Global service: impacting the student experience and the world
Geno means people. Cide means killing. Together they become genocide — the intent to deliberately destroy a people. It’s an issue that seems far away for most Americans but some Minnesota private college students are addressing it head-on.
Students packaged food destined for Darfur at the Building Bridges conference
On March 8 at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter. 1,200 students and others attended the sold-out Building Bridges conference, “Genocide awareness: How will history judge us?” Building Bridges is an annual student-initiated and student-led event on global diversity at Gustavus. This year’s conference aimed to give students a means to defeat the notion that one person can’t make a difference.
Gustavus students Asitha Jayawardena and Jing Han Soh applied to be co-chairs of the conference last spring. When selected, they chose the genocide theme because they felt that it is an issue often overlooked in the U.S. “Not many people know about what has gone on in Darfur and we made it our mission to tell them,” Jayawardena said.
The two formed a large committee that really came together as a group. “It’s been one of the best things to happen to me at Gustavus,” Jayawardena said. “It allowed me to excel as a leader and spread awareness about a cause I am very passionate about.”
The conference keynote speaker was Paul Ruseabagina of “Hotel Rwanda” movie fame. Ruseabagina shared his story about the 1994 mass slaughter in Rwanda with the goal of preventing future genocide events like it. “For him, the situation at Darfur reminded him exactly how it was in Rwanda,” said Soh. “He reminded us that history WILL judge us and urged students to pressure the government to take an active role in the genocide issue.”
More than 250 conference-goers also participated in a Kids Against Hunger packaging event. The nonprofit organization uses volunteers to package a nutritious rice-soy casserole that they distribute through relief organizations. The 48,000 meals packaged at the event are destined for Darfur.
“We are trying to show students that they can do something,” said Jayawardena. “A lot of people were very impressed with the conference as a whole and I believe we thoroughly got our message across.”
Genocide Intervention Network
Another conference workshop was led by former University of St. Thomas professor Ellen Kennedy (now the outreach coordinator at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies who leads the work of the Minnesota chapter of Genocide Intervention Network — or GI-Net). Jenny Lê was one of the St. Thomas students who worked with Kennedy to start the Minnesota GI-Net chapter and currently serves as its president. The organization educates people about where genocide is happening, raises money and does legislative advocacy. It also supports divestment in companies complicit with genocide, through the Sudan divestment movement .
Students worked at a table for the Genocide Intervention Network at the University of St. Thomas activities fair
Lê says that a Rwandan refugee’s story helped motivate her to get involved with GI-Net. “Her entire family was killed in Rwanda, but she had to keep going. She now tells people, ‘it is your responsibility.’ Her story moves me every time,” Lê said. Last year Lê and Heather Schommer, another St. Thomas student, went to Washington D.C. to lobby for sanctions against the Sudan government and divestment in companies that indirectly support genocide.
As part of the divestment effort, GI-Net rates legislators on their support for anti-genocide legislation and these Darfur Scores stimulated some legislators to take action to end conflict.” Lê reports that staffers for Congressman Jim Ramstad and Senator Amy Klobuchar have called the GI-Net office to find out how to improve their Darfur Scores.
The chapter receives so many speaking requests that Lê said they decided to develop an educational presentation that could be used by anyone. The resulting “Upstanders” uses the words of real-life people and is meant to be presented by one or more readers. “These people weren’t bystanders — they actually changed outcomes,” Lê said. “Their stories help educate and teach others how to advocate effectively.”
One voice is that of Brian Steidle, a U.S. Marines captain in 2004: “When I was in Darfur and a witness to genocide…I believed that they’d have the Marines on the ground in a week and this would be over. That was nearly four years ago.” Another voice is Mark Hanis whose four grandparents were holocaust survivors. “I was determined not to sit idly by while this tragedy was happening in Darfur. My friends and I formed an organization called the Genocide Intervention Fund to raise money to support the African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur.”
Involvement in GI-Net has been extremely beneficial for the students involved, according to Lê. While working to prevent genocide, students have honed their public speaking skills and gotten a real sense of what civic duty means. “And we now know what’s going on in the Congo, Sudan and the world,” she said.