Students in Washington lobby for Armenian Genocide stamp issue

PanARMENIAN.Net - If the United State postal authorities ever get to mint a postage stamp commemorating the Armenian Genocide centennial in 2015, much of the credit could very well go to a small class of world history students at Wilmington High.

Two dozen of them are lobbying feverishly to get such a commemorative issued by designing their own illustrations and forwarding them with essays to Postmaster General John E. Potter in Washington, D.C.

The students belong to a class called “Facing History and Ourselves,” taught by human rights activists Lisa Joy Desberg and Maura Tucker.

The idea stemmed from presentations made by members of the Merrimack Valley Armenian Genocide Curriculum Committee, and chaired by Dro Kanayan, over the past four years.

Some sketches depicted a religious symbol. Others showed families hand-in-hand. One illustration showed Yerevan’s Genocide Memorial, Tsitsernakabert, with its eternal flame, surrounded by flowers on April 24 against a blue sky. Another depicted a mother with a baby strapped to her back and another child in hand making her way across the desert sands, The Armenian Weekly reported.