Saturday, April 12th
Rock It For Darfur
Yreka High School Student Union
Guitar Hero show-off, karaoke and raffles
All proceeds go to Save Darfur Coalition
1pm - 3pm
call 859-0873 for more info
I’m very stoked about this event! I hope a lot of folks turn out to support this fundraiser for a very worthy cause. It’s really easy to sit back in our living rooms, complain about local politics, gas prices, who won or lost the big game, but when you realize how the people in Darfur are having to live, it really puts things into perspective.
The daily atrocities that occur in the Sudan and Darfur are often so severe you can hardly speak of them out loud. There is no way to relay the situation in Darfur and the Sudan in a simple way. The situation is steeped in multiple layers of corruption, discrimination, and power struggles. What is simple to relay is how the innocent residents have been affected.
When you quote figures like 2.5 million people displaced, it’s easy for your brain to just turn off, as if a number that big doesn’t consist of whole town that doesn’t consist of one family that doesn’t consist of one father, one mother, one child. In the last 5 years over 250 thousand people have been killed. Their deaths are brutal. Many were literally hacked to death with machetes. Many were raped, tortured, then killed. For many they wished they had died a death like this. That may sound melodramatic, but this is the reality. The perpetrators in this conflict prey specifically on the children in order to recruit them into their armies. They come to the villages in the night then capture the children. The children’s first indoctrination into the army is to be forced to murder their own parents. Wrap your mind around this image. Imagine this happening to your own family. The families in Africa are not so different from those in Siskiyou County. They had homes, jobs, dreams, aspirations, families, friends and neighbors. What is happening to these people is pure evil. It must be stopped.
The lack of action by the rest of the world is absolutely impossible to understand, but it comes back to the complexity of the situation. As I said, the levels of corruption are incredible. The answer is going to be found in awareness and putting pressure on our leaders to stand up, speak up and take action immediately.
