Group Heads to Jordan to Wage Peace

When their teenage son dreamed of joining the Marines to help children in war-ravaged countries, Fernando and Rosa Suarez del Solar left behind a thriving Tijuana laundry business to start over in San Diego.

And when Lance Cpl. Jesus Suarez del Solar, 20, was killed more than a year ago near Baghdad, his parents saw a mission uncompleted.

“After he died, I promised myself that we would finish his job,” said Fernando Suarez del Solar, 49. “My wife and I are grieving very much, but we know that the Iraqi children are much worse off than us.”

On Sunday, Suarez del Solar lugged two waist-high suitcases of medicine through LAX, en route to the Middle East to fulfill his son’s dream. He and his wife joined 13 other volunteers traveling from the United States to Jordan to deliver aid and call for peace.

Some had lost relatives in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks or the military action since. The volunteers -- organized by the antiwar group Code Pink and the human rights group Global Exchange -- said they were making the trip out of concern for the people of Iraq.

“This came out of seeing the horrors of the medical situation in Iraq on the news and wondering how we could help,” said Jodie Evans, a Venice resident who helped launch Code Pink, a women’s organization opposing the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

Evans, 50, a longtime activist, was among protesters who heckled President Bush during this year’s Republican National Convention and were removed by security personnel.

The aid effort was prompted by last month’s attack on Fallouja, which had been a stronghold for insurgents. Heavy fighting there displaced thousands of residents and caused significant damage to the Iraqi city.

Evans said nearly $600,000 in medical supplies for treating refugees -- including antibiotics, latex gloves and dozens of bags of cotton balls -- already had been shipped to the children’s hospital in Baghdad.

The money for supplies was raised with the help of websites of such groups as Global Exchange and United for Peace and Justice, which organizes demonstrations against the war in Iraq.

The volunteers who left Sunday plan to travel to the Jordan-Iraq border for a peace vigil on New Year’s Day.

Like the Suarez del Solars, Nadia McCaffrey also lost a son in Iraq. National Guard Spc. Patrick McCaffrey, 34, died June 22 when he and another soldier were ambushed by insurgents.

“These suffering children did not kill my son,” Nadia McCaffrey of Tracy said before boarding a plane in San Francisco. “They are as human as I am.”

For Rosa Suarez del Solar, the trip was a way to focus her grief.

On Sunday morning, 21 months after her son stepped on an American cluster bomb, she wore sunglasses to hide eyes puffy from crying.

On Christmas, she said, her family attended Mass but had no tree, opened no presents, held no party. Losing her son, whose senior class project in high school was a tribute to the Marine Corps, has left them with nothing to celebrate, she said.

But as hard as times have been for her and her husband, she said, she knows life is even worse for the children wounded and orphaned during the assault on Fallouja.

“We have food and shelter while they have nothing,” she said. “Our son would not have accepted that, so neither can we.”