Doctor tells Pinelands students of disease, starvation in Darfur
By LEE PROCIDA
Staff Writer, 609-457-8707
Published: Thursday, November 20, 2008
LITTLE EGG HARBOR - When it came time for Jane Hall to think about the curriculum for civics class this year, she wondered how to explain the message to be learned from the Holocaust, knowing that similar atrocities continue unabated."We teach our children to say, 'Never again,' " she said. "But there's genocide that's still happening in Darfur."So Hall, a special education teacher at Pinelands Regional Junior High School, made some phone calls and found Dr. Jerry Ehrlich, a pediatrician from Cherry Hill, Camden County, who could explain the disaster there firsthand."These are huts on fire, planes dropping bombs, people dying, people running," Ehrlich said, gesturing to a projection screen behind him Wednesday morning in the school's cafetorium, which displayed a crayon drawing of what happened to villages there from a Sudanese child refugee.Darfur is a province in the northeastern African nation of Sudan. Ehrlich spent two months there in 2004 as a volunteer for Doctors Without Borders, a humanitarian aid organization that dispatches doctors to crises around the world.
He brought with him to Pinelands a slideshow of pictures he took while working in a refugee camp in the capital city Khartoum, which he presented to the eighth- and ninth-grade classes."They do not want you to see the pictures you're about to see," he said, "they" being the Sudanese government, whose president was charged this summer with 10 counts of war crimes, three of genocide, five of crimes against humanity and two of murder from the International Criminal Court.When Ehrlich arrived in Darfur, an estimated 50,000 to 80,000 civilians had been killed by the military and government-supported militias in the region to quell an uprising that started in 2003. A million people had been driven from their homes into refugee camps, where doctors such as Ehrlich provided medicine and food to families dying of disease and malnutrition.Since he left, the United Nations estimates that half a million people have died from violence or disease from the conflict. "Despite international outrage and demands around the globe to end the brutality, the conflict continues," Hall wrote in the November issues of the Wildcat Press, the school's newsletter. "Darfur has become a lawless land where civilians live in fear and perpetrators roam freely."Ehrlich has given hundreds of lectures on the crisis he saw. On Wednesday, dozens of Pinelands students listened in silence to his lecture. There were audible gasps and students whispering "Oh my God" when he showed pictures of emaciated children he cared for. He ended with a slide of a woman smiling as she held her baby, whom Ehrlich helped save."How can we help?" a student asked after the presentation.After thanking the student for asking, Ehrlich said everyone should write or call government representatives and ask them to take action. At a time when the economy has most people's attention focused on their wallets, he said it's ever more important to remember crises like Darfur because change will only come when people demand it."Tell them you know what's going on in Darfur," he said, "and you want them to end it." E-mail Lee Procida:LProcida@pressofac.com
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