Category: i-ACT 5: June 10 – 22, 2008
Follow Gabriel and Katie-Jay from SGN on their return trip to refugee camps on the Chad – Darfur border to visit with the surviving victims of this genocide and hear their stories. They will be joined by former STAND Leadership Committee members, Scott Warren and Colin O’Brien. Join the community, become an i-ACTivist for Darfur.
What I Learned
So, by now, you know that we weren’t able to visit any refugee camps. To echo the chorus, obviously it’s extremely disappointing. Colin and I were both looking forward to meeting the people that we, and thousands of students, had been working for, and bringing their stories back to inspire and inform our activism. But, […]
Get Involved!
Here’s a summary of all the actions from i-ACT 5 (and more!). Keep the pressure on and strong! Locally Tell 5 Friends (or more!) about i-ACT: Send them to our website and send them a story of one of our friends This coming weekend, bring the faces and stories of our friends to your place […]
And now the Rain.
It’s a quiet early morning in N’Djamena. It’s not the eerie, bad, thick quiet that we could almost feel in February. There are fishermen out in the river, moving oh so slowly. The moon, looking full, is hanging low over on the Cameroon side. We made it to the capital, leaving the east and all […]
Colin’s Journal
It looks like there’s no longer a chance that we can make it out to refugee camps this time. After spending so much time getting permits, talking to officials, and waiting for flights that never left, it’s frustrating to see it slip from our fingers when we came close so many times. I’m trying not […]
Commitment and ACTION
At the end of writing this I realized I had started a short diatribe, and so if you don’t get to the end, I thought I would add the punch line here: Even though i-ACT5 did not make it into the camps, PLEASE, for all the innocent civilians caught in this crisis, CONTINUE EACH DAY […]
Hello friends: Following on the theme for World Refugee Day (June 20), we decided to take on that general theme for our trip: Protection. We were to focus on what protection means to the millions of displaced, and, when visiting the camps, show how the refugees feel about protection in the camps and back home. […]
Edit: Originally sent to our mailing list on 16 June, 2008. Hello Friends and Familia: We are starting our second week in Chad, and for the first time in five trips we might not be able to visit a refugee camp. When we left camp Kounoungo this past January, our friend Yakoub told us that […]
The rebels have left Goz Beida and UNHCR has resumed flights to the area. All 230 international and national staff members of NGOs stationed in Goz Beida spent last night safely at the EUFOR compound. These same troops, mostly Irish and Danish, are also responsible for protecting the almost 16,000 Darfur refugees who fled their […]
We had cell phone service early in the morning but the signal went dead well before noon. Our friend and translator, Bouba, has been in Goz Beida since Friday, going up with our car, supplies, and extra luggage, to supposedly meet us there when we flew in. Of course, we have not been able to […]