Not on Our Watch (19 page)

One person really can make a difference.

Bill Andress helped found Sudan Advocacy Action Forum, and he spends about six hours a day working on Sudan-related issues. Andress became involved in Sudan when he heard a pastor from Sudan, Ezekiel Kutjok, who was touring and talking about the situation in southern Sudan. Andress realised someone had to do something, and he partnered with Bobbie Frances McDonald to start an advocacy group. Their group has about 2,500 members, half of whom are Presbyterian. Monthly they release a situation report, and once every six weeks they ask their group to do something active such as sending letters to congresspeople or the president. Andress explains, ‘Our strategy is very simple: pray, act, and give.’

Andress is motivated to devote his life to this because of his religious beliefs. ‘After hearing about Sudan, I woke up at 3am day after day after day, worrying about nobody doing anything about it. That was ignorance speaking. I thought nobody was doing anything about it, but I was certainly not doing anything. I can imagine facing St Peter and him saying, “You didn’t do such and such,” and me responding, “I didn’t know,” but not “Yeah, I didn’t want to.”’Andress believes the atrocities in Sudan are relevant to all. ‘Even if you’re not Christian, if you have a faith at all, I think every faith requires a level of humanity. This is not just a Christian issue, it is more broadly a humanitarian issue, and this country needs to stand for what’s humanitarian.’

The American Islamic Congress (AIC) was also motivated by religious beliefs to help the people in Darfur. ‘Protecting and defending human rights are the foundation of Islam,’ explains Jana El-Horr, DC program director of AIC. ‘This message is not true only for Arabs or Muslims, but for all of humanity. That is why it is important to have interfaith dialogues and understanding.’

To foster such communication, AIC asked interfaith communities to lead a fast in October (during Ramadan) and break the fast together to raise funds for and awareness of Darfur. AIC also forwards newsletters from different Darfur-related organisations to its 4,000-person database, and in conjunction with the al-Khoei Foundation, AIC is trying to meet with all Muslim or Arab ambassadors to the UN to press for more action in Darfur. ‘We are impartial politically. We are looking at the human rights issues. There are people dying for over three years, and no one is doing anything.’

Interfaith Action

As a way of encouraging awareness, many Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and other religious organisations have organised prayer sessions or incorporated Darfur and the refugees into their services. Through meditation and/or prayer, you can deepen compassion for others, and that compassion can help bear witness to and end the suffering of others. As the Dalai Lama said, ‘The true expression of nonviolence is compassion. Some people seem to think that compassion is just a passive emotional response instead of rational stimulus to action. To experience genuine compassion is to develop a feeling of closeness to others combined with a sense of responsibility for their welfare.’

In the Darfur campaign, prayer and meditation have been exceptional tools for reaching out to large numbers of people. These are mostly carried out within congregations, but much more could be done to promote interfaith efforts and alliances. One weekend in July 2005, through the advocacy efforts of the Save Darfur Coalition, the United States Congress recognised a National Weekend of Prayer and Reflection for Darfur. Across the country 350 communities of faith focused their prayers on those suffering in Sudan. In April 2006, Save Darfur helped organise a ‘Week of Prayer and Action for Darfur’ for communities of faith, where over 800 religious institutions participated. The Save Darfur Coalition (www.savedarfur.org) has a congressional network that you can sign up to be a part of that will send updates about how the religious community can be involved in education and advocacy efforts.

The organisation offered suggestions for incorporating Darfur into a sermon, homily, D’var Torah (which is a brief explanation of the weekly Torah reading), or Jumuah Khutbah (the Muslim Friday prayers) and provided sample prayers on its website for institutions that participated in the effort, such as the following:

A Prayer for Overcoming Indifference

I watch the news, God. I observe it all from a comfortable distance. I see people suffering, and I don’t lift a finger to help them. I condemn injustice but I do nothing to fight against it. I am pained by the faces of starving children, but I am not moved enough to try to save them. I step over homeless people in the street, I walk past outstretched hands, I avert my eyes, I close my heart.

Forgive me, God, for remaining aloof while others are in need of my assistance.

Wake me up, God; ignite my passion, fill me with outrage. Remind me that I am responsible for Your world. Don’t allow me to stand idly by. Inspire me to act. Teach me to believe that I can repair some corner of this world.

When I despair, fill me with hope. When I doubt my strength, fill me with faith. When I am weary, renew my spirit. When I lose direction, show me the way back to meaning, back to compassion, back to You. Amen.

Naomi Levy

Amy Butler, the senior pastor at Calvary Baptist Church, not only got her DC congregation to hang up Save Darfur banners, she also committed to mentioning Darfur in her service every Sunday one fall. She sees intentionally praying for the people in Sudan and empowering her congregation to take action through donation, letter writing, or prayer as worth pushing the comfort zone of many Baptists who have a strong belief in the separation of church and state. ‘All of us can agree that this is something that we never want to see happen again. We all need to raise our voices and say this is wrong.’

Robert Kang of The Church in Bethesda and his co-pastor April Vega were feeling overwhelmed by what they read about Darfur. It really hit home for them when they read a Washington Post article about a 14-year-old Darfurian girl who was raped. Learning about the plight of raped women in Darfur—the cultural implications of a raped woman being seen as a damaged or dirty woman—was overwhelming. ‘I remember being so struck by that that I actually took it to church and gave a talk on Sunday regarding it. I don’t know what the exact point of the talk was, but I just wanted to make the story heard and known. I knew if this had happened to my neighbour in this city, people would have been all over it, but here was a distant woman and no one was doing anything about it. What can we do?’ he wondered. ‘This little insignificant church?’

Then he heard of five outdoor prayer services being held by his old church, Cedar Ridge Community Church, where Brian McLaren is the pastor. Inspired, Kang and Vega joined these efforts hoping that it would bring attention, media coverage, and people to join in prayer. For the services they partnered with Rabbi David Saperstein, director at the Religious Action Centre, and in this way were able to bring together a large interfaith community to discuss the situation in Darfur. More important than large numbers of participants were the stories shared, the passion of the people there, and the link of interfaith unity that was created.

Kang says, ‘Just personally, I’ve been really challenged in my limited view and faith. Being a part of this five weeks of worship for Sudan and Darfur has made a significant impact on my spirit and what I value as action, and I hope and pray that it continues to grow. I confess that I was one that thought of change really only on a large scale (in numbers and size), and I feel like I’ve come into contact with the power of passion and the power of a few, and I believe that is what is going to change the world. People who are passionate, and devoted, and will fight to change the world. In a small way, I feel completely blessed by this.’

Strategy Two

UNDERWRITING CHANGE—RAISE FUNDS

The organisations operating on the ground in Darfur and neighbouring Chad, where many refugees have fled, are in constant need of money to meet operating costs. For instance, nearly 3 million people in Darfur and on the border with Chad depend on food aid. However, in May 2006, the United Nations World Food Program (WFP), the largest humanitarian organisation operating in the field, announced that it was cutting its daily rations for the refugees and internally displaced (IDPs) because of a severe funding shortfall. That meant that the food ration would be less than the minimum required to stave off malnutrition, rates of which were already on the rise in Sudan.

It should not have come to that. According to WFP, throughout Sudan, more than 6 million people depend on food aid for basic nutrition at a cost of $746 million. Nicholas Kristof said about WFP in one his columns, ‘Without the World Food Program organising food shipments to Sudan and Chad, hundreds of thousands more people would have died. Those UN field workers are heroic.’ But as of June 2006, barely half the aid requirements were funded. The United States had given nearly $200 million, the EU $60 million, and the UK $90 million—that left a marked shortfall. One of Kristof’s readers contacted him to find out to which organisation he should donate a $1 million cash dividend from Microsoft. But you need not be a millionaire to have a direct financial impact. You can contribute money or you can write letters and advocate for more funding from your country. In this case, the latter activity led to a surge in governmental contributions to the relief effort around the world and to an increase in the WFP rations.

Much has been written about whether donated funds really get to the people for whom they are intended. The emphasis on improved efficiency over the last two decades has resulted in much better targeting of resources to the truly needy, and much less waste and overhead.
Money
magazine ranks these aid agencies according to how efficient they are at ensuring their money goes to the intended beneficiaries, and this has helped spark a real effort in the aid industry to make sure that each dollar that is contributed goes to helping people on the ground. The track record has improved enormously during these last 20 years. Today, your money will make a difference in saving lives, more than it ever has before.

You can also raise money for organisations that get at the root causes of the violence, so that endless appeals for food and medicine become unnecessary. Organisations like the International Crisis Group (www.crisisgroup.org) and projects like ENOUGH aim to end the conflicts and atrocities that produce extreme human deprivation.

Groups and individuals around the country have been doing creative things in the way of fund-raising for Darfur’s victims of violence. Traditional fund-raising methods (e.g., bake sales, T-shirt sales, dinners) and non-conventional ideas (e.g., CD sales, birthday party fund-raisers, etc.) are part of a widespread effort to assist humanitarian projects in Darfur, and even to help advocacy groups who try to get at the root causes of the violence. College groups have thrown parties at clubs and bars to raise money for Darfur relief. Many colleges have used money raised to support a project of the Darfurian-run Darfur Peace and Development organisation, which sets up schools in Darfur and Chad for children who are IDPs and refugees. Others have organised benefit concerts, like 15-year-old Spencer Wiesner from upstate New York, who raised $20,000.

Rachel Karetzky, a 13-year-old activist living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, learned about Sudan while on vacation and started a fund-raising campaign to benefit the victims of Darfur as part of her Bat Mitzvah community service project. ‘I saw genocide on the news and thought, Why doesn’t the world do anything?’ she asked. ‘Everyone knows what happened to the Jews in the Holocaust, and I learned about it for so long in Hebrew school, etc. Then you realise the consequences afterwards, and that it shouldn’t happen again. And now it’s happening again and it’s wrong.’

With some initial guidance from the American Jewish World Service, she started her campaign. In six months, she raised almost $15,000 to benefit the victims in Darfur.

She initiated ‘Cans for Darfur’—collection cans in salons, bakeries, and shops for people to make donations. To raise additional funds, she held a raffle with donated prizes, sold green Save Darfur bracelets that said ‘Not on our watch: Save Darfur,’ and on the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, she handed out flyers and asked people to make donations. She also spoke at her own synagogue, Beth El, and the Society Hill Synagogue along with Ruth Messinger, president of the American Jewish World Service. Aside from talking about her own project and how meaningful it was to her, Rachel spoke about what other Bar and Bat Mitzvahs should do to also get involved and make a difference. Rachel’s efforts did not just target her Jewish peers at her school. She also chose to do a curriculum project comparing Darfur to the Holocaust and was able to share her research at a fair and collect donations. Her hard work and efforts paid off, as she appeared on
Nick News
on Nickelodeon describing the comparison between the Holocaust and Darfur. She also got signatures for a petition that was sent to the president.

After raising all that money, Rachel says, ‘I felt overjoyed, happy and excited. I felt like I was really making a difference, so I continued. At times it got hard, but I like to speak in front of people.’ The advice she would give someone who wants to get involved would be to ‘always think that you’re making a difference. Keep on trying and raising money even if you pass the Bar Mitzvah. Don’t stop your campaign, because you are making a difference.’

When Miles Forma, an 18-year-old student from New Jersey who has cerebral palsy, saw the movie
Hotel Rwanda
, he was so moved that he started a fund-raising campaign for a special school programme in Rwanda. He organised an African dance workshop and then gave a PowerPoint presentation on the Rwandan genocide. Miles had family members who perished in the Holocaust, and he kept asking himself how the world could turn its back. Only the idea that he would make a difference was comforting to him.

Speaking through his DynaVox, Miles said the movie made him feel ‘sad and angry and inspired.’ In his presentation he paraphrased the philosopher George Santayana, ‘People who ignore the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.’ And he explained to the audience that one of the lessons of what happened in Rwanda is not to turn our backs when a country needs our help. About 35 to 40 friends, students from Crotched Mountain, a centre for people with disabilities, and individuals from the community came to Miles’s event. His goal was to raise $1,000, but he has raised almost $2,500 to date.