Mothers of Sorrow and Hope

"A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they were no more."  -- Matthew 2:18

Gerard Kiely was a university student, just 19 years old, when he was killed as he attended Mass at St. Brigids Church in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Maura Kiely, his mother, remembers: "In 1975 when Gerard, our only son, was murdered, I realized with devastating awareness that one chapter of my life had been completed, and that nothing could ever quite be the same again.

"We had two children, and we had taught them to contribute more than a little to the spirit of community for which we were aiming. To say we were shattered would be an understatement; we were so stunned that at the time it was difficult to understand God or to find the answer to Why?

"But I believed that life for Gerard was not taken away, just changed, and that we had still to struggle to live the faith for which he died. There are, I believe, no accidents in this life as far as God is concerned. Out of evil, it is said, comes good. I committed myself to work for reconciliation among bereaved families in Northern Ireland; and so the Cross Group was born."

The common denominator of the participants in the Cross Group is that the conflict that rages between Northern Ireland's Protestants and Catholics has claimed at least one member in each one's family. They meet to share their pain and their memories. They commemorate anniversaries of deaths. And when they hear news of another murder, they write personal notes of sympathy to the families affected.

The name reflects their belief that no one could be asked to bear a heavier cross than to lose a loved one to the senseless tragedy of war. "Bereavement by bomb or bullet is different, and in many ways more acute, than other forms of bereavement," explains Kiely.

The group, she says, is so informal that it defies the title "organization." There is no official membership. Those who participate look at subscription to the group "as being either what we need or what we can offer others."

Their common pain has become a force for reconciliation, transcending the differences that have caused other citizens to kill one another. "We see no difference when someone is killed," says Kiely, "whether it is a civilian, a policeman or prison officer, army personnel or people in high positions. The tears of all the widows and mothers are the same." And there have been many tears.

"People say that time heals," reflects Maura Kiely. "Time itself does not heal. It is what we do with time that can heal."

TIME MOVES ON, AND days come and go, but the sun never sets on war. As twilight makes its descent over the guns and bombs of El Salvador, dawn is getting ready to burst upon the whips and tanks of South Africa. From Belfast to Beirut, Kabul to Krakow, San Salvador to Saigon to Santiago, in Managua and Manila, in Gaza and Guatemala City, in Phnom Penh and Pretoria and Port-au-Prince, the war machine cranks round the clock, its shots heard round the world.

But in a world where too many hands grasp rifles and too many fists beat bodies, other hands are reaching out to clasp one another in an act of comfort. The healing truth that one mother found in a corner of the earth called Northern Ireland is being discovered, day in and day out, in other corners all across the globe.

On every continent, mothers of grief are becoming mothers of hope as they transform their sorrow into a force for change. These mothers are finding that what they do with their time can indeed heal -- not only themselves and one another, but also the nations.

They have set loose on the globe a hope that is shaking the very foundations of the world. And as they meet and pray and weep and strategize, they offer a precious gift: a promise to the world's children that they will not be lost or forgotten.

IN SOUTH AFRICA the knock on the door usually comes in the early morning hours. Parents are forced to watch helplessly as their children are dragged from their beds by the security forces that are the enforcing arm of apartheid. Under the cover of darkness, their children are turned over to horrors unimaginable.

Detention without trial has been a reality in South Africa for many years, but recently more and more children have become the targets of this form of terror. It is estimated that in the first year of the state of emergency imposed in June 1986, between 7,500 and 10,000 children were detained. Sources say the numbers continue to escalate.

Most of the detained children are not kept in official prisons but in crowded police cells, some moved around from place to place. Current legislation states that the security forces are under no obligation to release the names of those in detention, and locating them is extremely difficult.

"Detention was the most terrifying experience I've ever had," says Nongcobo Sangweni, a South African mother whose young daughter was also detained. "Once you're detained, you are left by yourself; you have no access to your lawyers, your friends, or your loved ones."

Sangweni worked on a health project in conjunction with the Metal and Allied Workers Union, which may have led to her detention. But she believes there was another reason: "All I can say is that at the particular moment that I was detained, I was involved in looking at the detention of children. I was going out to talk with mothers to see what was happening."

She helped to found the Natal Women's Organization, which came to birth, she says, when "we realized there was a need for women to get organized, both in the urban areas and out in the countryside. We wanted to bring sisters together and show that just by themselves they can help themselves.

"We saw that there was a need to bring together mothers who not only share the same political aspirations but who also look at what is happening to children -- children in a country with a 66 percent malnutrition rate. Only when the organization was formed did we realize that we had to look at the issue of children's detention."

After her six-month detention, Sangweni spent nearly two months in a hospital, receiving treatment for depression and for abcesses in wounds she received from beatings during interrogation. She feels that one of the most acute causes of her depression was fear for her daughter: "For a long time, I did not know what had happened to her because we were separated. Nobody was communicating any information to me, and every night I heard the young children screaming, asking to be pardoned. I had a feeling that one of those children was my child."

Children are detained both to intimidate their parents and to try to force young people to offer incriminating information about others in the struggle against apartheid. Sangweni's daughter was detained while Sangweni was undergoing a 16-hour interrogation and then released. She was 9 years old.

Nongcobo Sangweni still has concerns for her young daughter, who after her detention became very withdrawn, frightened of white people, and preoccupied with a fear that she or her mother would be taken again. Sangweni is worried about other children as well.

She remembers, "When I was in the hospital, I saw three children who were hospitalized. I could see that they had been brutalized. They [the authorities] interrogate the children. And the children get tortured, too. In fact, I think the children get it worse.

"One had such a big scar -- they said he fell. I could not see how one could fall and cut himself that much in his cheek. He was so depressed. I don't know what happened to him."

AS A COUNTERSIGN to the tragedy and trauma that are daily life for many South Africans, the Detainees' Parents Support Committee (DPSC) came to life. The committee began with a handful of people, much of the impetus coming from Audrey Coleman, whose son was detained for his anti-apartheid activities. She was barred from seeing him and didn't know where to turn for help. She decided to do something for herself and the many others in the same situation.

Just weeks before the 1985 state of emergency was declared, the committee opened an "advice office" in Johannesburg. The office was immediately swamped with people seeking help.

The DPSC quickly grew to a widely publicized organization and pressure group, with support committees throughout the country, including the Natal Women's Organization. Masses of people now show up at DPSC meetings, where legal counsel, medical aid, and emotional support are offered. The meetings are referred to as "tea parties," since "meetings" of the group are illegal.

The DPSC monitors the repression and compiles affidavits of torture and lists of detainees. It presses the minister of law and order to release the names and whereabouts of those in detention and works for their release. Its "Free the Children Campaign" successfully led to the release of hundreds of children, according to Coleman.

And yet in most cases the authorities remain unresponsive. The terror and brutality escalate, and more and more children are disappearing into the night. In late February the DPSC was one of 17 groups targeted in the South African government's crackdown against anti-apartheid groups. If success is measured here by concrete political change, there is not much to point to.

But success is found in compassion and mutual support and the empowerment of women who are finding they can, as Sangweni noted, help themselves. Perhaps most of all, success can be measured in persistence. Persistence -- and even celebration -- in the face of death.

The South African government is undertaking a desperate effort to crush the creativity and energy of a youth movement committing itself to the struggle against apartheid. But its repression has backfired. It is creating a generation that is "traumatized but determined," according to Leslie Liddell, who was detained for 52 days as a result of her work with the South African Joe Fish Council of Churches on behalf of prisoners.

"I was always amazed at the courage," says Katrina Ganey of Detroit, who interviewed many young people in South Africa last spring. "Most of them had been beaten and cruelly tortured in ways that are unimaginable ... But I didn't run into a child who had been in detention who didn't feel that they would go back if they had to."

She describes a church meeting in Soweto, a service of welcome -- filled with singing and chanting and rejoicing -- for a group of released detainees: "You don't know what the gospels are until you go and see that, because those kids actually believe, 'For me to live is Christ and to die is gain.'

"They were always preparing to go to prison or preparing to die ... Once you come to grips with the fact that you're going to die, there's nothing to talk about anymore. All that's left is to try to do as much as you can today."

That commitment on the part of South Africa's children is also the promise of their mothers. That mutual courage strengthens the generations -- and offers a legacy for generations to come.

"What keeps people going," says Nongcobo Sangweni, "is to know that we are fighting for what is rightfully ours ... We have suffered; and there's no way that we can ever turn back."

THERE IS A PATH more traveled than any other in Guatemala. It is worn bare by the constant flow of weary but determined feet in search of the truth.

That path leads from prison to hospital to morgue. Each mother who walks it carries the hope of finding a "disappeared" loved one. Each one hopes that the morgue is not the end of the journey; and yet more painful even than discovering the body of a loved one there is living with the haunting uncertainty that obsesses the soul when one is not found.

For Blanca Rosal, the journey began on August 12, 1983. Her husband, Jorge, a poultry farmer, left at 2 in the afternoon to run some errands. He never returned.

She learned later that Jorge had been detained by security forces on the road. She believes his abduction was an effort to intimidate his parents, both of whom are physicians who have been at work creating consciousness among the campesino population about the social forces that are causing their children to die of malnutrition.

Three campesinos were witness to the detention, but their testimony will never become public. Says Rosal, "I've never given the names of these three people, because I know that it would cost them their lives."

Rosal searched and filed habeus corpus briefs in every province of the country and attempted repeatedly to meet with government officials. She received no response. "And that's the reason I became a member of GAM," she says.

GAM (Mutual Support Group for the Appearance Alive of Our Loved Ones) was founded in June 1984 by five women whose sons and husbands had disappeared. "The only objective," says Rosal, "is to demand that 38,000 disappeared individuals be returned to their families alive, or that the circumstances under which they disappeared be clarified and the people responsible be brought to justice."

But most will not be returned. So great is the number of assassinations in this country, an entire branch of GAM is devoted to the task of identifying bodies.

In October 1984 GAM organized the first mass demonstration in Guatemala since a hundred people were disappeared or assassinated following a May 1 march in 1980. In the 1984 demonstration, a thousand people marched 19 miles to the National Palace, most of them Indian women, some of them barefoot. In silence they threw carnations on the palace steps and then read a proclamation demanding information about their loved ones.

GAM now has 1,200 members, but they are a very small portion of those who have suffered from the disappearance of a family member, according to Rosal. "Most people are afraid to join or participate in GAM because they fear for their lives or their safety. You need to be very brave to participate in such a group in Guatemala."

GAM has been given international recognition, including nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. But its greatest impact is the one it has on the personal lives of its members.

"Because of GAM, I felt the desire to continue living and continue struggling for a better future," says Rosal. "It plays an enormous role in terms of providing moral support." GAM also serves as a place for getting information in a country with few newspapers and many small towns.

THE GUATEMALAN GOVERNMENT has been unresponsive to the mothers' demands for an accounting of their loved ones. Former President General Mejia Victores suggested that the disappeared are all out of the country trying to get rich.

"The only [government] response there has been to GAM's demands has been the murder of two of its most prominent members," says Rosal. In mid-March of 1985, after GAM members banged pots and pans in public squares to draw attention to their cause, Mejia said, "People will get bored with these people because nobody likes to hear pots and pans." When asked what his response would be, he replied, "You'll know it when you see it."

Just two weeks later, on Palm Sunday, the mutilated body of GAM spokesperson Hector Gomez was discovered. On Holy Thursday the brutally murdered body of GAM leader Rosario Godoy de Cuevas was found, along with that of her brother and her 2-year-old son. The government declared that they were victims of traffic accidents.

"The government has also offered money to so-called widows to help support their children," says Rosal. "This is something GAM has never accepted and will never accept, because we understand that these people [the disappeared] may be alive somewhere, and we will not cease to demand that they be found."

Blanca Rosal doesn't know if her husband is alive or dead. She says she will never rest until she knows: "We simply cannot cease to do everything that is in our power ... If we give up, some day the government will say that they were right and we were wrong and that is why they were able to hush our voices. We are not going to allow that. We are strong. And we are right."

She fled to the United States a month after the murders of the other GAM leaders at the intense urging of international human rights groups, who feared for her safety and that of her two young children. She finds it difficult to live here so far from the support of GAM and her extended family. "It is particularly difficult because I have to be both mother and father to my children."

Rosal's daughter was eight-and-a-half months old, and Rosal was two months pregnant with their son, when Jorge was taken. Her children, now 5 and 4, know that the security forces took their father. "I don't tell them that he is alive," she says, "so that they won't have the hope to see him in the future. I don't know if I am right in saying that to them."

Her son sometimes speaks of returning to Guatemala when he grows up to kill the people who killed the father he has never seen. It is difficult to imagine such a thought from this smiling 4-year-old, owner of a broad face ringed with soft, brown curls. He hangs playfully on the back of his mother's chair, then pokes his head around the door several times and waves goodbye as I leave their apartment. His name is Jorge.

JESSE FAIR SPEAKS softly, focusing on his shoes as he talks, "I was in the dope house. We were smoking some '51s' -- cocaine and weed mixed together. We were real high.

"We started playing around with a gun. We took all the bullets out except one. This man was lying on the couch. [Another man] clicked it at his head -- click, click. Didn't nothing happen. Clicked it at my friend two times. Didn't nothing happen. As soon as he clicked it at me, it went off. I was shot in the chest."

This, too, is a war zone. Detroit -- where a coveted pair of fancy sneakers or a flashy gold chain is worth killing for. Where young people get seduced into the fast cash of selling drugs -- as much as a thousand dollars in two days, according to Jesse Fair. Where "weapon checks" are a routine part of high school life. And where 365 children under the age of 16 -- one a day -- were shot in 1986, 43 fatally.

It is estimated that there are 250,000 more legally owned firearms in Detroit than there are people. Ask Jesse where the kids are getting them and he replies, "You can buy a gun off the street."

"Even teenagers?"

"Teenagers? Nine years old! If you got the money and know who the connections are, you can get one -- just like that."

On January 2, 1987, The Detroit News stated that "no homicides were reported in Detroit during the first 20 hours of 1987." This was seen as good news.

Drive through Detroit's streets, and you get a sense of what's behind it all. Low-rent housing is disappearing as condominiums and corporate offices come to life on the city's waterfront. Manufacturing plants stand vacant, their business taken to the Sun Belt where unions are weaker, or to Brazil or Mexico, where workers earn 25 cents an hour.

Up north a neighborhood is being leveled. With a sunset displaying only various shades of gray as backdrop, a bulldozer digs away at the foundation of a house. Vacant lots stretch on for blocks, scattered with mounds of old tires and scrap lumber. Abandoned cars and barricades and billboards scraped to peeling paint mark the landscape. A house with broken windows stands alone in a field overrun with weeds, its door creaking on its hinge in the wind.

The mayor has his priorities. He wants to bring casinos and conventions to Detroit to spruce up its image. He's launching a "celebrity campaign." Says Jeanie Wylie-Kellermann, a Detroit journalist, "People are dying in the streets, and these people [city officials] think that by getting a basketball player to say something good about Detroit, we'll all feel better."

Talk about "the violence," and people point to unemployment, to inadequate education, to illegal drugs. And indeed these indicators point to desperation: Michigan's 8.8 percent unemployment rate is the highest of any state in the nation, and Detroit's is twice that; the dropout rate in schools is 60 percent; and "crack houses" can be found on most city blocks, an estimated 10,000 to 13,000 throughout the city.

But Clementine Barfield has another analysis: "The problem we're having is a spiritual warfare. It is a problem between God and Satan; and Satan, trying so hard to win, is exalting himself through the children."

Two of Barfield's sons were on the statistics lists in 1986. In July a boy pulled a gun on her youngest son, Roger, 15, in school. Three days later he and his two older brothers went in search of the boy. They were in a car at a gas station when a friend of the boy's saw them and opened fire on the car with a 9-millimeter automatic weapon. Roger was critically injured, and 16-year-old Derick was killed.

Barfield speaks affectionately of Derick, a strong athlete who wanted to be a minister. She recalls the day he died. Along with other city employees, she was on strike. Derick wanted to join her on the picket line, but she knew he needed to be in school. At the union rally, she picked up a T-shirt to take home to him.

A police officer and Barfield's brother found her at the rally. "I still had his T-shirt across my shoulder when I got to the hospital," she recalls.

VIVID DETAILS POUR OUT when mothers recount the moment they learned of a son or daughter's death. So does their affection. Often guilt pours out, too -- phrases like "If only I had ... maybe it wouldn't have happened." Brothers and sisters wrestle with the guilt, too. Roger Barfield, who carries a bullet in his neck and the burden of knowing that it was his argument that got his brother killed, withdrew for a year, unable to do anything but sleep and eat and grieve.

Like so many other mothers, Barfield never thought it would happen to her child: "I had been hearing of other kids getting killed. But it was as though it was a long way away. And then suddenly it wasn't so far away anymore. Suddenly it was at home.

"There was an emptiness in my heart. There was something inside of me that said, 'This should not be.'" And so, with little more than sheer determination to find a way to make sure others would never have to suffer what she had, Barfield began contacting other mothers whose children had been killed.

On January 4, 1987, six parents who had lost children and several concerned citizens met in a small Detroit church. It was a small beginning, but news of the meeting quickly spread by word of mouth and through the media. More than 350 people came to the second meeting.

Grace Lee Boggs remembers that gathering: "There was really an outpouring. The church was jammed. It was obvious that they [the mothers] had touched a nerve." Several tasks were outlined, and committees were put into place. "You got a real sense that Detroit was going to be rebuilt," says Boggs.

"We didn't have any answers at that point," says Clementine Barfield. "But we right away started planning a memorial service for all the children who had been killed."

Four weeks later, on the coldest day of the year, 1,400 people turned out for the memorial service, filling the pews of a large cathedral and spilling over into the choir loft and the aisles. Families of the slain children marched in a procession, carrying babies and Bibles, many with eyes wet with tears. At the close of the service, a candle was lit for each of the murdered children.

For months the group behind the outpouring was referred to simply as "the group without a name," because the members hadn't come up with one. A friend suggested to Barfield that it should be called Save Our Sons. She responded, "But we're losing girls, too." The next day the friend proposed Save Our Sons and Daughters (SOSAD).

Thus was launched the first battle of the group's existence. An influential local pastor felt that the name Group Without a Name would give it greater recognition and press appeal. He also suggested to Barfield that he could "make [her] another Rosa Parks." Says Barfield, "I didn't want to be Rosa Parks. I wanted the children to stop getting killed."

When the group chose Save Our Sons and Daughters as its name, more than a skirmish over a name was won. As Boggs describes it, "It was a clear sign that the mothers were going to be the ones who would give leadership to the organization."

SOSAD's profile in the city continued to grow. On Mother's Day it sponsored a drama about the violence. On a sweltering July day, 2,000 people marched through Detroit behind the banner "Kids Killing Kids Must Stop" to push for gun control in the city.

But quietly, behind the scenes, Save Our Sons and Daughters was also building a support network for grieving families. Its commitment to personal support is personified in Vera Rucker, co-chair of SOSAD.

Rucker's 16-year-old daughter, Melody, was at a back-to-school party in late August 1986. Three uninvited boys came to the party and were asked to leave. They returned later and shot into the crowd, killing Melody.

Rucker turned Melody's bedroom into SOSAD's first office. She didn't know then that the phone calls would come 24 hours a day. Young people called for help, struggling with drug addictions and contemplating suicide; mothers who had just lost children called in the middle of the night and talked for hours; one teenager who had seen five friends killed over the course of a few months called just to talk about the hurt and the anger and the fear.

Rucker's quiet compassion is evident as she recounts these stories. "The most important thing is that we're here for each other," she says.

THE CIRCLE OF COMPASSION extends to all the victims when a killing happens. Many Detroit homicides go unsolved, but Melody's killers were picked up the following day and convicted. Two of them got life sentences in prison, and the other was sentenced to 40 to 80 years. "It was four young lives that we lost," says Rucker, "and their families are hurting also ... They [the boys] were just 17."

Brenda Walton's 20-year-old son, Stevie, was babysitting when a young man came to the home and shot him six times. Stevie, a county wrestling champion, had previously beaten the young man in a wrestling match. "He just couldn't stand that a black man had beat him wrestling," she explains.

The young man had pleaded guilty, but his parents had hired several lawyers and the plea was changed. Just a few weeks before I spoke with Walton, the young man's trial ended with a hung jury. She saw letters from several jurors that "came just short of saying that they didn't believe a white boy should be punished for killing a black boy."

There is no bitterness in her voice as she speaks. She says that Stevie had no prejudices but loved all kinds and colors of people, especially children.

Referring to the boy who killed her son, Walton says, "I pray quite often for Chris and his family." She was not allowed to speak to the family during his trial, but she met with them afterward. She recalls, "[Chris's] mother didn't know people like us existed; they had heard so much negative about black people.

"We prayed together," she continues. "So something good came out of it [Stevie's death]."

Walton has encouraged SOSAD to take on direct action campaigns against drugs. Although there was fear of retaliations from drug dealers, with five parents and a dozen kids she successfully picketed for two days at a "crack house" selling illegal drugs in her neighborhood and got it closed down. Ironically, the police had told her beforehand that they couldn't protect the picketers because what they were doing was illegal.

Stevie was very active with young people. Walton says of her work with SOSAD to try to make the streets safer for children, "I'm doing what Stevie would have done."

CYNTHIA DAVIS SITS BEHIND a desk at the SOSAD office, a large room in an old brick schoolhouse on Martin Luther King Boulevard. A bumper sticker pasted across the front of the desk reads "Someone I Love Was Murdered."

A year and a half ago, Davis's 14-year-old son, Alex, was dragged out of an arcade by a gang of youths and pushed in front of a train. He died two hours later. She found herself at first unable to cope with Alex's death and escaped to drugs. But SOSAD helped turn her around, offering her work to do and accountability around her drug problem.

Davis offers a sentiment that comes up with the mothers as often as the guilt: "I didn't want Alex's death to be in vain." She is SOSAD's coordinator of youth activities. She sets up projects that build self-esteem in youth and offer alternatives to the violence of the streets -- everything from making furniture to workshops on nonviolent conflict resolution in local high schools. "I look at SOSAD as an extension of Alex," she says.

At the other end of the office, Betty Matthews and James Boggs are stuffing SOSAD newsletters into envelopes and talking about the way things have changed -- the disappearance of the drug store where Matthews used to work and the flight of the 5 & 10s to the suburbs. Boggs has lived in Detroit for 51 years.

As Davis talks energetically on the phone to a potential donor of roller skates for an upcoming SOSAD youth party, Betty Matthews nods toward her and says quietly, "It seems like I should be into this sort of thing, but I'm not ... It was five months ago for me this, past Saturday, so, you know, I'm still counting days."

Matthews helps around the office and attends the weekly Bereavement Support Group meetings. "Sometimes I feel that I'm getting more out of it than I'm putting into it," she says. At Save Our Sons and Daughters, there is a clear feeling that that is just fine. Every stage of grieving is respected.

Matthews's 15-year-old son, David, was shot by a 38-year-old man. The hardest part for her is that his death has never been thoroughly investigated. The police report says simply "Motive: robbery; case closed." But there is no evidence to substantiate the killer's claim that he was being robbed. And David was shot in the back of the head.

The last response she received when she attempted to get the police to pursue the truth was, "We have seven new cases since David's, and we're understaffed and overworked."

"You're made to feel that your child is so worthless," Matthews says. "A life is a life, but they make such a fuss over some." David had never been in any trouble, and she doesn't want the police report to stand as it is. "It's not going to bring him back," she says as tears come to her eyes, "but I don't want the police report left like that."

In the hall outside the busy office, Jesse Fair finishes telling the story that led him to come to SOSAD for help. The "friends" who shot him talked about dumping him in a garbage can, but they couldn't get the back door of the house open. They left him in the drug house and ran. He stumbled to the porch, falling when the wind hit him.

"I shouldn't even be here," he says. "But by the grace of God, I'm here ... When I was laying on that porch, I saw the hurt of my sisters and my friends looking over me; they were crying and screaming. And I started thinking, 'If they were screaming over me then, just think what they would go through if they were going to my funeral.'"

He spends a great deal of time talking with teenagers as SOSAD's youth speaker. "I tell the teenagers, if they're not thinking about their own self, think of their family; think about those who they might leave behind and what they might go through."

What the families go through has been enough to tear many of them apart. The exceptions are those that have found ways to cope with the grief and the anger and channel their energy toward change. SOSAD has been the significant factor for most.

According to Grace Lee Boggs, the creation of SOSAD was the "turning point in Detroit from powerlessness and hopelessness." Grief and outrage are not unknown emotions to any of its members. But the real motivation is a reverence for life and a desire to offer some love and put it out there into the streets. Mother-love and a deep faith in God keep the engine running.

And with that fuel, Save Our Sons and Daughters has high hopes. Vera Rucker reflects, "I don't see SOSAD as an organization but as a movement."

Clementine Barfield agrees. "We made people aware; now the work really begins. People ought to be marching, and sitting in, and dying, if need be ... We have to create a whole consciousness movement -- not just here in Detroit; I'm talking about all over the United States, all over the world if need be. We have to raise children of peace." The movement is beginning to catch on in other cities; inquiries about starting SOSAD branches have come from Los Angeles and Boston and Washington, D.C.

SOSAD'S MEMBERS SPEND no time looking for targets to blame for their losses. They look to themselves and their responsibility to the children.

"It's our responsibility to the human race to help one another," says Barfield. "Are we our brother's keeper? Yes, we are. If we're not, then we're all lost. And our children recognize the fact that we're lost -- that we're going nowhere.

"We're talking about young people not being concerned about growing up and planning what they're going to do with the rest of their lives, because they don't see a 'rest of their lives.' They're just saying, 'Give me mine now. We're not going anywhere anyways. Let me at least say I wore some fancy clothes and some gold and rode in a nice car.'

"You hear them in the streets, and they're screaming loud. They're not screaming to each other; they're really screaming to us. They're screaming to people to help them, to change this whole madness, to make things better for them. And if we don't do it, and do it soon, we can just write off our future."

When Clementine Barfield first began contacting other mothers in 1986, her ultimate goal was to work for gun control. "But the more I see and learn, I know the guns are not the problem," she says. "The guns are just a symptom of a far, far greater problem. The greatest problem that we have today as human beings is a lack of spirituality.

"We're losing our children younger and younger. And if we don't do something about it soon, we're going to lose all of them. We're going to lose them physically; we're going to lose them psychologically. We've lost them spiritually. It's going to take some strong spirituality to bring them back into the fold.

"I've heard people who were on drugs or alcohol say that nothing helped them. The only thing that saved them was when they started believing and trusting in God. It's going to take that for the children."

The task before these mothers is not easy. "Sometimes it feels like it's never going to end, like all we do is eat and breathe death," says Rucker. "But our young people give me hope. I get out and see the young people laughing. Sometimes I forget that the young people can still laugh."

Clementine Barfield says, "If I didn't have a strong belief in God, I think I would just give up. I have to rely on a strength that's greater than me." "God always has the last word," adds Rucker.

This month is particularly difficult for these two mothers. Both Derick and Melody would have graduated from high school in May. In the midst of preparations for SOSAD's second annual memorial service, Barfield reflects, "Derick would have been going to the prom, and the senior trip, and deciding which college he wanted to go to. Instead of him planning the rest of his life, here we are planning a memorial service for him and all the children who have been killed.

"If I dedicated my whole life, which I have, to trying to make things better, it still would not equal what I have lost. I feel as though my son had unlimited capabilities. He would have done a fantastic job as a minister. But even now I feel as though Derick is ministering; he's doing it through me."

IN DECEMBER 1977, 20 mothers in El Salvador with disappeared family members went to ask then-Archbishop Oscar Romero what they should do. "Mothers, unite yourselves in one voice so that you will be heard," was his response.

COMADRES, the Committee of Mothers and Relatives of Political Prisoners, Disappeared, and Assassinated of El Salvador, subsequently came to life. And they have been heard.

They have been abducted and tortured; they have been threatened with excommunication by the church for fasting at the tomb of Romero and occupying the cathedral; they have been imprisoned. And by some, they have been honored.

Maria Teresa Tula viuda de Canales was among four mothers chosen to travel to the United States in November 1984 to receive the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award on behalf of COMADRES. All four were denied visas by the U.S. State Department, which accused them of being "terrorists" and "a threat to national security," according to Tula.

One mother, Alicia de Garcia, was later in Argentina at a gathering of the Latin American Federation of Families of the Disappeared and received a U.S. visa from there. At the award ceremony in Washington, she sat on the stage, her feet barely touching the floor -- a small, humble woman in a white kerchief, next to three empty chairs for the missing mothers. She and her friends are the great threat to governments -- simple women who wash dishes and sell fruit to support their work of demanding to know what has happened to their loved ones.

Maria Teresa Tula viuda de Canales cradles her infant son as she speaks about the committee. The latter part of her name means "widow of Canales."

Her husband was abducted by the national guard while he and other workers in a sugar factory were negotiating for fair wages and better working conditions. She herself has been abducted by death squads, tortured, and raped while pregnant with her son. He was born in prison.

"I know that [my husband] is dead," she says. "My struggle is so that more mothers and women do not suffer what we have already suffered ... The majority of mothers stay with our committee because we have seen that in these days mothers are no longer afraid of death, because we know that what we are doing is just ... We're not just struggling for one family member, or one child, but rather for all of the children."

In a country where the word "disappearance" has an unmistakable meaning, one thing will remain. Says Tula, "The committee will always exist. It will not disappear; because we are going to keep watching to see if there will be peace."

THIS IS THE TASK that mothers around the world have taken upon themselves -- a vigilant watching, as well as the constant work of demanding the truth. Like the widow in Luke's gospel who kept knocking at the door of the unrighteous judge, these mothers will persist until justice is done.

But they do more than demand justice. They are working to create a world in which life and peace can flourish. A world for all the children. Their hope and their gift are reflected in a Mothers' Day prayer offered by a poet to the mothers of El Salvador:

Mother of political prisoners, mother of the disappeared, mother of the people; Mother, the streets are yours, as well as the tenderness. Mother, in May I give you a country ignited with friendship and happiness; a country that is born in your womb and grows between the mountains and the hope. Mother, in May I give you a country set afire with carnations and smiles. Mother, thank you, your pain is life.

Thank you, indeed -- for the gift of life and hope that is yours alone to give.

Joyce Hollyday was an associate editor of Sojourners when this article appeared. Staff interns LeAnne Moss and Julie Wakelee contributed research to this article.