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Wednesday, June 8, 1988 / University Daily Kansan
Journey to help Nicaraguans
By Lisa Sheikh
Ted Millich, Kansas City, Mo., senior, helps ready an old school bus for a trip to Nicaragua. Millich and three other University of Kansas students and a former KU teaching assistant left Lawrence for Managua on May 30.
Kansan staff writer
When Jon Bell was approached by a representative of the U.S. Veterans Peace Convoy and asked to buy a button to support the Veterans aid to Nicaragua, he laughed. That was in April.
The students are part of a convoy of 50 trucks and buses from all over the country that assembled on June 2 in Austin, Texas. Except for the KU students, the convoy drivers are Vietnam veterans.
Now, he and four University of Kansas students are on their way to Managua, Nicaragua, to help bring medical supplies to the war-torn country.
The convoy expects to arrive in Managua on June 17. There, it will deliver the medical supplies to the Pope John XXIII Foundation, which will distribute them.
The convoy originally intended to take all the donated supplies by truck and bus, but Quest for Peace, a church relief organization based in Mt. Rainier, Md., which supervised the collection, received ten times the amount of supplies it had requested. So 450 additional truckloads now are being shipped ahead to Nicaragua. The veterans convoy will collect the rest of the supplies along the way.
Bell, a former graduate teaching assistant in the English department, is the only one of the five KU students who has been to Nicaragua. He spent seven months there last year.
About two months ago, he was in the Kansas Union when Veterans representative Greg Nelson asked him to buy a button.
"I said, I'll buy one, but a lot of good it's going to do," Bell said.
"And Greg said, 'Well, if you really want to help, why don't you drive a truck?' "
Bell told some of his friends about it, and since then, they have been in touch with the peace convoy and Quest for Peace.
To join the convoy, the students had to find their own transportation. That came in the form of a '63 Chevrolet school bus donated by David Hann and Richard Kershenbaum, Lawrence residents. But the bus needed extensive repairs, Bell said, so the students needed to raise $3,500 to cover the cost of repairs, new tires, gasoline and other travel expenses.
$2,800 through donations from local merchants, KU students and merchants in the Westport area of Kansas City, Mo. Bell said the group would have to make up the difference.
Also taking the trip are David Burkland, Junction City junior; Susan Ask, Great Bend junior; Ted
Milich, Kansas City, Mo., senior; and Nancy Stoffer, Prairie Village senior.
After the group arrives in Managua, Burkland said, the students will be on their own. Each will stay for a different length of time, and each will fly back separately. The group will donate the bus to the Nicaraguans.
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