Representatives of several different religious communities met yesterday at Christ Church Unity in Brookline to discuss ways to stop the conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan, which the U.S. government has called a genocide.
Journalist Liz Walker — who preaches as an African Methodist Episcopal minister in addition to hosting a “Sunday with Liz Walker” on CBS4 — screened an excerpt of her documentary, “A Glory from the God,” about the Rev. Dr. Gloria White-Hammond, a local preacher and pediatrician who founded an organization that helps Sudanese women.
Though she has not been to the western Darfur region where the government-sponsored militia has been massacring civilians since 2003, Walker said she has been to southern Sudan five times since 2001 and is going there next week.
She said stronger involvement from the U.S. government is unlikely because it is too distracted at the moment by the war in Iraq.
“This seems to be the kind of humanitarian and human rights issue that has to be approached from the ground up because international policy doesn’t seem to be working,” she said.
Walker said a religiously diverse attendance was important because spiritual leaders serve as “moral compasses” for their communities.
“This movement, I am thoroughly convinced, has got to be based in faith,” she said.
Christ Church Unity President Collette Phillips said the documentary exposes the crisis for communities distant from the Darfur region.
“If only there was footage like this 60 years ago [during the Holocaust], maybe the world would not have stood silent,” she said.
Brittany Zenus, a high school student who founded the Global Awareness Project at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, attended the meeting. Her group focuses primarily on fundraising and drawing attention to the needs of those in violence-plagued communities in Africa. She said her group is trying to convince her school to divest money from corporations that have financial dealings in Sudan — a move that several states and some universities have already made.
Linda Mancini, representing the Lam Rim Buddhist Center, said she works at the Boston Center for Refugee Health and Human Rights, which gives aid to some Darfur survivors among others in need.
“We want the genocide to end,” she said.