by John Elmore
12. July 2011 13:36
MapleCreek resident Diet Eman was recently honored by the National Education Association with their Rosa Parks Memorial Award. The award, announced at the NEA’s annual Human and Civil Rights Gala in Chicago on July 1, 2011, is presented someone who inspires others to champion the cause of human and civil rights. Diet certainly fits that description.
She was a 20-year-old working as a bank teller when the Germans invaded her country of the Netherlands. She and her fiancé, Hein Seitsema, joined the Dutch Underground Resistance. During the five-year Nazi occupation, Diet and her comrades daily risked their own lives to save the lives of countless Jews and downed Allied pilots. She spent time in a Nazi prison and then a prison camp, where she met and became friends with Corrie Ten Boom. Released as the Allies approached the camp, she went right back to resistance work.
After the war, Diet Eman studied to become a registered nurse and for 10 years she served 5,000 day laborers and their families at a Shell Oil complex in Venezuela. Years later, as a Red Cross volunteer in Grand Rapids, Michigan, she traveled all over the world helping families after natural disasters.
Today, at age 91, Eman serves as a volunteer Spanish-English language translator in a free health clinic for the uninsured. A devout Christian, she draws strength every day from her Lord to live out her convictions. Her message is an unequivocal: “Stand for what you believe.”
Watch a video of the NEA presentation of the Rosa Parks Memorial Award to Diet Eman, here: http://bit.ly/nSOpzE
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