[lavplist] Sad loss of one of our members

[Kevin & Barbara O'Reilly]

To all Los Altos Voices For Peace,

The article below is to let you know of the loss of one of our founding
members, Larissa Keet.

Those of you who came to the vigils at Singer Plaza four years ago will
remember the energy she brought to our efforts to prevent

our country from going to war with Iraq.  She was there for many of our
vigils and for the founding of LAVP in May of 2003.  

We will remember her at our next monthly meeting, Feb. 12.  and will
gratefully accept contributions in her honor toward the Peace Scholarship

LAVP is offering at Foothill College this Spring.

We will miss her greatly! 

 

Local peace leader killed in Kenya
 


Click on the photo
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Larissa Keet, a longtime Palo Alto-area peace and environmental activist,
died after she was hit by a truck while crossing a street in Nairobi, Kenya,
on Jan. 13. She was in Kenya to attend a meeting of the World Social Forum.

Keet, 65, had lived in Los Altos Hills with her husband, Aubrey. They had
been married 42 years.

Keet was a speech and language teacher in the Palo Alto Unified School
District for many years. She later became a licensed therapist and a
graduate of the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, which she attended to
obtain a graduate degree following her years as a speech/language teacher.

She was also active in many local groups, including Acterra, Hidden Villa,
the Foundation for a Global Community and one of its subgroups, Valley of
the Hearts Delight.

According to friends, Aubrey has traveled to Kenya to work on the difficult
process of getting his wife's remains returned home. 

Debbie Mytels of Palo Alto, a close personal friend, said Keet died in a
hospital in Kenya several hours after being hit by a truck.

Mytels noted that Keet became a specialist in conflict resolution and
participated in several international trips with the Compassionate Listening
Project, bringing together people in world trouble spots such as
Israel/Palestine -- where she helped with the "Living Room Dialogues"
between Arabs and Jews -- and Armenia/Azerbijian, among others. 

Keet was also active with the Raging Grannies of the San Francisco Peninsula
and Los Altos Voices for Peace. 

She attended many international conferences, including the first Beijing
Conference on Women in the 1980s. 

"Hundreds of people locally were touched by the life of this beautiful,
vibrant woman -- and her 65 years on this Earth were simply too short,"
Mytels said. 

A living-room memorial service was held last Wednesday, attended by about 70
friends who spilled out into the yard of a residence in Menlo Park. In their
Los Altos Hills' home "she welcomed many guests and served everyone organic
food," Mytels recalled.

Another service will be planned after Keet is returned from Africa, possibly
at the Hidden Villa in Los Altos Hills, with which she also was active. 

The larger service is in part prompted by the many people Keet touched in
her life and practice, other close friends, Libby and Len Traubman of Menlo
Park, said. Those able to attend the service last week were "only a fraction
of her circle of communication" and those affected by her, Len Traubman
said. 

She and the Traubmans first met as part of an earlier iteration of the
Foundation for Global Community, based in Palo Alto, Traubman recalled. The
organization has had several names or facets, including Women to Women Build
the Earth for the Children's sake, Creative Initiative, Project Survival and
Beyond War. The Traubmans were founding members of the organization. 

"She was in many circles, we learned in the living room gathering -- circles
of relationships that brought people together. 

"She traveled the world to be where there were gatherings of people,
especially of women -- to be where progress was being made, to be where she
needed to be to help things move forward," he said, noting that she had a
strong spiritual side that complemented her Jewish roots.

"She was a woman of a new world, a world between where an old (way of) life
is dying and a new world that's not yet been born," Traubman said. "She saw
herself as a midwife to the world." 

She is survived by a sister, Barbara Goldblatt of Denver, Colo.; neice,
Sheri Gellman of Connecticut; and nephew, Neil Goldblatt of Denver, Colo.

- Don Kazak and Jay Thorwaldson <mailto:dkazak at paweekly.com> 

 

 

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