A wake-up, warning

NEWPORT BEACH — To uninformed visitors, Corona del Mar High School might have looked like a war zone on Tuesday morning. Yellow police tape stretched on walls and benches around the outdoor quad — sometimes raggedly, with stray pieces scattered on the ground. A large handwritten sign across from the gymnasium read simply, “Danger Watch Out.”

But there was no emergency Tuesday at Corona del Mar High. Inside the gym, students learned about parts of the world where people face peril every day. To start off, the school’s seventh annual community service learning day, Nobel Peace Prize-winner Ken Rutherford gave a hair-raising presentation on the threat of landmines in Third World countries.

“The weapon I’m talking about has killed more people than nuclear, biological and chemical weapons combined,” Rutherford, an associate professor of political science at Missouri State University, told the audience of 10th-, 11th- and 12th-graders.

Rutherford’s presentation, which he repeated for an audience of younger students, was the latest project of Club Anthro, a humanitarian-themed student group founded by seniors Zan Margolis and Amanda Knuppel. On Tuesday evening, the club planned to host a fundraiser at the Mozambique Restaurant and Coastal Lounge, with Rutherford as the keynote speaker.

Zan, 17, met the Nobel Prize-winner through a family connection. Rutherford had attended high school with Zan’s parents, and she met him at a class reunion a few years ago. The encounter, she said, opened her eyes to a frequently overlooked problem.

“I didn’t know what landmines were until I met Ken Rutherford, and I think that’s a reflection,” she said. “I come from a privileged community. When I travel the world, it involves hotels and airplanes.”

Rutherford, who lost his legs to a landmine while doing humanitarian work in Somalia in 1993, has roughed it quite a bit more. During his half-hour presentation, he showed photographs of his accident and recounted the hours when he lingered near death in a hospital and survived on donated blood.

Landmines, Rutherford noted, were frequently left in the ground from past wars, and menaced civilians long after the soldiers had ceased fire. He also described the effects of landmine injuries in Third World countries; a man who loses a limb will receive the support of his wife, Rutherford said, but a woman in that situation may be abandoned by her husband.

After co-founding the Landmine Survivors Network in the 1990s, Rutherford met Princess Diana and toured Bosnia with her shortly before her death. At one point, he said, she made a statement about humanitarian work that he never forgot.

“She said, ‘The media has made my life the world, and I like to make their life the world by taking them to places they wouldn’t otherwise go,’ ” he recounted to the students.

Junior Jasmine Naziri, 16, said Rutherford’s speech had given her a new outlook on the world.

“I thought it was horrible,” she said. “The landmines should be stopped.”