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Child Refugees Get Pillsbury Help

They are child refugees as young as 10, and sometimes they trade sex for survival, protection or food for themselves or their younger siblings.

And now some of these worst-treated Third World adolescents are getting help from one of Minnesota's best-known families.

Three members of the Pillsbury family have raised more than $225,000 to help finance 24 projects in Africa, Asia and Central America to promote reproductive rights and health care for adolescents.

Some of the projects are staffed by adolescents themselves, and sponsors say they bring special credibility to the job.

Ochora Emmanuel, 19, is one of those project workers. He was abducted twice, first at age 13, by the rebel Lord's Resistance Army in northern Uganda -- "very terrifying," he called it at a Minneapolis "awareness-raising" event in October.

It was "hard to say" why he was released, he said. Later he became part of a research team that interviewed more than 2,000 teens and adults to identify needs and concerns in northern Uganda. And he was a founder of Gulu Youth for Action, an education and advocacy group.

The New York-based Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children makes small grants to nongovernmental organizations that do the field work for its projects.

More than 40 million people worldwide -- 13 million of them adolescents -- are international refugees or have been uprooted within their own country, the commission says.

"A lot of these rebel forces are targeting kids," said Mary Diaz, the commission's executive director. "It terrorizes the rest of the community."

Diaz tells stories of teenagers gang-raped, beaten with rifle butts, enslaved as servants or soldiers and, if they return home, rejected out of fear or superstition.

Emmanuel said he knew that "if you tried to escape, you'd be killed."

Such maltreatment of children comes in countries already ravaged by sexually transmitted diseases and, Diaz said, where maternal health is so poor that one of every 16 women dies of complications from pregnancy in some areas.

Emmanuel and Diaz were at the downtown Minneapolis Club for the October event, and so many Pillsbury relatives and friends showed up that it could have been mistaken for a family reunion.

Henry Pillsbury and his wife, Barbara, flew in from Paris, where he works as an actor. Philip Pillsbury was here from Washington, D.C.

The three started their charitable fund, the Eleanor Bellows Pillsbury Fund, through the Minneapolis Foundation in 2000. It honors the mother of Henry and Philip, a woman who was president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in the 1950s and organized volunteers at what is now Hennepin County Medical Center.

Henry Pillsbury told stories about how his mother became "persona non grata" for her Planned Parenthood lobbying at the Minnesota Legislature and how his father, Pillsbury Co. Chairman Philip Sr., refused suggestions that he try to rein her in after a threat that company products would be boycotted.

Eleanor died in 1971 at age 58, and her sons were saluted last fall for "doing what your mother would do if she were alive."

The fund is basically "a three-person pop-and-mom shop" that is "not tied up in a lot of bureaucracy," Henry Pillsbury said.

It has helped the Women's Commission reach out to adolescents through radio, sports events, health fairs and teen-to-teen counseling.

Among the latest projects: Fighting the trafficking in girls in Nepal, supporting Gaza volunteers who edit a weekly publication, and training Afghan women to teach literacy and reproductive health care.

The commission has sponsored other projects in Algeria, Angola, Burundi, Colombia, Congo, Eritrea, Guatemala, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Tanzania, Thailand and Zambia.

Originally published by The Minneapolis Star Tribune, January 2, 2003 and reproduced here with their permission