Wednesday, March 31, 2004

THE AMERICA I LIVE IN

Soldier's family and friends donate arabic language books...so prisoners have something to read.

The social workers began teaching the boys to read and write, except there wasn't much to read. So U.S. Army Capt. Dave Seiter, a reservist who works as a lawyer in Indianapolis, asked his family and friends to help out.

They logged on to Internet bookseller Amazon.com and flooded Seiter with Arabic language books, comics and booklets for children. With that, Seiter and the prison's warden, Wali Jaleel Jaber, opened a library.

"I certainly don't expect that we can make all of them avid readers," said Seiter, who oversees Iraq's juvenile justice system for the U.S.-led occupation authority. "But if we can affect a couple of them, that makes it worthwhile."

The boy prisoners, all wearing orange jumpsuits, knelt in the facility's sun-splashed courtyard Sunday during a ceremony dedicating the library to the prison's previous warden. The warden was slain last month by a pair of juvenile gunmen who robbed him of his cellular phone. His killers are at large.

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