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Never say nyet  If I could live my life over again..." is a phrase you will never hear from Judith Jenya '62, MSW '74. Determined to pack several lifetimes into one, Jenya lives at double pace and never says no to a challenge. Jenya completed her senior year at Cal in one semester. Since then, she's been to art school and law school, and has acquired graduate degrees in education and social work. She's been a teacher, an art therapist, a family lawyer, and a soccer mom (sometimes all these simultaneously); she also trained as a mediator in nonviolent conflict resolution and pioneered the first U.S. adoptions of Russian children. Currently, she is using the skills and experience from all these "past lives" in her work as director of the Global Children's Organization, which runs camps for children in war-torn and violent places. "I wasn't raised in a very typical way," says Jenya, who grew up in southern California. Her parents met at International House--her father, Max Meisels '35, was from Germany and a kibbutz pioneer; her mother Jenny Meisels '34, was the daughter of a Bolshevik revolutionary. (Judith adopted the name Jenya, her mother's original name, after her mother's death.) She was brought up with a strong sense of social justice--as part of the war effort, her father worked as a laborer in the shipyards (even though he was a qualified civil engineer) and the family once took in a refugee. They chose to live in a blue-collar neighborhood, where Jenya was the only white girl in an all-black Girl Scout troop. Jenya developed other qualities that have served her well in the life she has chosen. "I don't discourage easily," she says. That helped when her plane was being shot at as she landed in Sarajevo in 1993, during the siege on that city, and during the 17 days when she herself was unable to leave. It also came in handy several years earlier when she was trying to get permission to visit orphanages in Russia and kept hearing "nyet! nyet! nyet!" "I decided that nyet really means not yet," she says. "Also, I have a lot of chutzpah--that's one of my major qualities!" she adds. The seeds for the Global Children's Organization were sown in 1990, when Jenya was invited to lead a camp on the banks of the Moscow River for children who had survived the Chernobyl disaster. "The idea was to give them some hope, some encouragement, some fun," she recalls. During her later trip to Sarajevo, she visited an orphanage and thought again of that camp. When she saw the hundreds of tiny, uninhabited islands dotted around Croatia, everything came together: "I had a vision, an epiphany, of what sort of place we should have." She chose Badija, a beautiful and secluded island with no roads and a 15th-century Franciscan monastery that had been converted into the national basketball camp of Yugoslavia. Over the next two summers, more than 2,000 child refugees, both Bosnians and Serbs, came to the camp for a break from the war. For her work there, Jenya received the International Humanist of the Year Award in 2001. Since the end of the Bosnian war, Jenya has been raising money for the Global Children's Organization, which has since run summer camps in Northern Ireland and southern California, bringing together children to teach them nonviolence and "giving them a chance to be kids again." She is now trying to create a year-round camp for children growing up around gang violence in Los Angeles. "All of these kids have witnessed a shooting, a death, a drive-by shooting. That's just not OK to have that as your childhood," she says. --Ayala Ochert
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