Striving to Make a Difference in Darfur, the World

County Students Becoming Activists

When Northwest High School senior Maria Sebastian and her friends became aware last year of the ongoing genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan, they decided they had to do something.

"We just realized this is happening now," Sebastian said of their discussions about Darfur. "We're sitting at lunch, and people are being killed right now."

"We just realized it was so much worse than it was portrayed in the news, and we weren't doing enough," senior Molly Mazuk said.

So Sebastian, Mazuk and their friend Hiral Padia, also a senior, formed Students for Change in Darfur, one of Northwest's first human-rights advocacy chapters, to raise awareness about the genocide.

The girls are not alone in their efforts to get involved in social issues. Across Montgomery County, high school students and some middle-schoolers are becoming social and political activists, promoting issues such as stopping genocide in Darfur, protecting the environment and saving energy, in addition to raising money for charitable causes.

Students often organize through clubs formed at schools or through student government associations. Others work with local advocacy organizations.

At Northwest, Students for Change in Darfur began by handing out fliers and holding a Genocide Awareness Day, during which members visited classrooms and gave students photos and written testimony from genocide victims. In addition to organizing a march in Washington last year that drew 500 participants, the group also held a jogathon March 14 that raised about $6,300 from 150 participants. An April 18 benefit concert featuring nine high school bands raised another $800.

On May 2, the group presented a $7,146 donation to the Student Anti-Genocide Coalition, the student-led division of the D.C.-based nonprofit Genocide Prevention Network.

The student coalition coordinator, John Bagwell, said the money would go toward providing protection and helping people trapped in refugee camps.

"If every adult community group followed your lead, we'd see a different result," he told the students, noting that the donation was the largest his organization had received from a student group.

Montgomery Blair High School senior Ben Simon also has focused his school's Social Action Club on the crisis in Darfur. In September, the club organized a dinner that raised $7,500, which the group donated to the nonprofit Save Darfur Coalition, a national alliance of more than 180 humanitarian and advocacy organizations, and Doctors Without Borders, an independent international medical humanitarian organization.

Simon said he also spearheaded a campaign to persuade the county to divest in companies doing business in Sudan. The County Council recently approved legislation prohibiting the employees retirement system from investing in certain businesses operating in Sudan.