Eye Level Pasadena

Local high school sophomore Leslie Brian founded a STAND (Students Taking Action Now: Darfur) chapter at Polytechnic to raise money for people in Darfur. Check out the students’ website and these articles about their project:

• Los Angeles Times: Pasadena teens reach out to Africans in need
• Pasadena Star-News: Student fundraiser to benefit refugees: “I can’t single-handedly solve genocide,” [Leslie Brian] said. “But I can look back after a few years and know that I personally did not let it happen. We have an obligation to help people.” (link)
• Pasadena Now: Students Stage Sew-a-thon to Raise Money for Darfur Relief

The students are raising money for the Darfur Peace and Development Organization (DPDO). Here’s a link to the Polytechnic STAND page on the DPDO site.

Path to Freedom reminds us that 10% of the sales from their store go to helping others, including displaced people in Darfur:

Don’t forget that 10&% of all sales from the Peddler’s Wagon go toward helping other’s in the third world, one such project that we support is sending sun ovens to the Darfur refugees. (link — bottom of the page)

This strikes me as a pretty creative idea, especially since, from what I understand, one of the huge problems is that people who leave the refugee camps to get firewood are often raped or killed, so eliminating the need for firewood sounds like it could help.

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Sebastian Zacharia of Woodbury University will discuss the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan this Wednesday, April 18 at 7:00 p.m. at the Pasadena Central Library.

Pasadena Central Library Auditorium
285 E. Walnut St., Pasadena
April 18
7:oo p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

By way of Pasadena Community Calendar and the Pasadena Weekly.

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Adopted virtual neighbor Marilyn of California Fever and I started Bloggers for Darfur in 2006 as a way to raise awareness of the killing taking place in the Darfur region of Sudan. (I should note here that Marilyn deserves the credit for keeping the site going and for doing the blogging ever since.) We started it last year to coincide with last year’s Global Day for Darfur, and, as Marilyn points out, there has been no real progess in Darfur in the last year. It’s pretty overwhelming to me. This year, Global Days for Darfur will take place between April 23 and April 30. (Different places will observe it on different days in April.) Marilyn has a post up this week about Google Earth’s new satellite images showing the destruction there.