i-ACT team members Gabriel, James, and Estelle depart on Saturday March 19th for i-ACT’s tenth trip to the Darfuri refugee camps on the Chad-Darfur border! Buky Williams, Coordinator of the Darfur Dream Team Sister Schools Program, will join i-ACT for their two week journey.
The team’s primary trip goal is to deliver the second CommKit to Camp Goz Amir and check in on how our students and teachers are fairing with their kit in Camp Djabal. Check out this video of them in December 2010!
CommKit is a two-way satellite-based communication system that allows refugees who are completely isolated with little-to-no infrastructure to connect via an online social network with U.S. schools. By the end of this trip 30 U.S. schools will be connected with our friends in the camps!
The Darfur Dream Team and i-ACT will be facilitating a live School Assembly on Tuesday March 29, 7am PST/10am PST. It will be posted here and at www.iactivism.org/live. Whether you are a student, teacher, or an interested community member you can meet the Darfuri students and interact with them through facebook, twitter (#askdarfur), and a chatbox during the Assembly. We will be live for approximately 30 minutes. This is a great opportunity to have the Assembly on a projector in a classroom or have individual students participating at your school’s computer lab! Contact ktj@stopgenocidenow.org if you have questions about this.
i-ACT will also be delivering ten Kindle eReaders to primary and secondary schools in the two camps they visit. They will be charged with the CommKit solar panel/battery system that our engineering guru Eric created! Thanks to community support, we loaded them with classics in 
French, English, and Arabic. The students have been asking for books ever since our first trip in 2005 but it’s almost logistically impossible to bring them enough to quench their thirst. This trip we will test whether Kindles are a viable option. Imagine the eReaders in the hands of thousands of Darfuri students–they can literally hold the power of their future in two hands!
One of the most important things that our team will do in the camps will be to simply connect with the people. They will be posting 
Expedition reports daily–photos, videos, journals, quotes–that tell the story of the people of Darfur. We will hand out cameras as part of iOnGround and we will be able to see the refugees’ lives through their eyes. The voice of the refugee and their hopes for the future, and thoughts on peace and justice, is all too often left out of our conversations. i-ACT offers a chance to bring their voice back in.
I invite you to join us on i-ACT Expedition 10. Tell five friends. Post this message on facebook. Re-tweet something Gabriel writes. Most importantly tune back in during the next two weeks and listen to what the refugees themselves have to say.
peace, Katie-Jay
4 replies on “i-ACT10 Team Leaves Saturday March 19!”
Thanks for the excellent overview of #10 trip to camps, KTJ!
I will be following every day and hopeful we can figure out a way for STF to join the ranks of schools supporting your school program in the future. Our STF plan is to focus on human right to education next fall, utilizing HRW reports on access to education globally and the work of STF in Los Angeles. Eager to learn if the Kindle e-readers work. Waiting for your next communication and sending deep good wishes,
Pam
Thanks, Pam. Yes, we’ll be sending reports on implementing our Refuge(e)-Reader program. We’re excited but also know that there will be challenges. Looking forward to catching up sometime soon!
This is wonderful work. Very inspiring. Since the connectivity for Facebook and Twitter will be available, I wondered if you had considered using a web conferencing service. Internet conferencing has been increasingly linking classrooms around the world, as covered, for example in this article – Web Conferencing in Education.
So how did the activity go? All of your sincere concerns for these people are truly inspiring. You are all wonderful. Helping to teach kids in a place where progress isn’t obviously present is without a doubt a noble act.