Striving to Make a Difference in Darfur, the World
County Students Becoming Activists

By Julie Rasicot
Special to the Washington Post
Thursday, May 15, 2008

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.

Simon and his fellow students also set their sights on the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, with a May 3 die-in, during which 200 students clad in white from Blair and 10 other high schools in Montgomery and Prince George's counties laid on a patch of artificial turf off Ellsworth Drive in downtown Silver Spring.

"We all in domino fashion collapsed on the ground and laid there for about 20 minutes," Simon said.

The group hoped to persuade the commission to adopt a policy that barred investing its pension fund in companies doing business in Sudan. The commission's employee retirement board is planning to divest the half percent of its $600 million investment portfolio with businesses that may be spending in Sudan, said Valerie Berton, a spokesman for the Planning Board.

Simon said he got involved in the Darfur issue "pretty much because I think everybody in Montgomery County is blessed enough to be in one of the most well-educated counties in America. We should all be helping out others who are in need."

At Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville, senior Ben Elkind has been working all year to "try to bring a discussion of race to the forefront in school." He succeeded in getting the topic to be one of the issues during Rocket Talk, regular sessions in which students meet for a discussion monitored by a facilitator.

As president of the Montgomery County Regional Student Government Association, Elkind also has been working with other students to draft plans to address school policies that may discriminate against students.

The students plan to meet this month with several community superintendents to talk about expanding the school system's study circle program to all high schools. The program helps "schools address the challenges posed by cultural and racial differences by bringing together parents, teachers, and students from different backgrounds," according to the school system's Web site.

"An honest and open dialogue about race is something that is much needed," Elkind said.

For Mira Fleming, a junior at Albert Einstein High School in Silver Spring, child marriage in countries such as Mali was an issue that she just couldn't ignore. A member of School Girls Unite, a local nonprofit group promoting education for girls worldwide, Fleming became alarmed when she learned this year about the physical and social harm that girls suffer when they are forced to marry at young ages.

"It kind of freaked me out," she said. "That millions of people experience this, kind of put me on edge."

So, with the help of fellow members of School Girls Unite at Einstein, Fleming created a video petition of Einstein students who are against child marriage. The students also collected 400 signatures from students at Einstein and A. Mario Loiederman Middle School. Some traveled to Capitol Hill to show the video to aides for some of the county's congressional representatives to garner support for the pending International Child Marriage Prevention and Assistance Act.

Einstein junior Georgia Handforth said she got involved when she offered to help edit the video petition and soon found herself lobbying Congress.

"Here we are, sitting around in school, saying 'Oh, we work so hard. I hate it,' " she said. "But there are people out there who just can't" get an education.