Children’s coalition takes on Darfur
By Ramnath Subramanian
March 24, 2008 — Every time I think about the suffering children of Africa, one indelible image springs to the forefront of my thoughts: Kevin Carter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph in which a lone emaciated child crawls toward some potential shelter while a vulture waits close at hand, projecting an ominous presence.
Such images are quotidian in many parts of Africa and, stitched together, they form a tapestry that stirs the soul to outrage, and then to feelings of helplessness. At the zenith of his fame, Carter succumbed to the latter force, and chose to end his life. To paraphrase Wordsworth, the world, especially the iniquitous aspects of it, had been too much with him, and he simply could not deal with reality any longer.
Last school year, I talked to my students about the genocide taking place in Darfur. From the conversations that ensued, the Children’s Coali tion for World Peace, CCWP, was born. This initiative is entirely the work of students, for I am a firm believer that children must look into the well of knowledge not with their teacher’s eyes, but with their own.
Members of the CCWP continue in their youthful effort to bring Darfur to their community’s consciousness. Their strategy has been twofold: to directly petition the government for help, and to seek the conduits of media to spread the news.
On both fronts, the task has not been an easy one. Last year, coalition members addressed City Council and asked Mayor John Cook to sign their petition, which asked for governmental engagement in Darfur. His signature, added to several hundred that the children had collected, would have carried some weight when the petition was sent to the President of the United States. Mayor Cook did not respond to the request.
However, the disappointment that the children felt was assuaged when they got a reply from the White House.
Attempts to garner the media’s attention have also met with minimal success. I have told my students not to become discouraged.
“The age demanded an image/ Of its accelerated grimace,” the poet Ezra Pound wrote.
Today, those images are being supplied by Paris Hilton and people of her ilk.
However, even where the landscape is fuliginous, one comes across swathes of sunshine. On March 10, eight current members of the CCWP showed up at Eastwood Knolls at the cusp of dawn and boarded a bus to travel to the West Side of the city to appear on the Paul Strelzin radio talk show.
The experience was unique for the children. During the conversation, which moved from banter to seriousness as effortlessly as a child skipping rope, Strelz, in his inimitable way, raised the image of children growing up in troubled parts of Africa without toys and stuffed animals. If the coalition members would give up some of their toys and organize a collection on campus, Strelz said that he would ship them to Darfur.
Juxtaposed, the images of stuffed animals and starving children may seem incongruous, but not when viewed symbolically. The toys carry the message that American children care, and they offer the promise, albeit a silent one, of a better world to come as these children move toward adulthood and a wider embrace of humanitarian goals.
Ramnath Subramanian, a sixth-grade science teacher at Eastwood Knolls School in El Paso, writes often for the El Paso Times on educational topics. E-mail address: [email protected]