Making a Lot of Noise About the Genocide in Darfur

It was very hot the other night when we performed a staged reading of my new play, "In Darfur" at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park and we had plenty of water. You can read here about the night.

The cast: Leon Addison Brown, Rutina Wesley, Aaron Lohr, Maduka Steady, Ron Brice, Heather Raffo, Zainab Jah and Sharon Washington

Some idols on the activist front out there making a lot of noise about the genocide in Darfur, came to see the play and gave a panel discussion afterwards. As a surprise, the tireless activist Mia Farrow who was not on the program as a featured guest because we thought she'd be out of the country showed up last minute and joined Samantha Power, Nick Kristof, John Prendergast, Mark Hanis and Omer Ismail as panelists. Also, one of very few Darfuri refugees whose made it into this country, and who was also our translator when I was in Chad, Daoud Ibrahim Hari also spoke.

The Panel: (Back Row) John Prendergast, Samantha Power, Nicholas Kristof and Daoud Ibrahim Hari; (Front) Omer Ismail, Mia Farrow, Winter Miller and Mark Hanis

Here are three great places to learn more about what you can do and how you can do it. I recommend GI-Net for some very smart and simple actions you can take.

http://www.genocideintervention.net/advocate/tenthings.php

http://www.enoughproject.org/

http://www.miafarrow.org/

Of course you can always give money to these and other organizations doing great work.

There are many, so I'll just offer a few here:

Doctors Without Borders

CARE

The World Food Programme

We missed Ann Curry, who has been on two previous panels after the play, and has been very much an activist, pushing NBC to improve their coverage of the genocide. The networks have lagged.

If you check out Ann's website you can see her blog entries and some really amazing photos she took.

Ann is one of the more down-to-earth people I know and has a heart way bigger than her fist. That's not meant to indicate she has violent tendencies, a person's heart is the same size as her or his fist. This is a friendly dig from me to Ann, but yes, we had this conversation in the desert.

Photos by Ben Strothmann