I have always loved the written word above all else – my earliest memory is being ridiculed on the school bus for furiously attempting to finish my latest chapter book. In my tormentor’s defense, I did live three blocks from our middle school. As I grew older, this love for writing and literature only intensified. So when I took our action for Day 13 – reading Halima Bashir’s Tears of the Desert – I was both excited and terrified. As part of the Save Darfur team that works to raise awareness and action around sexual violence, I was all too familiar with the horrors the book would hold. In discussing this issue, we often use clinical, colder terms – “gender-based violence,” “moment of assault,” “psychological implications.” In many circumstances, we as an activist community write our way around the truest and most difficult word – rape.
Stalin famously said that “one death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic.” Unfortunately, these words often ring true – not only in the international community’s reaction to mass killing, but in how we react to mass sexual violence. While statistics are hard to come by and those who were to collect them have been either expelled or intimidated by the Sudanese government, we know that thousands upon thousands of women in Darfur have been raped by governmental forces and the janjaweed militias. But this story of mass rape is actually a much more horrifying story – it is the story of a single rape, an unbearable experience that no one should have to suffer through, experienced thousands and thousands of times. In many ways, it is harder to read or hear a single testimony than to write a paper about its prevalence. This understanding was at the core of my apprehension – to read is not only to know, but to embody an experience for a certain time. What euphemism and convention can obscure, the written word lays bare. This is the source of its power.
Tears of the Desert is, however, a majestically crafted memoir – one which I am a fuller person for reading. For the past four years, I have studied the history of genocide intently and for the past two I have been engaged in research on genocide memorialization, both formal and informal, in Rwanda. In a period of six weeks, I traveled to nearly every recognized memorial in the country – frequently traveling to four memorials, attending a remembrance ceremony and conducting several hours of survivor interviews in a single day. At that time, I realized that if I could not construct walls between myself and what I was studying, the reality of the situation would cripple me. At the same time, the reality is what spurs you to action. It is a strange and frequently uncomfortable tightrope to walk – between feeling and acting, between policy and testimony. And in the past year or so, in order to act and to write analytically, I constructed walls which became, at times, too large for me to see beyond. Tears of the Desert forced me to surrender this distance. The capacity for genuine compassion – literally “to feel with” in Latin – and to verbalize thought are the two elements that distinguish human beings from our animal counterparts. In many ways, this surrender was a kind of return to a deeper humanity – one which provokes pain, but also understanding, kindness, empathy and action. (more…)
Today is the 9th day of the 
Today, on Day 6 of the 16 Days, I am 
Today, 30 November 2009, is the fifth day of our 16 Days Campaign. On this fifth day we’re celebrating faith, human rights and anti-genocide leader, 
After a weekend full of family, friends and food my cousins and I sat down to write a letter. We wanted to tell the people fighting for the women and children of Darfur what their work meant to us.
It was especially meaningful to me to light a 
