As the academic year began, author Daoud Hari challenged the students of Mars Hill College to make a difference for the suffering people of Darfur. Now, students have taken up that challenge -- but they need your help.
Hari visited the campus as the speaker for Opening Convocation to discuss his memoir, “The Translator.” The book, chosen by faculty as the summer reading selection, gives a first person account of the horrors of widespread genocide against the tribal people of Hari’s native Sudan. Since 2003, hundreds of thousands of African Sudanese have been killed in Darfur, largely by the Sudanese government. Another 2.2 million people -- mostly women and children -- are crowded into camps surrounded by a barren landscape.
In response to Hari’s call to action, Mars Hill’s Student Government Association has organized a campus-wide project to sell Berkeley Darfur Stoves. These high-efficiency stoves make it easier and safer for families to prepare food as they live in the refugee camps of Darfur.
According to Mars Hill senior Kasey Boston, the Darfur Stove project was chosen by the student government association as a way to get the various campus organizations involved in one large campus-wide volunteer project. While the tribespeople of Darfur are the main beneficiaries, the SGA has made the project fun for students by encouraging a competition between organizations. The target goal for the campus is at least 50 stoves.
“The idea came from Daoud Hari's book.” Boston said. “We knew that so many students read the book and were deeply touched by it and yet the students had no outlet to do something about the terrible things they had read.” Boston said the project gives everyone who purchases a stove a tangible way to have a direct impact in the lives of Darfur’s people.
The Berkeley Darfur ultra high-efficiency cook stove uses up to 75% less fuel than a standard cooking fire or other stoves. This minimizes the time that refugees, often women and girls, have to venture outside the safety of the camps in search of fuel. These trips to search for fuel can take individuals miles from their camps and they often end in violence.
In addition to its efficiency, the Berkeley Stove can be built in Sudan by locals, enabling them to earn extra income. Other advantages of the stove are that it emits less smoke than other stoves, minimizing smoke inhalation for families in close quarters; it is suited to local high-temperature and high-wind outdoor cooking methods and helps the denuded environment recover from severe overharvesting.
According to SGA president Grace Kim, the Darfur Stove Project shows Mars Hill College students and community participants that awareness of a problem is insufficient to make a positive impact.
“Knowledge without action has no power,” Kim said. “It is part of a well-rounded education to be aware of difficult and dangerous situations throughout the world. That knowledge is important, but by adopting this project, we wanted to say that knowledge alone isn’t enough. Our SGA wanted to be an example to our fellow students and to our community that, unless you move from knowledge to action, you cannot help those who are suffering.”
When participants “buy” a stove from a student at Mars Hill College, they are actually subsidizing $20 of the stove’s $30 total production cost. To ensure that stove recipients will use and value their stove, and not merely re-sell the metal for scrap, refugee families in most cases are asked to contribute $10 themselves.
In addition to selling stoves, students at Mars Hill are selling t-shirts for $12, and profits will go toward stove purchases. Community participants will also be able to purchase stoves as Christmas gifts in honor of a loved one on Dec. 1st at a "Gifts that Give Back" sale in the Bentley Fellowship Hall.
For general information, go to thehungersite.com; and for information on purchasing a stove, contact any Mars Hill student, or contact Kasey Boston ats000141908@mhc.edu or 727-455-1023.
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