Collegiate Times

A makeshift refugee camp lined the Drillfield yesterday, in hopes to provide and raise awareness of genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan.

Students of the International Relations Organization passed out brochures from MillionVotersforDarfur.com, which included information and a post card that students could fill out asking President Bush to extend U.S. aid to the region. Students also had the option of dropping the card back at the organization's site on the Drillfield so that group can mail it out for them.

?I'm really excited that people actually seem to care when we let them know what we are about,? said Stephanie Petrina, junior materials science engineering major and member of IRO. ?Most people seem to want to help us out.?

The group also hopes the realistic look to the refugee camp will encourage students to think about the issue.

?What we are trying to convey, being citizens of the U.S., is that we can be isolated from some issues,? said Mala Kumar, junior marketing major and under secretary general of Virginia Tech conferences for IRO. ?We wanted to show an authentic feel of a refugee camp with chaos and trash everywhere.?

This campaign has been an ongoing effort by IRO. Last week, the group sponsored a similar event, though it was originally geared towards getting United Nations attention. This week's campaign focuses on getting U.S. aid into the region. The national campaign started two years ago, and this is a chapter of that effort, Kumar said.

Recently, IRO showed Hotel Rwanda and had a photo exhibit in Torgersen Hall and Squires. On April 18, Francis Bok, a former Sudanese slave is planning to speak at Tech, said Drew Cleveland, junior history major.

Planning for the event took up much of the semester and the idea was a collective collaboration of the entire group, and the topic was always a chief issue discussed among group members. The idea for the camp was derived from some projects that the Habitat for Humanity has done in the past. Construction took up about a week and was made up of scrap and recycled materials.

While this is the first time the IRO has sponsored efforts to campaign against Darfur, efforts similar to this have been popular among many universities that have been trying to raise awareness, Petrina said.

?We hope that students raise their awareness about the issue and hopefully have some of them write to their congressmen and senators about the issue,? Cleveland said.

Petrina thinks that many students would care more about the issue by simply becoming more aware.

?We thought it was really important to get the word out because so many people are unaware and it seems like our government doesn't have much interest in stopping the genocide in a country that we can't exactly benefit from economically,? Petrina said.

Kumar said that overall reactions have been mixed, Tech is one of the first colleges to bring the issues ?to the table.?

?While it was positive overall, some students were indifferent,? Kumar said. ?A lot have been taken off guard, some were concerned.?