Teachers for Darfur

Positive Action on Darfur from Brown and Sarkozy

Check out this article from the Guardian, Friday 20 July.

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http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/story/0,,2131165,00.html

Genocide - Never Again by Sally Holt

In 2006 a group of year 10 students from West Bridgford School, Nottingham visited the Holocaust memorial centre in north Nottinghamshire. As part of the visit we were given the opportunity to place a pebble in remembrance of the millions who died in the Holocaust. As we placed those pebbles and thought of the message we were being given; ‘Genocide – never again’ we felt that we needed to do more than just say the words. It was from this point that our view was shared by other past pupils who were already attempting some fundraising for the region of Darfur.

Since then we’ve raised awareness as well as funds in a range of ways including, assemblies to our peers, non-uniform days and cake sales and have also established links with a school in Rwanda, forging close connections with these pupils via the Pen-Pal scheme.

We’ve been hugely fortunate to have fantastic support in the form of one of our teachers; Ms D’Arcy who has visited the school in Rwanda and helped us immensely in our efforts.

As we progress into Sixth Form we want to set higher targets and reach out to more people in our efforts to help both Darfur and Rwanda with our message; Genocide anywhere is unacceptable and nobody can look the other way and allow this to happen. Genocide – never again.

One of our biggest projects to date has been building a house for a survivor of the genocide in Rwanda, Anne-Marie and her son Patrick who touched Ms D'Arcy's heart during her stay in Rwanda. We needed to raise £10,000 and along from various other students we managed to the rise to the challenge and the grand total given was £12,000!

Anne-Marie has recently moved into her new home. It was such a great moment to see all the funds we raised being used for something which meant so much to someone and we know how much this will improve Anne-Marie's quality of life. This project has given us the ideas and contacts for many other projects and we're hoping to be involved in some new, large scale projects in the near future which we're all very excited about.