Last night I helped out my colleague Shawna with the "Deconstructing Darfur" workshops that she has been facilitating this month in Teen Second Life. The goal of the workshops series is to help a small group of young people to learn about Sudan, the conflict and resultant humanitarian crisis there, what the international response has been and finally to design their own activist effort from within Second Life. Yes it's ambitious to say the least, like everything we do at Global Kids.
We were fortunate enough to have two great speakers come into the Teen Grid (well, at least speak via streaming in Skype chat) to engage with the workshop participants. The first speaker was Catherine Wagner of the Save Darfur Coalition, speaking about her work with high school students around the United States. She gave lots of great ideas for actions that the teens could take. Then we brought in Mohsin Mohi-Ud Din of Human Rights First, talking about in particular the role of China in providing small arms to Sudan while also profiting enormously from Sudan's oil reserves, found largely in the Darfur region.
It's always great seeing the teens engage with the material and ask hard questions of the guest speakers. Now they are all fired up about China, so we'll see what social action results from this.
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