Shaniyat Turani-Chowdhury speaking to NYC middle school students

March provided We Are Not Your Soldiers a variety of different settings, different ages and different kinds of groupings.

It is through your donations that these visits are possible. We provide small stipends to the veterans to help towards compensating them for time off from work and, when needed, to cover childcare. We also, again when necessary, cover travel expenses. For in-person visits we provide written materials for the students. And then, of course, we have “infrastructure” expenses such as share of space rental, communications (phone, website, etc.). Please help insure that We Are Not Your Soldiers can continue to have these in-depth conversations with students.

Our first visit of the month was to a NYC middle school whose students were very well-spoken and had a lot to say to Shaniyat Turani-Chowdhury who, after returning from his Marines deployment to Afghanistan, began writing and has been focusing a lot of his attention to issues related to Palestine.Many of the students had questions about why he had originally enlisted as well as about Gaza.

We next went to a private college, also in NYC, but this time we zoomed in. John Burns shared his experiences with this sharp group which was disturbed by how the U.S. military preys on the poor both within this country and its wars on people around the world.

Again with Shaniyat we traveled to a college in New Jersey to a class with many students from immigrant families. A lot of the discussion related to migrant issues and the military and what is facing us all under the fascist plans of the Trump administration.

We ended the month with a remote presentation by Brian Teucke to a meeting of college activists in Florida, a difficult place to be one these days for those interested in creating a better world. A lot of the discussion centered around how consciousness is raised and how to move people to take action.