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Community Corner

Children of Libya: Davis Resident Launches Aid Foundation

Two of Jamal Buzayan's six brothers spent years locked up as political prisoners of the Gadhafi regime.

Jamal Buzayan, 55, is a retired UC Davis research scientist who lives comfortably with his family in Davis. But his focus is to help people in Davis and beyond to better understand the discomfort of Libyan youth suffering in that nation’s civil war.

To this end, Buzayan, his wife, Najat Darrat, and their eldest daughter, Halema Buzayan, have co-launched the Children of Libya Aid Foundation. A 501(c) (3) organization non-profit group, its aim is to inform the public of the pressing need to raise funds for medical treatment of youth injured in this North African nation since an anti-government uprising began on February 17.

The foundation will hold a fundraiser this Sunday, July 17 in downtown Sacramento.

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Buzayan told the stories of two young Libyan victims: Ayman, 14, lost both hands and suffered widespread burns after picking up a cluster bomb outside his home in Misrata in early June. He is receiving treatment in Tunisia.

In early June, Ali, age one and a half, took a bullet to his brain in Misrata. Egyptian doctors have cared for him, deciding not to remove the bullet to avoid further harm to the infant.   

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Ayman and Ali are among the hundreds of youth injured in the
Libyan conflict (exact numbers are unclear due to issues of access) who are receiving care in neighboring Egypt (east) and Tunisia (west). These injured children are traveling abroad for medical treatment because the health care system in Libya has collapsed as hostilities there have spiked, according to Buzayan.

He knows a thing or two about conflicts and their consequences there. Buzayan left his hometown of Benghazi, Libya in 1975 in political exile for the U.S. What made Buzayan a dissident in Libya?

“I couldn’t tolerate a dictatorship that used force against people to govern them,” he said. “People should be able to choose their elected leaders.”  

Buzayan arrived in Hattiesburg, where he earned a bachelor’s degree at Southern Mississippi University. That led him to Davis 31 years ago to work on a Ph.D. in biochemistry, which he received from UC Davis
in 1985. Buzayan researched the biochemistry of plants at UC Davis
for over a quarter-century. 

All that time, Buzayan was unable to return to Libya, where two of his six brothers spent years locked up as political prisoners of the Gadhafi regime.

Today, government violence during Libya’s popular uprising over the
past five months has resulted in scores of wounded children. The demand for their health care far exceeds the available supply of it.

Such conditions propel Buzayan to help Libya’s youngest victims of war.

“Children are innocent,” he said. “They don’t have political opinions. Under any circumstances, children should not be military targets.”

Yet they are. Meanwhile, the under-resourced Libyan health care system is unable to help the rising numbers of injured youth, according to Buzayan. Thus family members are taking their war-wounded children for treatment to Tunisia and Egypt, where the so-called “Arab spring” of political revolutions in part spurred people of other nations in the region to try and overthrow governing autocrats.

But Tunisia and Egypt are unable to meet all of the medical needs of young Libyan victims. Thus they are also traveling to Turkey for treatment.

Globally, health care costs money. Accordingly, with help from William
D. Kopper, a Davis attorney, Buzayan co-formed the Children of Libya Aid Foundation.

“We thought that what we should do is to collect money to finance some of the cost of the medical treatment of Libyan youth abroad,”
Buzayan said. For instance, these funds finance care and travel to get specialized treatment such as skin grafts in the U.S.

What has most surprised Buzayan, a Muslim-American, since co-forming the Children of Libya Aid Foundation?

“Most of the people who are helping us are non-Muslims: Jews, Christians, atheists, Buddhists and Sikhs,” he said. “Once people outside of Libya see the suffering of Libyan children, they help them.

“A professor at the Baylor College of Medicine became involved as if the wounded Libyan kids were his. This is a beautiful side of humanity. We are all united in this fund-raising effort.”  

Over-all, near 30 people from Libya to Tunisia, Egypt and the U.S. are active in the foundation that Buzayan helped to begin. He and his family make up the total of 30 Libyan-Americans—including exchange students—living in Davis now.

For more information on the July 17 fundraiser in Sacramento for injured Libyan youth, visit http://www.childrenoflibya.org/
or call (530) 645-2523.

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