Taking Action Now: An Interview with Nate Wright

An interesting interview with a student activist for Darfur...

Taking Action Now: An Interview with Nate Wright: "Among the few who have stepped up to fill the void is 21-year-old Georgetown senior Nate Wright. A year ago, Wright co-founded Students Taking Action Now: Darfur (STAND) with senior Ben Bixby, the president of the campus’s Jewish Student Association, and with help from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Their goal was to raise awareness about the ongoing genocide, raise relief funds for humanitarian aid, and lobby for immediate political action. To their surprise, their plan didn’t just light a spark at Georgetown—it spread like wildfire to other schools, and Wright’s national STAND Coalition now has tens of thousands of students connected across nearly 200 campuses in the United States and Canada."...

MJ: What was it like producing that documentary? What was it like being there?

NW: You want to be able to go over there and say that when you come back, things are going to change. You want to be able to promise [the refugees] so much more than you can deliver them. It definitely gives you an incredible sense of helplessness when you can’t really bring them anything more than a voice. I mean, they are incredibly grateful just for the opportunity to be heard and to know that they haven’t been forgotten, but there is sort of this sense of helplessness. At the same point in time, there are so many absolutely amazing stories. The first refugee that we met as we were going to these camps in eastern Chad started talking about these students from D.C. who were giving up their privileges to help the people in Darfur. It even took me a minute to realize that he was talking about the project that we had done: When we did that first STANDFast back in November, myself and several other of the students did an interview with Voice of America, and he could have been listening to my voice. It was something that he was incredibly touched by—the fact that students in the United States hadn’t forgotten about them and cared about them and were trying to do something to make their lives better.

And even though everyone would talk about how they didn’t have enough food and water, whenever you walked into anyone’s tent, you would have to ask them not bring you any food or water because they’re just so hospitable. Even though they can tell you’ve got money—we’re wearing clothing that hasn’t been torn apart—to see these people in these conditions offering you food and water, it’s incredibly moving. I don’t think that they can really understand how people in the United States could see this and not do something. It really seemed as if that idea was beyond them, that someone could see their suffering and not want to help them....