The kids at the New Haven Academy study genocide in history as an academic subject. They came face to face with genocide as an all too ongoing event when a survivor of the ethnic cleansing in Darfur spent an hour in remarkable conversation with them.
Tenth-graders at the magnet school did more than listen at Wednesday morning’s encounter. They rose to El-Fadel Arbab’s challenge to do something about it.
Arbab is a member of the Fur tribe of western Sudan, from which Darfur gets its name. He’s a spokesperson for the Fur Cultural Revival, a part of the Maine Peace Fund. His stop at NHA was part of a tour of area high schools and colleges sponsored by the Holocaust Education and Prejudice Reduction Program of the Jewish Federation of Greater New Haven.
The students were exposed to a tale of terror by the soft-spoken Arbab. It included a nighttime attack on his African village by Sudanese soldiers and gangs of Arabic-speaking armed gunmen known as Janjeweed; escape from being burned to death by hiding in a tree for days, and a 12-year odyssey from Khartoum to Cairo and eventually to resettlement in Portland, Maine.
“You don’t seem to show anger or hatred,” Melody Smith said. “Don’t you hate your country or the Janjeweed?”
“No,” he replied. “What I hate is how in my country the people divide us, one people against the other. Who I blame is the world’s leaders. They say ‘never again, but it goes on. But Bashir [Omar el-Bashir, the International Criminal Court-indicted president of Sudan] must be brought to justice, even if it takes a 100 years.”
Melody, like all tenth-graders, participates in a curriculum called Facing History and Ourselves, in which genocide in the Holocaust, Armenia, and Rwanda is studied along with issues of justice and reconciliation, as in South Africa.
She was amazed at Arbab’s measured response and even the sense of peacefulness that emanated from the 25-year old. He was only 12 at the time of the attack. Today he works seven days a week in Portland restaurants to support his four brothers, sister, and mother — all, like him, immigrants.
“I couldn’t be the way he is,” Smith said. “I’d want to react violently.”
“But we are all human beings,” said Arbab. “Even the Janjeweed. Maybe some of them were being forced to do these terrible things. We have to live together. Maybe some time we will forgive them.”
Laron Strong, also a tenth-grader from New Haven, was moved particularly by Arbab’s story of his hiding in a tree immediately after the attack. Arbab’s grandfather had told him how he had hidden in the trees in a previous war.
Arbab said that while he was concealed in branches, far below, the Janjeweed killed survivors, chased them down the river valleys, macheted babies, so as not to waste a bullet on them, but all the time they did not look up into the trees.
Taking Action
Strong raised his hand. He wanted to know what he and his colleagues at NHA could do to help. Not next semester or next month, but now.
A suggestion came from Lauren Kempton of the Jewish Federation, who was traveling with Arbab. She described solar ovens being used by the females of the 2.5 million refugees of the genocide because they fear rape if they dare to leave the camps to collect fire wood.
“The ovens cost all of $15.”
“Can we raise some money to purchase some of them?”
Meredith Gavrin, one of the school’s directors, gave a thumbs up. Strong said he was going to start raising it in the cafeteria.Arbab also urged the tenth-graders to go to savedarfur.org and write to their Congress people.
Thanking the kids for being such interested, rapt listeners, Kempton, quoting Elie Wiesel, said, “‘When you listen to a witness, you become a witness.’ Now you are witnesses.”
Paige Russell, another tenth grader who had lingered to talk with Arbab, said, “Welcome to America, welcome to New Haven.”
In addition to NHA, Arbab spoke to students at Hamden Hall, Sacred Heart University, the University of New Haven, and Hillhouse High on Thursday afternoon, all told nearly a thousand new witnesses.