beyond magazine

Sunday: Global Day for Darfur

Here's a bunch of college students in Alberta who undertook a 300 km walk to raise funds and awareness for Darfur. Go ahead and donate money for every time the thought "Kids these days!" has crossed your mind. Wouldn't it be great if they just got a bunch of money from random places around the world? It would make them want to keep doing things like this. You can donate directly through War Child. Go ahead. Nothing else to see here.

Google Earth: Darfur

ushmm + Google Earth

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has joined with Google in an unprecedented online mapping initiative. Crisis in Darfur enables more than 200 million Google Earth users worldwide to visualize and better understand the genocide currently unfolding in Darfur, Sudan. The Museum has assembled content photographs, data, and eyewitness testimony from a number of sources that are brought together for the first time in Google Earth.

Crisis in Darfur is the first project of the Museum's Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative that will over time include information on potential genocides allowing citizens, governments, and institutions to access information on atrocities in their nascent stages and respond.

               

Not just a soldier

I attended the funeral of Captain Nichola Goddard today. She is Canada's first female soldier to be killed in combat.  She died last week after an ambush in Afghanistan. The funeral was open to the public and I just felt that it was something I wanted to be a part of. The three minute clips on the evening news can never give you the sense of something like this.

You can find out more about Captain Goddard here.

The full texts of the eulogies are also online: 

I have been thinking a lot about fate lately. It was such an accident of birth that we ended up where we did when we did. That we are where we are now, with the choices that we have available to us. It seems to me that we have such a burden of responsibility to make the world a better place for those who were born into far worse circumstances. It is more than donating money to charities – it is taking action and trying to make things better. You have both shown me that throughout my life – but here, I realize it more than ever before.

My current job and role in Afghanistan is part of that – but it is more the non-governmental organizations that come later. They are the ones that really make the difference. I like to think that my being here means they will be able to come that much sooner, and operate more freely. I will be looking for more opportunities to volunteer in Wainwright and to really try to make a difference. It is very humbling to be here, part of something so much bigger than myself.

Love always, 

Nichola 

 

Darfur Drawn

The Conflict in Darfur: Drawn Through Children's Eyes

On mission along the border of Chad and Darfur, Human Rights Watch researchers gave children notebooks and crayons to keep them occupied while they spoke with the children’s parents. Without any instruction or guidance, the children drew scenes from their experiences of the war in Darfur: the attacks by the Janjaweed, the bombings by Sudanese government forces, the shootings, the burning of entire villages, and the flight to Chad.