Darfur: Action is Character
Blue Girl, Red State (via Kevin Drum) tells the story of a friend who just came back from serving Sudanese refugees in Chad:
What she dealt with daily goes beyond the pale...beyond the nightmares of most people; Children with all four limbs hacked off right above the knee or below the elbow. Twelve year olds who died in childbirth after being gang-raped by the Janjaweed. Women who gave birth to rape-babies who were then cast out by their families for shaming the family name, leaving only one avenue of survival for themselves and their children after the camps: Prostitution.
What is fucking her up is the desperation, and the fact that she worked herself to death for over a month, and she still didn’t really save anyone. Now that she’s gone, it’s like she was never there. Even the ones she helped keep alive, she didn’t save. You try dealing with that reality.
And women are the preponderance of victims. Men do not leave the villages to go to the countryside to gather firewood and other necessary items of sustenance. Women venture out, even though every time they leave their villages, they are at horrific risk of being beaten and raped and disfigured. The reason they go instead of the men? The women are only attacked, the men are killed.
One thousand or so international aid workers are in Sudan and Chad. Those in Sudan are increasingly targeted by militias. Even those not targeted battle emotional exhaustion like the woman described above. They need our prayers, their organizations need our financial support, the American television media need to at least pretend like they care, and NATO needs to think about sending peacekeeping forces.
For starters.
Blue Girl, Red State finishes her post with this:
If you want to do something to show your support, give a few bucks to Darfur action by Amnesty International, or to Doctors Without Borders, or to the Quakers medical missions. Or the Red Cross, for cryin’ out loud! If you do, leave a post and we’ll let her know about your action.
And if you can’t donate money, that’s no hinderance to contributing to the common good. Just look around you and see something that needs to be done; be it picking up a candy wrapper in a parking lot or carrying an old ladies purchases to her car. And then step up and do it.
Update: 60 Minutes will be doing a segment about Darfur on Sunday night.