The Miracle Makers

It’s clear that no one under the age of, say, 20 lives in the Tanenbaum house. With its apron of roses and photo-shoot perfect interiors, it is a grown-up house, filled with lovely, grown-up things. On the coffee table in the living room, for example, there is a shallow wooden box containing six perfect lemons and a bit of lavender tied with string. Right next to a bowl brimming with candy kisses.

And yet signs of children are everywhere--and not just of Carol and Fred’s two dark-haired daughters, now grown, whose photos fill at least one wall. In the family room, there is another bowl, this one heaped with pictures of other children, all sorts of children, many smiling out from a Tanenbaum embrace. There are huge cartons of stuffed animals and Matchbox cars in the garage, plastic bags overflowing with paper and paint and beads and brushes in the upstairs bedroom. There are paintings and drawings, all over the walls, all of it unmistakably children’s art.

But not completely of the rainbows and flowers and Mommies in triangular dresses variety. There are certain recurring themes--peace signs, and doves, tanks and explosions. In some, there are words that are not English. And in others, a sorrow and anger that is not at all childlike.

It is the work of their summers, this art. The work of the three years, almost four, that this nice Sherman Oaks family has spent ensuring that for two weeks on an island off the coast of Croatia, 150 children will get to go to camp. Bosnian children, Serbian children, Croatian and, now, Kosovar. All brought together by the Global Children’s Organization, of which Fred is president; Carol, art director and daughter Erin, volunteer coordinator.

And this year, after the Croatian camp, which runs from June 24 through July 8, they will fly to Ireland where they will bring together more than 100 children, Catholic and Protestant, in a camp in County Donegal from July 13 through 24.

For two weeks, both sets of these children, most of them culled from refugee camps, will not have to worry about bombs or bullets or food lines or ailing, preoccupied families. Instead, they will swim and dance and paint and play. For two whole weeks, a bunch of adults will be there just to make sure they have a good time--to smile in approval, to applaud, to listen if they need to talk, to just sit in silence if they do not. For two whole weeks, these young people, who have seen and survived so much, will stop being refugees and instead be children. Together.

“I don’t know anyone who is doing what they are doing,” says Vera Miholvic, of the International Rescue Committee, a group that works with refugees all over the world. “To give these kids a summer vacation is a wonderful thing. For so many of them the last thing on their minds is having fun, painting or singing. It makes such a difference for them.”

For two whole weeks, a miracle.

The Miracle That

Began at Dinner

For the Tanenbaums, this miracle started, as miracles so often do not, at a dinner party.

“It was 1994, and I saw a woman I knew, and she looked just energized,” Carol says, “so I asked her what she had been doing that summer.”

That woman was Randy Beckwith, sister of Judith Jenya, founder and executive director of the then-fledgling Global Children’s Organization.

“She told me she had been working with kids in Croatia, and I just had a ‘this is the right thing’ moment,” Carol says. “I talked to Fred, and although we couldn’t go the next summer, we went in ‘96, with Erin. We had no clue what we were getting ourselves into. And we were transformed.”

A marriage and family counselor as well as an artist, Carol has a warm bath of a voice, steady and quietly compelling, a sound that requires neither volume nor drama for emphasis. The kind of voice that can say “we were transformed” and mean just that.

“For me, it’s part of my Jewish heritage,” says Fred, a practicing attorney whose smile shines through his silver beard, glints off his glasses. “My family suffered a holocaust and genocide, and here it is again. And the draw of [the Global Children’s Organization] is that you are working directly with the children. And we keep in touch with them all through the year, with the children and the volunteers. They have become our family. Our enormous family.”

They came back to Los Angeles committed to the organization. Carol says Jenya took one look at Fred, bursting with ideas and energy for the next summer, and said, “Well, it looks like you’re going to be president.”

Jenya, an L.A. native, was so impressed with the Tanenbaums’ commitment that she moved herself, and the headquarters of the Global Children’s Organization, from Honolulu to Los Angeles. She continues as executive director, Fred became president and chairman of the board of directors. Carol agreed to run the art program, the keystone of the camp’s activities, and Erin, who was working as an elementary school coach, quit her job, became the volunteer coordinator and began working on a master’s degree in bicultural development.

The Global Children’s Organization is funded by a few small grants and private donations. Erin and Jenya speak regularly to schools and other community organizations, and rarely do they walk away without a new volunteer or a gift of money or supplies. Every volunteer must pay his or her own freight and sponsor one child, which makes it a $2,000 to $2,500 commitment. Campers themselves pay nothing.

“We have volunteers from all over the country, of all ages, from 17 to 70,” says Fred, “and they all manage to get the money somehow. Some get sponsors, or get matching funds through work, or they just earn it. But they all get it. It’s amazing.”

To do this work, which is often emotionally draining, the Tanenbaums need the help of those not working directly with the group. Carrie, the eldest Tanenbaum daughter, is a doctor of Chinese medicine, Carol says.

“She is not at a point in her career where she can devote this kind of time, but she is very, very supportive of all of us,” she says. “This is a family venture. “

And this family seems eerily suited to the daunting, multilayered task of running what is essentially an international aid organization. It would take a family counselor to prepare volunteers to cope with the symptoms of post-traumatic stress--detachment, lack of trust, caretaking, anxiety--they may see in these children. It would take a painter to understand the healing power of art, to allow the children to say what they cannot say in words.

It would take a lawyer to wade through all the paperwork required to lease a camp half a world away, to keep track of all the money coming in and going out.

And it would take the unflagging energy of an elementary school coach to turn a sympathetic listener into a volunteer, to monitor everyone’s itineraries, to put together the introductory packets, to keep the Web site and mailing list current.

And it would take a very special family to do all this together and not turn on each other. More than a special family. A miracle.

A Complicated

Call to Action

The truth about miracles is that, in most cases, lightning bolts and identifiably holy voices do not play a role. Instead, they involve odd and complicated and-then-I-met-this-guy stories. Like this one:

Jenya, a lawyer who specialized in family and children’s rights, founded the Global Children’s Organization in 1992, after an experience at a youth camp in Chernobyl, Ukraine. Subsequently, she met a young man from Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and moved by his description of the violence, visited Croatia, where another friend working with Doctors Without Borders arranged for her to visit some refugee camps. At an orphanage in Split, the director upbraided her.

“He said, ‘I hate all you humanitarian aid people because you come here and take pictures and no one does anything,’ ” she says. “So I asked him what he thought the children needed most. And he said a summer camp. That they needed a break from all this. And I thought,” she says, laughing even now, “how hard could that be?”

With much faith and fund-raising, Jenya was able to pull together the money and staff for the first camp. Contacts within the refugee camps selected, as they continue to do, the children who would participate.

“I had no idea where we would have it,” she says. “But as I was flying home from Croatia, I saw these islands off the coast . . . and I thought if we could just get some of these kids to an island, then they would be safe.”

At the eleventh hour (“we had the tickets and the supplies and no place to go”) one of her Croatian contacts found accommodations on a small island called Badija, used for most of the year as a camp for the Croatian basketball team.

“He didn’t think I would like it because I’m an American and it wasn’t luxurious enough,” Jenya says. “Needless to say, it’s perfect.”

Like the Tanenbaums, Jenya made her commitment a family affair. Her son, her sister Randy and her niece all volunteered for the early camps, and they keep coming back, usually bringing an exponentially growing number of volunteers and financial backers with them. (The Global Children’s Organization now has several full-time in-country volunteers, who work to establish yearlong contacts among campers. In fact, many of the original campers are now returning as counselors.)

“That’s how it works,” she says. “We do some speaking, at schools and colleges, and we have a Web site, but mostly it’s people who see how it changes you. That’s what happened when Carol saw Randy.”

The transformation that caused Randy Beckwith to radiate at that fateful dinner party, that infuses Erin’s voice with palpable urgency, comes with a price. To see these children, peering up through bangs or splashing around in water wings, knowing the carnage and atrocities they have witnessed and suffered forces you to bear witness to both the depravity and resilience of the human spirit. Not an easy thing for most of us, who prefer to write checks, prefer to be moved from a distance.

“It is impossible to comprehend the horrors they have lived through,” Carol says. “One little girl had hair to her knees. The story was, her brother’s head had been brought to the family in a plastic bag. He had always loved her hair, so she swore never to cut it.”

Others have witnessed the slaughter and rape of parents and siblings. Carol says they suspect some of the children have been raped or sexually abused but that “they do not talk about it. It is a taboo subject.”

“That first summer absolutely changed my life,” Erin says. “I was 27, and I became friends with kids 16, 17, and they were so like me, yet so different. What they had seen and survived--I honestly could not believe it.”

There are other very tangible obstacles. It is not easy for the parents of these children to part with them, even for two weeks, even for an experience they desperately want their children to have.

“Sometimes, the mothers end up coming too,” Fred says. “They really want their children to participate, but they are too afraid to entrust them to strangers. We don’t turn anyone away.”

The language barrier makes things a bit difficult at first--most of the volunteers have barely learned the rudimentary phrases included in the orientation literature. There are interpreters--native counselors and a few of the children who are bilingual--but not enough to go around.

Each counselor is assigned a “family” of 10 children whose ethnic backgrounds would make them sworn enemies anywhere else.

“The only rule is no violence,” Carol says. “We watch the older Bosnian volunteers who have gone through it, who know what these kids have been through. They are so gentle and compassionate; we look to them as our guides.”

For all of these problems, art seems to be the universal answer.

“Its language is universal,” Carol says.

And its ruthless beauty the most effective testimony. When Miholvic, then part of the California Youth Theater at Paramount, began working with the Global Children’s Organization, she included some of the art done in the first camp in a UNESCO exhibition that appeared in Copenhagen, Denmark.

“The response,” she says, “was extraordinary. It showed all that the children could not tell.”

Since then, art from subsequent camps has been shown at the Shakespeare Festival L.A. and the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance; the Los Angeles Children’s Museum is planning this fall to exhibit a collection that will include art from this year.

“In those first years, the artwork reflected no life,” Carol says. “There were literally no people. And much of it was black and white. Tanks and war pictures, graves, black bent flowers. . . . But as the years have gone by, and the children’s lives have become a bit more normal, there is more color. And the people are back.”

But, she adds, she does not know what to expect from the Kosovar children. For them, the horror is still ongoing.

“It’s a very human effort,” Fred says. “And it is extraordinary how they change. We have had children say, ‘My father may well have killed your father, but here at least we can just be friends.’ ”

“And it’s not the just the children,” Erin says. “The volunteers--it changes their lives.”

Erin is the most intense of the three Tanenbaums, with high-beam blue eyes. When she is not attending classes at UCLA, she works full time for the Global Children’s Organization. It’s easy to understand why more than 500 volunteers have put their lives in her hands during the last three years. Why the parents of the younger volunteers reluctantly put their teenagers on the plane.

“I realize that we aren’t saving lives or delivering medicine,” Erin says. “But for these kids, this is something so special. They write me and tell me they think about it all the time. And the same is true of the volunteers,” she adds. “To see them move out of their comfort zone and go somewhere you would never want to go for your vacation, for them to use up all their vacation, and money, summer after summer because this is so huge to them. It’s just . . .”

Oh, yes. A miracle.

Global Children’s Organization can be reached via e-mail at gco@globalchild.org; by phone at (323) 934-8805 or on the Internet at https://www.globalchild.org.

Mary McNamara can be reached by e-mail at socalliving@latimes.com