Nate Wright (CAS ‘06), Georgetown and national co-founder of Students Taking Action Now: Darfur, will be one of three student correspondents for an MTV-U documentary on the Darfur region of Sudan, which has been ravished by genocide and internal ethnic divisions. The documentary will air on April 7 as part of the MTV-U Sudan campaign.
MTV-U, the 24-hour college television network, has made this cause its central focus of the semester and chosen three students to accompany its film team to Darfur. Wright will spend two weeks in March investigating the stories of Sudanese citizens living in refugee and internal displacement camps in Darfur and along the border Sudan shares with Chad.
“I want to adopt the voice of someone in Darfur because he can’t have a voice himself,” Wright explained.
Stephen Friedman, General Manager of MTV-U, explained the network’s interest in college students in a February 6 press release.
“College students are the engine of social change,” the press release said. “We believe Nate and his peers at colleges around the country can mobilize the world to prevent another Rwanda in Darfur.”
MTV-U endorsed student activism at the three-day conference hosted by Georgetown’s STAND chapter, in cooperation with the U.S. Holocaust Museum’s Committee on Conscience, last weekend. Conference events were held in the ICC and at the museum. Over 400 students representing 100 universities nationwide united to learn from researchers at think tanks like the International Crisis Group and humanitarian organizations like Oxfam, as well as from each other. Students facilitated workshops on raising awareness and funds.
“Our chapter is small, and we have learned strategies from what we are told has worked for other branches,” Cedric Owens, head of Colby College’s STAND chapter said.
The trailer for DarBeDee, a film directed by a Georgetown graduate that intends to raise awareness about the situation in Darfur, was shown on Sunday in Gaston Hall.
“No one has a camera [in Darfur] and so no one can see,” director Adam Shapiro (GRD ‘97) explained. “We want to share our knowledge so that the world can see what is really going on there.”
While DarBeDee puts a human face on the suffering of Janjaweed victims, the documentary that Wright will help to produce will serve to connect young Americans with young Sudanese and their perspectives on the situation.
Wright emphasized that his goal as a part of the MTV-U crew will be to accurately depict the situation in Sudan and to establish a permanent connection between Sudanese and Americans. He said he aspires to serve as an eyewitness on behalf of the victims and to provide aid in any way possible.
“We want this to be a mission of hope,” Wright said. “If we show that we care enough to learn about their situation, we can empower them some way despite what they are going through.”
