never again

I was searching through old emails when I came across this plea I sent to my address book. I wrote this in November of 2006. At the time, I was convinced that we would resolve the issue in Darfur imminently. More than a year later, it boggles the mind that the issues raised in this email are still of major humanitarian concern today.

Dear Friends,

As we head into the holiday season, we take this time to look back at the past year, or the past several years, to count our blessings and be thankful for all that we have. This year, I hope that we can extend that reflection beyond our immediate lives, and think also of our brothers and sisters around the world who aren’t quite so lucky as we are.

As you know, there is a crisis currently engulfing the African continent, in the western region of Darfur, Sudan. Unfortunately, as is often the case, the victims of crisis tend to be innocent civilians - mothers, wives, children, grandparents. In Darfur, mortality rates are estimated at 5 times above the emergency benchmark, the majority of which are directly related to the fighting.
Even more alarming, surviving victims have been forced to uproot their lives and flee, resulting in massive amounts of displacement. It is estimated that approximately 3 million people have been forced to migrate since the start of hostilities in 2003. Some of these people have managed to find their way to neighboring Chad, where they currently live in refugee camps which offer some measure of protection. But many are still in Sudan as Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) and are still vulnerable to attack. And now the violence has begun to spill into the rest of the Sahel, threatening to destabilize the region.

While not an official declaration, the Government of Sudan’s focus on the non-Arab African population of Darfur has elements of genocide. There is a pattern of attacks on this specific population; men are disproportionately targeted for murder, and women and girls are systematically targeted for massive, widespread rape. In 1948, the world promised that never again would we allow genocide; we have failed in that promise twice (in Bosnia and Rwanda) since then, and we are failing again now.

The African Union has deployed a woefully inadequate peace-keeping force with limited powers. More than that needs to be done. The UN Security Council has declared that a scaled-up UN Peacekeeping Force is necessary, but they have been slow to act due to threats from the President of Sudan to meet these troops in force.
And here is where we can help. I have attached a letter (based on one created by Physicians for Human Rights) that you can send to President Bush requesting that we act now to save the lives of those at risk in this conflict.

There are 4 ways to send this letter:
by email: comments@whitehouse.gov
by fax: 202-456-2461
by phone: 202-456-1111
by snail mail: address is on the letter
The last is by far the most effective, but any one will do. In addition, if you could forward this email to others you know, that would be helpful as well.

To paraphrase one of the most-respected voices in humans rights, we are all we have. If we don’t act as a global community to ensure the safety, security, freedom and livelihood of all people, no one else will. The responsibility is ours alone.

Thank you for your help.

All the best,
Deepali

For more information, please visit: http://www.phrusa.org/research/sudan/ . I strongly recommend watching the brief video entitled “Darfur: Lives Destroyed.”

a call to your conscience

Save Darfur is taking on Fidelity. I’m not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, massive divestiture of funds helped end apartheid in South Africa. But that required the support of several Western governments. Not going to happen in Sudan, where China is making a tidy profit off oil. So is SD wasting their time?

So, I guess I will look into divesting my funds from Fidelity. Which also means taking a long, hard look at all my other investments. Where are you invested?

you don’t have to live like a refugee…

I forgot the update on the rations, so here we go, a bit late.

The lentils turned out great. No problems there (I cheated and used my pressure cooker, but I didn’t have t0). I added some basic spices - mustard seeds, cumin, coriander, fenugreek, a little chili pepper. Made a nice stew.

The corn meal… that was a different story. Round 1 was “mealie pap”, something similar to polenta. It was bland, but not inedible in small quantities. And it was filling - I only ate half my allocation. Round 2 was porridge. I added cinnamon and cardamom and a bit of clove. I also boiled the coffee in a pan with a bit of sugar. Not bad, except I forgot to turn the stove off when I left the room, and the porridge ended up all over place (including in the coffee). I cleaned everything up, and had the non-contaminated bits for breakfast. Not so bad, but certainly not what I would want to eat for days on end.

Final thoughts? Ever so grateful for the accident of birth/twist of fate that ensures that I will never have to endure living conditions like that, and even more determined to work towards preventing/eliminating the situations that cause other people to have to.

what was that about the love of food…

So here is this weekend’s assignment for class: cook and eat a day’s worth of rations, and then report back.  While I like the hands-on approach to understanding refugee health, I’m not so ecstatic about the 400 grams of maize flour and the chunk of sweet potato sitting on my countertop.  At least I got coffee….  it’s nice to know refugees get to maintain some measure of comfort.

I haven’t cooked it up yet, but I have a few ideas.  Generally speaking, maize flour is used to make porridge (to which sugar and oil are added for palatability and weight gain in children).  That just sounds revolting to me, so I’m going to try for something polenta-esque, or maybe even some corn tortillas.   The sweet potato will go begrudgingly into the lentil stew I concoct (with the 200 g of lentils included).

I should submit this to Heidi at 101 Cookbooks and see what she would come up with.