Huntington Beach High School Hosts Rally for Darfur
By Kristen Ryan
On March 11, 2010, students at Huntington Beach High School in California held a rally on campus to raise awareness about the crisis in Darfur. The event, which was sponsored by the school’s Operation Save Darfur Club, featured a speech and book signing by the authors of They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky, a memoir by three Sudanese “Lost Boys” who fled to the United States to escape the violence in Darfur. The rally was part of a larger “Week for Darfur” series held in collaboration with the HB Reads program and Orange County for Darfur.
The Operation Save Darfur Club, which hosted the rally, began at Huntington Beach High School or HBHS in 2007 and now comprises about forty students. Adam Joe, a 17-year-old junior at HBHS, first learned about the genocide in Darfur from a Model United Nations class taken his freshman year. “I immediately became horrified and felt compelled to take action,” said Joe. The next year, Joe joined Operation Save Darfur, and today he serves as the club’s president and a Regional Coordinator for the Sister Schools Program.
Last fall, the members of Operation Save Darfur adopted a school in eastern Chad through the Darfur Dream Team’s Sister Schools Program. The students at Huntington Beach High School have since raised funds to provide school supplies and teachers’ salaries for the Obama School in Chad. In the future, the club hopes to raise enough money to build a permanent schoolhouse that would replace the makeshift structures currently serving as classrooms.
