Cultural Gulfs, Environmental Strain, War... And An Abiding Hope

Charminar Hiderabad

Vandana Shiva, Munich (2005)

Irrepressibly dynamic peace and anti-nuclear activist, Greenwich resident Ayumi Temlock returns to PoemAlley after a two-month visit to India to talk about who she met, what she saw and the programs she participated in, conducted by such luminaries as ecology and food sovereignty activist, physicist Vandana Shiva (1993 Alternative Novel Peace Prize Winner), among others.

ISRO Manned Return Vehicle

temple ceiling

Over the last few years, Ayumi has been instrumental, independently and/or in conjunction with Greenwich/Stamford Peace Action and WESPAC Foundation, in protesting the proliferation of armed drone aircraft used against people of Yemen, Afghanistan and other nations, raising public awareness regarding the paucity of the official account of the 9/11 bombings and--a subject especially close to her--advocating for the abolition of nuclear weaponry.

 For the latter cause, Ayumi personally arranged the financing and travel arrangements to bring two Hibakusha, Takashi Morita and Junko Watanabe, from Brazil to relate their first-person accounts as survivors of the 1945 atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima to UConn students, New York residents and members of PoemAlley at Curley's in 2010. Listen to their historical contributions as translated by Ayumi at 3:35 (right after Dev Crasta and Rebeka Radna's ethereal duet) in the video below of the Green Fuse PA event, held at the Unitarian Universalist Society in Stamford (UUSIS) on April 24 of that year.