Sudanese refugee and associate of the Massaleit Community in Exile and the Darfur Association, Ahmed Ali, spoke last Wednesday about the Sudanese death toll that has reached over 400,000 documented deaths tied to genocide.

According to Ali, the deaths are due to the Arabs who desire to make Sudan an all-Arab state.

“Ninety-four of Darfurians are African,” said Ali.

“When it is going to stop, we don’t know,” said Ali who also expressed his desire for Americans, particularly university students, to aid in stopping the conflict by contacting their respective representatives in Congress.

“I explained to [Congress] ‘This is genocide. You have to do something to stop this genocide,'” said Ali to the audience.

“I’m not going to stop until the genocide stops on my people,” said Ali. “As humans we have to help each other.”

Besides inviting Ali to speak, sophomores Alicia Oberle, Ally MacCaskill, Corinne Adams and Hadley Anderson put together a series of genocide awareness events as part of a requirement for the Pioneer Leadership Program called the Community Change Initiative. During sophomore year, Pioneer Leadership Students are required to hold programs meant to bring about change in the community and the university. The four students gathered information from around campus and found that not many students are aware of the death toll due to the civil war in Sudan.

“We’re supposed to make a sustainable change in our community,” said MacCaskill. “So we determined that there was a need for [genocide] awareness on campus after doing a small survey.”

In order to spread awareness, the four PLP students held events that consisted of passing out items on the Driscoll Bridge, the speaker on Wednesday and a film presented by DUPB, “The Lost Boys of Sudan,” on Thursday.

Their intention was to “Generate awareness and educate people,” said Oberle.

“So we did this with free T-shirts, free pins, a movie on the bridge, informational flyers, free bracelets and then we brought in a Sudanese refugee to speak.”

“People feel like it doesn’t affect them directly,” said MacCaskill expressing the challenge in getting students interested.

The theme of the week mainly focused on the deaths in Sudan. The students had a penny donation jar and they attempted to reach their goal to match every death in Sudan.

“We had a total of 14,702,” said MacCaskill. “Our goal was 400,000, but we are still really pleased.”

“I thought it was very successful, we had a really good turnout at both the speaker and the movie,” said Oberle. “We were happy with the turn out in both events.”

Their goal was not only to educate the campus, but also to generate interest in starting a club about genocide awareness so that many other genocide awareness activities can be held, including making genocide awareness week an annual event. Many people expressed interest in joining such a club during after the Pioneer Leadership students gained many signatures, Oberle said.

“We got quite a few names for our club,” said Oberle.

In the past as their sophomore projects, Pioneer leaders have done community service, cancer awareness and mentoring young students.

Other organizations on campus helped PLP with Genocide Awareness Week, including the Pioneer Ambassadors, the Student Health and Counseling Center and the Holocaust Awareness Institute with the Center for Judaic Studies donated bracelets, and DUPB.