From the Heart

lowans harvest refugee aid

They call it the heartland, a term with appropriate connotations. When the Vietnamese boat people came to the U.S. last spring, the state of Iowa actively sought 1,500 for resettlement. When Governor Robert Ray toured Cambodian refugee camps in Thailand and returned with tales of starving children, offers of aid from lowans flooded the statehouse, the Des Moines Register and churches. The interest was so great that just before Thanksgiving the Governor announced a program called Iowa Shares, an acronym for Iowa Sends Help to Aid Refugees and End Starvation.

People were asked to donate money in multiples of $2.20, the approximate price of a bushel of corn, but no one worried much about making the math come out even. Some farmers took their corn to grain elevators and asked the operators to forward the cash to Iowa Shares. One woman and her husband sent in $80 and her engagement ring. Iowa Shares kept the money but sent back the ring. In Dubuque, high schools sponsored a dance. Eric Sharp, 9, gave the $50 that his parents were going to spend for his Christmas presents.

"We probably could have raised more money if we had gone to the corporations for big donations," says Ken Quinn, an assistant to Ray. "But we wanted all of the people of the state involved." In just a month, lowans contributed $250,000. On Christmas Eve a ten-truck convoy loaded with rice, salted fish, soybeans, sugar and medical supplies left Bangkok for the Thai-Cambodian border. On Christmas Day, William Simbro, a reporter for the Des Moines Register, met in a jungle clearing with representatives from Sok Sann, a refugee settlement just inside Cambodia, and presented them with some surgical instruments. The rest of the supplies reached Sok Sann last week.

Back in Iowa, the money keeps coming in. At week's end Iowa Shares had raised almost $500,000, and supplies and medical personnel are being sent to other refugee camps in Thailand.

Not all aid attempts have been as successful as Iowa Shares. Some 50,000 tons of food and medical supplies have been shipped to Phnom-Penh and Kompong Som in Cambodia by relief agencies throughout the world. But Cambodia's government is holding up distribution because of fears the aid will end up in the hands of Khmer Rouge rebels. "Most of it is still in warehouses," says Lincoln Bloomfield, head of the National Security Council's Office of Global Affairs.

Last week the U.N.'s World Food Program announced that it would halt shipments until the present stockpile is cleared. Bloomfield calls the situation "unbelievably tragic." Says he: "If there's no improvement in the next month, we'll be reaching a crisis point."

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