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Fashion Boutique Sells Limited Edition T-Shirts to Help War Orphans

The fashion boutique Milia M in the village of Saifi Village has a display window that is filled with a thousand plastic wallets. Inside each of these pockets are 1,191 T-Shirts that represent the amount of people that died in Lebanon while the war was ongoing with Israel during the summer of 2006. Each T-Shirt is printed as a limited edition and has a unique serial number. The designer of the T-Shirts, Emilia Maroun plans to create different editions for other cities such as Paris and New York. All proceeds from the T-Shirts will be going to non-governmental organisations in the area that work with children and orphans that have been affected by the war. Maroun is hoping to raise $17,000 dollars from the sales of the T-Shirts and an additional $100,000 from her campaign once it has gone worldwide.

Each T-Shirt reads, "remember" and "don't forget" in nine languages - Arabic, English, French, Armenian, Turkish, Russian, German, Italian and Spanish. During the war, Maroun was desperate to help in some way but could not think of an idea. She said, "For me as a designer, the simplest thing I can do is a T-shirt. A T-shirt for a designer is like a card or a poster. But I also wanted this to be like an operation and not like a reminder, not like a dramatic story," and added "We live in a state of denial, and maybe this prevents us from acting. I wanted the installation in the window to be like a strike - we won't open the window until all the T-Shirts are gone. It's art in the service of something useful." She has recently launched the campaign and treats it as a New Year resolution. She is currently working with two organisations, the Mouvement Social and Mada.