New Drive Gives Refugees X-mas Toys

Two groups of Harvard students have joined a national drive to raise money for Christmas presents for refugee children from El Salvador living in Honduran camps.

Members of Phillips Brooks House (PBH) and the Catholic Students Center will try to raise $500 in House dining halls between Sunday and Tuesday. The money will be sent to a relief worker in the Colomoncagua Camps near the El Salvador-Honduras border by the end of next week, according to organizer Larry Ronan '78, a student at the Graduate School of Education.

Clean Up

The gifts will benefit about 6000 refugees, mostly women, children and elderly men, who fled to the camps in late 1980 after the Salvadoran military undertook a "clean-up campaign" to root out leftist guerillas, Ronan said.

Harvard's participation is part of a nationwide campus drive organized by a United Nations relief worker at Colomoncagua The worker sent letters to contacts across the United States last month, one of which found its way to PBH through Ronan.

Ronan said funds raised here and at other colleges will be channelled to the Honduran camps through the Maryknoll organization, an international Catholic missionary society with which he is associated.

"This drive is unique in that we will be bringing money as opposed to the usual gifts or old clothes," said Allison E. Rader '86 of PBH's Rural Action Committee. "This is more valuable than bringing gifts," she explained.

Although Ronan views the drive as a political gesture toward an American role in bringing peace to the region. Rural Action Chairman Jess H. Velona '83 said PBH has no underlying political motives in its participation

"None of the groups has been asked to take a stand," Velona explained

Graces

Maryknoll lay missioner Phillip Pulaski said the money may encounter obstacles in reaching the refugees. "Things are getting in, but only by the graces of the Honduran military," he added

The United Nations has worked for the past two years to organize refugees in camps near the Salvadoran border Ronan, who toured the area last summer, believes the fund drive is an "effort to take politics to a very personal level."