HIGH SCHOOLERS GET GLIMPSE OF A GENOCIDE A LOCAL COUPLE EXPERIENCE FIRSTHAND
by Carley Dryden
Beach Reporter
Dec 2 2010
CA
Swaths of canvas line a table in the Mira Costa High School cafeteria.
On them are pictures drawn by children from the Darfur region of
Sudan in Africa. Through the pictures, the children depict their daily
lives. Most of the canvases show men shooting guns at other people.
Some show men dressed in military gear, driving tanks and shooting
at tents, with drops of red dotting the entire canvas.
One girl wrote, “please stop we are children.” Her canvas shows a
plane dropping missiles.
Nearby, Mira Costa students shuffled inside small canvas tents,
with photos lining the walls and hanging from the ceiling. In the
photos were mountains of naked, dead bodies, piles of skulls, children
standing there naked and starving, their bodies literally skeletons
with a thin layer of skin. Some students cringed. Others broke out
crying. A few complained about how warm and cramped it was inside
the tent.
On the back wall of each tent were written: Armenia, Holocaust,
Cambodia, Rwanda and Darfur. Underneath each title was a number – 1.5
million in Armenia, 11 million in the Holocaust, 2 million in Cambodia,
800,000 in Rwanda and 450,000 and counting in Darfur. The number of
people killed in five of the most well-known genocides in the world.
Hermosa Beach couple Gabriel Stauring and Katie-Jay Scott, shown
above surrounded by their friends from a refugee camp in Africa,
travel to Chad and Darfur each year hoping to bring awareness to the
genocide there.
The tents and canvases were part of Camp Darfur, an interactive
mock refugee camp that educates students about past genocides and
brings attention to the current genocide in Darfur. Students from
the school’s People Acquiring Complete Equality (PACE) club acted
as docents of the exhibit, telling the stories of each genocide as
their peers walked through the tents, tents where at least 8 to 12
people lived for months, if not years.
“It’s horrible to see what they went through,” said senior Marie
Lauzon, who acted as the docent for the Armenian tent. “We didn’t
even know about some of these genocides until today. It’s still sad
that people could do this to other people.”
One student told his peers about daily life for Jews in the Holocaust.
They were stuck in the tents with little air for 23 hours a day,
he said. If they poked their heads out, even for just a minute, they
were shot. At one point during the genocide, for two days straight,
360,000 Jews were simply lined up and shot. Others were buried alive.
Senior Megan Alexander stood in the Cambodian tent, waiting to educate
her peers about the 2 million who died, some simply because they
wore glasses.
“10,000 people died each day. That’s a lot of people. How many people
they can kill in one day, that really hit me,” she said.
Hermosa Beach residents Gabriel Stauring and Katie-Jay Scott stood
back and watched the students mill around the exhibit. What the
students were seeing on canvas, and in tents, they have seen firsthand.
Making it personal
Stauring co-founded Stop Genocide Now and I-ACT, a grassroots team
that seeks to change the way the world responds to genocide.
On Dec. 4, Stauring will leave for his ninth trip to Darfur; it will
be Scott’s sixth.
Stauring was jolted into action in 2005, after reading about and
watching movies concerning the Rwandan genocide of 1994.
“When I heard about that, I went, ‘Wow. How could we let that
happen?'” Stauring said.
Then he heard about Darfur, where women and children have been brutally
raped and slaughtered.
“The children go through things that no child should ever hear about,”
Stauring said. “With me being a father, it would be difficult for me
not to do something.”
Stauring started taking small steps, sending out e-mails to family
and friends, researching the genocide online and talking with others.
One thing they saw that was missing was a way for people to connect
with something as huge as genocide, he said.
“It was very abstract and intimidating. Any stories you would see
were about big numbers of people, dead and displaced,” he said.
So Stauring and his small group decided to visit Darfur refugee camps
and collect personal stories of the refugees, to let people see that
each number is a person and they’re just like us.
“Our hope was people would connect with the personal story and feel
a lot more empowered to act,” he said.
For his first trip, Stauring used up all of his vacation time and took
a month off work as a counselor. The group rented a vehicle and went
from refugee camp to camp on the eastern Chad/western Darfur border,
without guides or a United Nations escort.
“It’s a very emotional response just arriving there. You see tents
all around you. You’re feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of it.
Immediately, children start coming to you. There’s not a minute that
you don’t have at least five kids holding your hands,” he said.
The visits are like a rollercoaster, he said. The refugees are warm
and welcoming, often offering the little bit of food and water they
have. But then they share their stories, the horrible things they
have been through.
The Darfur genocide started in 2003. Darfur had always been a
forgotten land, Stauring said, with no infrastructure, education,
roads or hospitals. The people would always ask the government for
help, and they always said no. In 2003, a rebel group attacked a
Sudanese military base.
“Their response was not just to fight the rebels, they systematically
destroyed over 90 percent of the villages in Darfur. They went east
to west and burned down anything that could be burned,” Stauring said.
The group hears a similar story from most refugees. On a normal day,
usually early in the morning, bombs start falling onto the tents and
buildings. The people wake up and run. The Janjaweed, armed militia
hired by the Sudanese government, ride in on horses and trucks and
start shooting. They kill the men first, even young boys who are
considered men. Then they rape the women. The people who survive get
kicked out into the desert and walk for days toward eastern Chad and
set up refugee camps.
For more than seven years, refugees have lived in these conditions,
Stauring said. They are malnourished and often the camps get
re-attacked. Many children die during the journey to the camps.
Just two regular people
For the most part, Stauring said he feels relatively safe when they
are at the refugee camps.
“For Katie-Jay’s first trip, that relativity took another sense,”
he said.
Scott had a similar awakening to Stauring while she was a student at
Portland State University. A woman gave the students a presentation
on the refugee camps in Darfur. She showed a slide of a young girl
whose hair was orange from severe malnourishment. Scott stayed in
her seat instead of going to class and thought back to high school
when she learned about the Holocaust.
“In high school I told myself, ‘If I had been alive then, I would have
been the person who did something, who snuck food or hid someone. I
would not have been someone who stood by,'” she said. And she didn’t.
Scott met Stauring at a Camp Darfur event in Portland, before her
third trip to Darfur. Later, they were married.
During the couple’s first trip together, while staying in a hotel in
Chad, the two got caught in the middle of a coup attempt by Chadian
rebels. Bullets hit just a foot above their heads and they were locked
down in their hotel for hours.
“We’ve been in the middle of bullets flying, things we’ve never signed
up for. We’re not war correspondents, we’re just two regular people
that decided to get involved in this,” Stauring said.
Along the way, it is the people they meet who remind the couple of
how much their presence means. There is Fatma, who was shopping at
a market early one morning with her husband when bombs started falling.
He ran, but the Janjaweed caught him and shot him dead in front of
Fatma. She was able to escape and grab her children. She walked 20
days across the desert to get her children to a refugee camp.
“Her eyes just tell such a story of strength and commitment to keeping
her children safe,” Scott said.
Each time they visit Darfur, the team has a theme. Recently, people
have asked the couple, “It’s still going on? It hasn’t been solved?”
“This time we need to help answer why it’s important to focus on
Darfur, because the genocide is still going on,” Stauring said.
Each day during their trips, the couple posts videos, testimonies from
refugees, photos, and quotes from survivors; they consider themselves
citizen journalists. They continue to try to personalize the genocide
to get the rest of the world to take notice.
The trips are expensive, usually costing around $5,000 per person,
and Stauring admits that they aren’t very good at fundraising. They
rely mostly on grants and their credit cards.
This trip may be their most important.
On Jan. 9, 2011, South Sudan will vote on whether to secede from the
north and form a new nation. The Sudanese government has warned the
people that they might not accept a vote for independence, while the
South Sudanese have warned of violence if it is not accepted. The vote
outcome could lead to one of the deadliest wars ever in the region.
Stauring and Scott hope that the videos, photos and testimonies they
post and the traveling Camp Darfur project will help spur people to
contact their legislators and national leaders.
“We hope people see that every time after these horrible things happen
the world says, ‘Never again.’ And then we let it happen again.
Nothing can be done for these past events. We can only do something
while it’s happening,” Stauring said.
For more information on Stop Genocide Now and the Camp Darfur project,
visit
From: A. Papazian
http://www.tbrnews.com/articles/2010/12/02/manhattan_beach_news/news05.txt
www.stopgenocidenow.org.