September 2011
1 post
"Let's Move!"
Dear Friends:
“Let’s move!”
That’s what our young refugee friend, Rahma, says when he’s acting as our guide inside the camp that has now been his home for eight years. Once he knows what we need to accomplish, it becomes his mission to help us, and he does not want to waste any time.
When we first met Rahma, he told us that he wants to be president of Sudan, so...
August 2011
1 post
To Do:
On a busy Wednesday, five things to do:
Join. The END IMPUNITY campaign has launched. Please check it out. END IMPUNITY: A campaign to stop mass atrocities going unpunished, seek prosecution of the perpetrators, restore dignity to the victims, and provide healing to the affected communities.
Read. A new blog post by i-ACT teammate, Jordan, who wonders if anyone is listening: A Chance...
June 2011
3 posts
End Impunity →
a campaign to stop mass atrocities going unpunished, seek prosecution of the perpetrators, restore dignity to the victims, and provide healing to the affected communities
Host a Support Sudan Home Gathering
“Don’t you just want to bring them home?” I’m often asked that when people see pictures and videos of me with children in the Darfuri refugee camps. I do bring them home with me, in so many ways. They are what keep me going every day in this often-depressing work. As any father would say, I love them all, but Guisma has a special place in my heart, and now you have a chance to Bring Guisma...
May 2011
17 posts
5 tags
WatchGuisma’s eyes have seen what no child should ever see. Her home was destroyed. Brothers and sisters died. Most of her life lived as a refugee, with little hope for a safe and nurturing future — but Guisma still smiles. Guisma is Darfur, bombed and oppressed — but still beautiful and resilient. You have the opportunity to participate in creating a better future for her and all of Darfur. By...
WatchGuisma’s eyes have seen what no child should ever see. Her home was destroyed. Brothers and sisters died. Most of her life lived as a refugee, with little hope for a safe and nurturing future — but Guisma still smiles. Guisma is Darfur, bombed and oppressed — but still beautiful and resilient. You have the opportunity to participate in creating a better future for her and all of Darfur. By...
4 tags
3 tags
April 2011
11 posts
6 tags
WatchGuisma’s eyes have seen what no child should ever see. Her home was destroyed. Brothers and sisters died. Most of her life lived as a refugee, with little hope for a safe and nurturing future — but Guisma still smiles. Guisma is Darfur, bombed and oppressed — but still beautiful and resilient. You have the opportunity to participate in creating a better future for her and all of Darfur. By...
Horizon
There are so many challenges and obstacles for the refugees to have full, healthy, and dignified lives. The obvious one, they should not be refugees. That status is to give them protection under international law, but it is also a limitation, with a horizon that is only as far as the camp’s boundaries.
There are also so many opportunities: the leader that will not give up; the child that wants...
Gabriel is Thinking Food
Posted by Gabriel on March 30th, 2011
For the last nine days, I’ve been going to refugee camps where an overwhelming percentage of them go without proper nutrition, especially the children–during crucial development years. But, I’m going to now whine about my diet during this trip. I can’t take it anymore.
For breakfast, at around 7:30am, I eat a granola bar (140 calories), a dry fruit bar (50...
March 2011
18 posts
Can you hear me now?
Posted by Gabriel on March 29th, 2011
Back home, I’m connected at all times. My Blackberry is attached to my hand. I don’t think it could fall out, even if I tried to drop it. My Mac is control central for all my activities and communication. E-mails, blogs, tweets, Facebook posts, and many more forms of reaching out and listening in are almost non-stop. On a regular basis, I connect through...
Join us tomorrow for a live School Assembly with... →
A Dream Home
My dream i-ACT Expedition has always been to come to Eastern Chad, to these refugee camps, and help the refugees pack and go back to a peaceful home, Darfur. In my nightmares, I never thought I would be here for my 10th Expedition, with no packing day in sight.
During my first few trips, the refugees themselves seemed fairly certain that the conflict would be resolved, more or less, and...
Mariam
We met Mariam on her way to the wadi, the river that runs on one side of the camp. She and her niece, Hawa, were carrying buckets and a digging tool to go collect mud for the building of a latrine at their home. We later found out that Hawa was also carrying her little baby girl, just four months old.
Mariam told me that this was not the first time doing this run; they had come and gone many...
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Returning
Today I met Mia Farrow — not the actress, the refugee Mia Farrow. She can’t be more than four years old. Her older sister, another beautiful girl just as Mia, is Susan — yes, like Susan Rice. They are both daughters of one of the camp’s Umbdas, or camp leaders. Umbda has seven children, and today I will ask him what the names are for the other five. I can’t wait!
We met Umbda on our last trip,...
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Inscriptions
Posted on Friday, March 25, 2011 in Expedition Reports, iAct 10
I’ve been collecting images of chalk drawings from the walls of Djabal’s mud brick classrooms. Some kids use them to practice their Arabic or English and sometimes even math. But mostly, the graffiti is of people, animals, football players and some scenes of violence. The walls speak of the children’s curiosity, fear...
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WatchCamp Djabal has become so familiar to followers of i-ACT. Here we see improvements made in education–uniforms, cement buildings with built-in blackboards, and desks! The team also updates CommKit with MacBooks! They deliver Kindles and voice dictionaries to help the kids learn more English. Watch the video and open yourself to what is Camp Djabal.
Breathing Sand
I have a cold which includes a headache, and I’m feeling miserable in one hundred degrees plus weather, and I’m breathing this fine sand with every step I take, and then we make it to Adef’s house. His two youngest boys, Abdelmouni and Gabriel, also are sick and surrounded by suffocating heat and breathing the fine sand around them and fighting a losing battle against flies, and this is their...
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Hot Djabal
Not many people could be seen walking around the camp. The temperature was above 100 degrees, and it does not make sense to be out being pounded by a sun that is so much brighter than where I live, sunny Southern California. It was good to back at Camp Djabal, where we have so many friends.
We talked education and politics with Abdulaziz and Sulieman, had a meeting with camp leaders from all...
6 tags
The Governor
Posted on Wednesday, March 23, 2011 in Expedition Reports, iAct 10
The Governor of the Region de Dila, a large area in Eastern Chad around the town of Goz Beida, drinks Coke Zero. I was lucky that there was more than one in the tray that one of his men brought to the large gathering of officials for what we had thought was going to be a quick formality, as the time I met him in December. If...
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Closer
Travel days are the most stressful. Airports in Chad are strange worlds. They are barely connected to the outside “real” world, and what information does make it through to them gets distorted, no matter how straight forward it seemed before.
We don’t make it easy on ourselves, though. We bring three times the allowed weight, made up of soccer balls, t-shirts, e-readers...
First Steps
Busy N’Djamena day for the team. Busy and good. The streets of this capital city look so different from earlier trips. On my first trip in 2005, NDJ had somewhat of a feeling of the wild wild west, African style.
Very few streets were paved, and you saw armed men everywhere. It was also dark at night. Driving from the airport to the hotel was an eerie ride through blinding shadows,...
WatchGuisma’s Story