BR woman helps land-mine victims

• By ED CULLEN
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Jul 21, 2008 - Page: 1D - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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Growing up in Baton Rouge, Krystal Sirman was shy and didn’t have many friends.

“I came out of my shell in Ghana. Now, I feel I’m in the prime of my life,” said Sirman, 26, who earned a master’s degree in international development at George Washington University.

Sirman, who has an undergraduate degree in psychology from LSU, is in Amman, Jordan, working with survivors of land-mine explosions
as an Advocacy Project Peace Fellow.

The Advocacy Project is a nongovernment organization (NGO) established in 1998 to help its partners produce and disseminate information. Typically, an NGO is a legal entity created by private interests with no participation by any government. If an NGO receives government money, no government representative is included in the NGO’s membership.

As an undergraduate in  the summer of 2004, Sirman led an LSU group to Ghana to work in rural schools and a hospital. Sirman traveled to Bangladesh this spring to do research for her master’s degree.

Sirman’s fiancé, Howard King, just finished law school at American University in Washington. Sirman and King, who’s from Charleston, S.C., met in Ghana as co-leaders of the student volunteers. King majored in political science at LSU.

At a camp this summer in Jordan, Sirman will work with children on ethnic tolerance and accepting disabled people.

“The disabled are segregated,” she said. “They don’t go to school” because they’re shunned. “They’re made fun of and bullied.”
Compared to Afghanistan, Angola and Cambodia, Jordan has relatively few land-mine victims, about 1,300 in a population of 6 million, according to statistics compiled by the Landmine Survivors Network (LSN).

“That’s why we’re expanding to all conflict survivors,” Sirman said. Casualties include people with hearing and eye  injuries.
LSN reported funding for 2006 at $7.6 million, 41 percent from U.S. funding, 33 percent in private grants, 16 percent in international and 10 percent individual donations.

An estimated 80 million landmines are buried worldwide, according to LSN. China, Russia and the U.S. have large stockpiles of landmines.
The daughter of Mike and Karen Sirman, Krystal grew up camping and playing sports.

“I don’t do seriously dangerous sports, but I like adventure, traveling and learning about the lives of other people.”

Sirman feels safe in Jordan but her parents had concerns about her going there. Jordan shares its borders with Israel, Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

“There’ve been no kidnappings here,” she said, “or any feeling of being followed.”