The Changes

I want to help an African women's cooperative make a difference for themselves.

Since early 2003, a brutal ethnic cleansing has been taking place in a region of western Sudan called Darfur. Since the early stages of the conflict, nearly 550,000 darfurian people have been killed, many of them women and children, as well as 2.5 million people displaced.

To sum things up, the Government of Sudan (GOS), which is made up primarily of Arabic people, has been using a combination of its own military (also primarily arabic), as well as a militia group called the Janjaweed (made up entirely of arabic nomads from the north) to, in short, wipe out the people of southern Darfur, who are sedentary farmers, almost entirely non-Arab. The farmers have assembled several small militias, most notably the Justice & Equailty Movement (JEM) and the Sudanese Liberation Army (SLA). These groups have attmempted to fight back, but they are no match for the immense firepower of the GOS and the Janjaweed.

Due to drought and desertification, the Arabic nomads are having to bring their livestock further south onto the farmers' land to find water and other essentials. Instead of attempting to co-habitate, the Janjaweed began attacking the villages and claiming the land for themselves, and the GOS has decided to support the Janjaweed in their quest by supplying them with food, water, firearms, ammunition and even helicopters, mortars and other devastating weapons.

The Janjaweed and the Government of Sudan are not doing this for the land. They are simply using it as an excuse to remove an entire race of people from the country. It is not a conflict. It isn't a civil war. Its called Genocide, and its serious. Do you think if the southern farmers were Arab as well any of this would have taken place? Not a chance. Genocide was such a world wide issue that needed immediate attention in the 1930's and 1940's when the Holocaust was at the forefront of International news, so why isn't it a big deal now?

550,000 people killed means that every minute of every day, one person in Darfur is killed. How many innocent people were killed on your birthday? 

I want to change the lives of a single mom and her five children.  She is in Vancouver, the kids are in Africa.

Drug patents have kept AIDS drugs prohibitively expensive. I'd love to see patent laws (or drug companies) change so that AIDS drugs can get to everyone who need them.