September 20, 2007 | Read Time: 1 minute
Nick Anderson, a teenager in Conway, Mass., has used the Internet to help raise tens of thousands of dollars for humanitarian aid in Darfur. Now he’s using the medium to share what he learned when he visited the troubled region of Sudan as a youth ambassador for Oxfam America.
During the last school year, Mr. Anderson and his classmate Ana Slavin used the social networking Web sites Facebook and MySpace to encourage high-school students to raise money to help displaced people and for advocacy to raise awareness of the crisis. The campaign, which they called Dollars for Darfur, brought in $306,000.
Mr. Anderson says he was amazed by the resilience of his counterparts in Darfur. “A lot of American kids complain about school,” he says. “These guys were walking five miles each direction to get to their classrooms. It’s dangerous walking back and forth.”
Now that he’s home, Mr. Anderson is sharing what he learned with others. Photographs and video that he took on his trip are posted on Oxfam’s Web site.
He urges people to get involved and not to be overwhelmed by how difficult it will be to remedy the situation. Says Mr. Anderson: “The effect that one person can have on their community as a whole in educating people on an issue and stirring people to action is really quite remarkable.”
To get there: Go to http://www.oxfamamerica.org/darfur.
