Pali Students Connect to Darfur Refugees

Starting November 21, we will have a rare opportunity to participate in a powerful form of activism. People worldwide with access to the Internet will be able to see, hear and communicate with survivors of the ongoing genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan, Africa. Gabriel Stauring, an activist and co-founder of StopGenocideNow.org, will be traveling to refugee camps in Darfur and Chad, which borders Sudan to the west, to help instigate this awareness project, called i-ACT (Interactive Activism). Stauring and Chris Bessenecker, an SGN working-team member, will post video footage from the camps on the Web site for 21 days and stage an interactive blog-type feature. Stauring, 39, recently visited Palisades Charter High School to discuss his upcoming trip with the Human Rights Watch Student Task Force, coordinated by Palisadian Pam Bruns, who started the youth leadership-training program in 1999 when she was director for HRW in Southern California. Stauring discovered StopGenocideNow.org about a year ago and took over the then inactive site with his sister, Rachel Veerman. The mission of the organization is “to protect populations in grave danger of violence, death, and displacement resulting from genocide,” and its current focus is the crisis in Darfur, which the United States calls genocide. “The international community and our leaders can really make a difference,” Stauring told the small group of students and at least five teachers who gathered during their lunch to hear him talk. “What it takes is political pressure. It takes people like you to spread the word and tell others ways to participate.” Dressed neatly in blue jeans and a black-and-white T-shirt with “Stop Genocide in Sudan” on the front, Stauring spoke passionately about his efforts to create awareness and action to halt the genocide in Darfur, though he is particularly modest about his activist work. “It kind of chose me,” Stauring told the Palisadian-Post about his involvement in the Darfur crisis. “One of the reasons we can focus on it is that it’s very stoppable.” The Darfur conflict began in early 2003 when rebel forces attacked and captured the capital in central Darfur. In response, the Sudanese government mounted a campaign of aerial bombardment supporting ground attacks by an Arab militia, the Janjaweed, who are still “killing civilians, razing and burning villages, raping women and young girls, abducting children, poisoning water supplies and destroying sources of food,” according to StopGenocideNow.org. While the majority of the resulting refugees are non-Arab Africans fleeing Janjaweed attacks, the victims include Arab and non-Arab peoples. Several thousand African Union peacekeeping troops are stationed in Darfur but peace talks have not produced any results. Death toll estimates range from 200,000 to 400,000, and experts predict that as many as one million civilians could die in Darfur from hunger and disease in the coming months. “The media just has not been paying attention to it,” said Stauring, who works as a family consultant for abused children at Girls and Boys Town in Long Beach. “The general public pretty much doesn’t know anything about Darfur.” He emphasized the urgency to act now to create solutions to the crisis, citing expert Samantha Power’s comparison of what’s happening in Darfur to “Rwanda in slow motion.” Power is a professor at Harvard University and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.” “It’s a really small group in power,” Stauring explained to the Student Task Force. “They claim they’re fighting a rebel movement inside Darfur, but as they’re ‘defending’ themselves, they’re killing people along the way.” The refugee camps in Chad and along the western border of Darfur that Stauring plans to visit are unlike any kind of “camps” we could imagine, with little food and water and a high risk of disease. “The conditions are extreme and people are surviving day to day,” he said. “Many [refugees] in Darfur had to walk 10 to 12 days to get to a camp and live in horrible conditions.” As another element to his journey, Stauring will deliver an important message to the refugee children in Darfur’a message of peace and hope in the form of 18 wooden tiles decorated with colorful, intimate collages by children in neighboring northern Uganda, where a civil war has been going on for almost two decades. The Ugandan children who created the “peace tiles” are called “night commuters” because they live in rural areas and walk miles each night to sleep in the bigger, safer town of Gulu, to escape abduction by rebel groups. In a workshop in Gulu organized by Christina Jordan, founder of Life in Africa Foundation, the night commuters used paint, stickers and various artifacts (photos, scraps of cloth or paper, broken toys) to express their personal experiences and inspire the children in Darfur. “Jordan really believes in the power of art,” said Stauring, who passed around some of tiles for the Pali students and teachers to see. On the back of each tile was a photograph of the artist displaying his or her creation, and Stauring plans to photograph the children of Darfur who receive the tiles so that the Ugandan artists can see who received their gifts. One tile featured a picture of a dove, a series of gold stars and the words “thank you” cut and pasted on it. Others were adorned with sequins, a leaf, small stones, and messages such as “Dream Big” and “Darfur Freedom Summer Vigil.” Stauring and PaliHi art teacher Angelica Pereyra, who is also the lead advisor to the Student Task Force, discussed the power of art with the students in Pereyra’s sixth period art class following the lunch meeting. Stauring said that the art created by the Ugandan children for their Darfur neighbors is “not just having an impact on individual kids, but on a lot of people, like me, who’ve been able to see this and be affected by these messages. “I wonder what they’re feeling right now,” Stauring said, referring to refugees in Darfur. “They’re probably thinking ‘somebody’s going to come save us’ and, still, no one’s come.” When the students inquired about solutions to the Darfur crisis, Stauring told them that the first priority is the protection of civilians, which involves disarming the Sudanese government and Janjaweed. “There’s nothing for [the refugees] to go back to,” he said. “They’re going to need help for decades. We have to do all in our power to make their stay in the camps as short as possible and get them back to a safe situation in their homeland.” The Pali students pressed Stauring for answers as to why the United States government or the UN have not intervened to stop the genocide, especially after the “never again” pledge not to tolerate such atrocities, following the 1994 Rwandan genocide. “Our leaders don’t believe that we [Americans] care,” he told them. “Why go and take a risk on something that people don’t care about? It’s not risky to do nothing; it’s a little riskier to do something.” In four days, Stauring will travel about 38 hours from Los Angeles to Chad where he will visit the refugee camps with an Arabic translator during the day, and edit and post footage for the Web site each night. He encouraged the students to comment on what they see and hear, and start a dialogue with the refugee children. Pereyra said, “You have to first be a believer that your own words are powerful.” To be a part of i-ACT, go to stopgenocidenow.org/iact/.