It couldn't have been a much bigger day for Georgetown: the president at his first Hoyas game, its first sellout this season at the Verizon Center, a crowd wearing "We Are Georgetown'' T-shirts, the 200th win for coach John Thompson III and the launch of an initiative for Darfur.

Duke and Georgetown are using their game to launch an initiative to raise money for children in refugee camps in the Darfur region of Sudan.

The Georgetown basketball team may have won against Duke on Jan. 30 in front of a capacity crowd that included President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, but students from both schools have put aside rivalry to become partners for a common cause -- Darfur refugees.

Through the Darfur Dream Team’s Sister Schools Program, students from the two universities are raising money for two schools located among the 12 refugee camps in nearby eastern Chad.

Saturday's Big East/ACC showdown between Georgetown and Duke will have a house full of special guests to announce Georgetown and Duke's new partnership with the Darfur Dream Team, an initiative to raise money for Darfuri refugee camps in Chad. Among the stars in attendance, the one with the most body guards will probably be President Obama, our nation's number 1 basketball fan.

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Refugees in parts of Sudan's strife-torn Darfur region are desperately
short of food and water due to a lack of rain, and problems have been
exacerbated in at least one area by Khartoum's expulsion of aid groups,
officials said on Thursday.

Thanks to funding from the UN refugee agency, hundreds of primary schoolchildren in Sudan's volatile West Darfur state no longer have to study in the open. At the same time, UNHCR is helping to form bonds between different ethnic groups and avoid conflict in an area where hundreds of thousands of people have been forcibly displaced in recent years.

The government of Sudan has announced that it will launch a plan to facilitate the return of over 200,000 Sudanese refugees now living in eastern Chad, who have fled over the past six years of the ongoing internal conflict. The Sudanese minister of humanitarian affairs, Abdel Baqi al-Jailani, said that the government has put together along with some UN agencies such as the International Migration Organization (IOM) and the Chadian government, a program that will make 2010 into the year "of the great voluntary return" of Sudanese refugees from Chad. The minister said that Khartoum "intends to regulate the conditions of Sudanese refugees in eastern Chad, seeing as the end of the war in Darfur no longer warrants a reason for them to stay there". There are over 200,000 Sudanese refugees in Chad, according to a UN census; this issue is one of the main points in the dialogue agenda between the governments of Chad and Sudan, which after years of tensions and accusations (starting with the support given to their respective internal rebellions), in the last months have been trying to rebuild their diplomatic relations. Today, military delegations from both countries are meeting in N'djamena to discuss border security issues.

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Ibrahim Gambari, who recently took up his new post as the head of the joint African Union-United Nations peacekeeping mission in Darfur, has met with the Defence Minister to discuss peace prospects in the strife-torn region as part of a series of meetings with Sudanese officials.

Mr. Gambari held talks yesterday in the capital, Khartoum, with General Abdelrahim Mohamed Hussein, expressing appreciation for the warm welcome he has received from the Government and people of Sudan since arriving in the country last week.

He vowed to do his utmost to promote durable peace and security in Darfur, where the AU-UN mission (UNAMID) has been in place since late 2007 to try to quell the violence in the region, where an estimated 300,000 people have been killed and another 2.7 million forced from their homes since fighting erupted in 2003, pitting rebels against Government forces and allied Janjaweed militiamen. Read more...

Humanitarian assistance to tens of thousands of people in eastern Chad
is under threat from banditry, which has led several aid agencies to
temporarily halt their operations in the face of attacks, the United
Nations relief wing reported today.

The top humanitarian official in Chad called for urgent attention to be paid to providing a better life for young men and women languishing in camps for refugees and displaced persons, warning that the alternatives for them would be prostitution or violence.

Mr. Falavigna, who took up his post as UN Resident Coordinator and Humanitarian Coordinator for Chad about three months ago, said that while there is an obligation to protect and care for refugees, it is also vital to offer young men and women growing up in camps the hope for a decent life.