Huffington Post recently posted this article by i-ACT’s Executive Director Gabriel Stauring:
“We are ready to fight with you,” a young Darfuri refugee living in Chad tells us in early June, 2014. His homeland, Darfur, has again exploded with violence. Actually, the violence has not stopped since 2003, when the world first started paying attention to that isolated region of Sudan. It was declared “genocide” by the U.S. government in 2004, after hundreds of thousands were killed and millions displaced. The chaos and destruction continued for ten years, yet the world moved on. In 2013, there was a spike in violence, with approximately 460,000 people displaced. In 2014, another 215,000. Chad, Sudan’s neighbor to the west, is now home to over 300,000 Darfuri refugees, and more are arriving every day, at the same time that conditions and food insecurity in the camps have become more dire and extreme. Mahamat, the young man that is “ready to fight,” is one of the earlier arrivals, having lived in one of the 12 original camps since he was 14-years-old.