The Manzanar Project has won two prestigious awards:
the 2002 Rolex Award and the Blue Planet Prize of 2005
in Tokyo. It was very gratifying to win these awards and
they have given the Project credibility in the wider world
but my ambition is not to win awards but to achieve the
objectives of the Manzanar Project.

The Project started in Eritrea, a small country on the
Horn of Africa, south of Sudan, which had fought a
30-year war to win independence from Ethiopia with its
massive military support from Russia. It was a just war
against cruel and tyrannical colonial domination, and the
infamous Ethiopian Famine was chiefly an Eritrean famine
because Ethiopia was starving out the rebels. I joined the
rebels in 1987 by introducing fish farming that succeeded
in growing fish and providing high protein food for the
wounded. I was inspired by their selfless and principled
devotion to the their cause of achieving independence and
justice. To my sentimental way of thinking, it was people
suffering hardship and injustice from incarceration in
Manzanar and the other 8 concentration camps reaching
across time and space to help people in need. Many of my
high school classmates at Manzanar contributed to this Project.
Against all odds, the Eritrean people (pop. 3.5 million) won
freedom from Ethiopia (pop. 60 million) in 1991.

After the war I struggled with the problem of economic
development in Eritrea. Agriculture in the highlands is insufficient
to feed the nation because of frequent, unpredictable droughts
which caused famine only relieved by massive international food
aid. Eritrea is one of the poorest countries in the world with
almost no sustainable economy. I noticed that in the intertidal
areas on its Red Sea Coastline that mangroves grew sparsely
(mangroves grow in salt water) and only in areas where the
scarce rainwater was channeled to the sea. (continued)