Samohi students hope to empower others through knowledge
SAMOHI The Darfurian genocide, seemingly worlds away, touched the high school community on Tuesday during a day-long campus demonstration where students experienced first hand the atrocities, the dire living conditions and slowly dissipating hope that accompany the deadly conflict in the Sudan.
The Human Rights Watch Student Task Force at Santa Monica High School set up a series of tents in the science quad on campus, simulating a refugee camp, each tent dedicated to educating students about a specific topic related to the Darfurian genocide.
While the genocide, which has seen more than 200,000 deaths since 2003, is thousands of miles away, the organizers with the Student Task Force hope that knowledge will translate into power, believing that change can be effected by the youth population.
It’s a conflict that club co-founders Francis Ahn and Fanny Ballantine-Himberg believe high school students know very little about, their classroom education limited to the Holocaust, Rwandan and Armenian genocides.
“When people hear Darfur, they don’t know what it is,” Ballantine-Himberg, a junior who will graduate in June, said.
Each of the five tents addressed a different element related to the Darfurian conflict — the first tent educating about Camp Farchana where 22,000 people have died since 2004; the second about what a refugee would eat as compared to the average American; a third about child soldiers forced into the conflict; a fourth about past genocides; and the fifth on water rationing.
The tents have been traveling to different high schools across the country thanks to Gabriel Stauring, the director of StopGenocideNow.org. Stauring, who advised Samohi students on their refugee camp demonstration, has taken several trips to Camp Farchana and could bring the tents with him on a future excursion.
Among the tents that seemed to have a lasting impression on the students were the ones that focused on the disparity between the amount and quality of food and water that Darfurians receive as compared to Americans.
The average American consumes about 2,200 calories as compared to the average refugee who gets just 1,000 calories, according to junior Brianna Blumenthal-Cohen. The demonstration included a tasting of a popular dish in Darfur, a pasty concoction made from flour, water and vegetable oil. The dish was displayed on the table alongside a plate of brownies, pasta and McDonald’s fast food.
“It is not a balanced diet,” Blumenthal- Cohen said.
Refugees, on average, only have access to about one gallon of water a day, while three to five times that amount goes down the drain in one flush of an American toilet.
“The club’s main goal is to get students our age active and aware of what is going on in the world,”Esme Levy, a Samohi freshman and STF member, said. “If students knew what was going on, they definitely have the power to make it stop.”
Amy Marczewski, who works with the Human Rights Watch office in Los Angeles and serves as an advisor to the Samohi STF, said that students have actually made a substantial impact toward ending the conflict in Darfur, noting that a group of students at UCLA started a divestment campaign and got the University of California to divest their funds from Sudanese companies.
“The way young people have made a difference is paying attention and making other people pay attention,” Marczewski said. “That is really how human rights abuses will be stopped, is by not tolerating them.”
Several classes did a walk through the tents, some students appearing surprised as to the severity of the conflict.
Orli Robin, a student in the freshman seminar, said she knew that the Darfur genocide was taking place but was surprised by what she learned.
“I didn’t realize it was this harsh,” she said. “A lot of people think it was just the Holocaust and that it would never happen again, but it is and it’s happening right now.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on April 16, 2008. Read the original PDF.