Students of Shore Regional High School rallied together Saturday to raise awareness of the ongoing genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan.
Above: Students from Shore Regional High School in West Long Branch participate in the Shorestock 2008 event to raise awareness of the genocide in Darfur. Right: Dominic Valenti of “Fresh Greens” performs with the band. Below: Tate Hewitt, 17, of West Long Branch, (c), gets his body painted by Kristen St. Peter, 17, of Oceanport, (l), and Amberly Bush, 17, of West Long Branch, at Shorestock. After a year of planning, the high school’s Student Council presented the “Shorestock 2008” festival on June 7 on the West Long Branch campus.
“You would be surprised at how many kids in our school don’t know about Darfur,” Hannah Molitoris, a senior at Shore Regional, said. “I think we are educating a lot of people about it.”
The event was the brainchild of Molitoris along with her senior classmates Bri Rubino, Larry Giannechini and Caitlin McGrath.
Students and teachers braved neartriple digit heat to attend the festival, which featured carnival games, a magic show, live music and the school’s annual battle of the bands.
PHOTOS BY FRANK GALIPO Set to graduate on June 19, the students said they began planning the Shorestock festival last year as a way to give back to the student body.
According to Giannechini, the students initially hoped to host the event last June, but were forced to reschedule it for this year due to the challenges of planning such a large event.
“There were a lot of obstacles, but our advisers really pushed for [the festival] and had meetings with the principal,” Molitoris explained.
“We went to meetings with the superintendent and we really wanted it,”Molitoris said, adding, “We didn’t care, we wanted to do something.”
Tickets for the event cost $10 and all proceeds are going to Aid Darfur, a United Nations-sponsored agency that works to help alleviate the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the region.
Chris Schuster, co-adviser for the student council and an English teacher at Shore Regional, said the event was a result of the students’ hard work.
“It’s difficult to put an event this big together because there are so many facets that go into it,” Schuster said.
“The amount of organization it takes and the advisers needed to do it, it’s a lot of work,” Schuster added.
When the students learned about the genocide inDarfur in one of their history classes, they decided to take action at a local level, Schuster explained.
“We have a requirement here at Shore Regional called ‘Conscience,’ ” Shuster said. “The state of New Jersey only requires two or three years of history.
“We require four, and one of the courses we require is Conscience,” Schuster added.
The Conscience class covers topics ranging from prejudice and intolerance to war crimes and genocide in order to help students develop an appreciation for and understanding of the world’s various cultures, according to Schuster.
“It teaches students about the genocides going on in the world nowand in the past, and it really changes a lot of kids when they learn about them,” Schuster said. “These students know about Darfur because of this class.”
FRANK GALIPO Kelly Cosentino, 15, of Oceanport, puts the finishing touches on a sign promoting her band Afternoon Breakfast prior to performing at the Shore Regional High School Shorestock festival in West Long Branch on June 7. McGrath explained that the idea for the festival came after the students took the class.
“At firstwe didn’t knowwhatDarfurwas,”McGrath said. “But once we learned about it, kids were hanging posters around the school and trying to sell ribbons to raise money for it.
“Everybody got really into it once they learned about it, sowe thought thiswould be a greatway to get the school really involved,”McGrath said.
Molitoris said that after she learned about Darfur, she wanted to do something that would make an impact and draw awareness to the genocide.
“Last yearwewere talking about doing something,”Molitoris explained. “We thought about different fundraisers and came up with Darfur.”
The genocide in Darfur is the result of an ongoing conflict between warring tribal and religious factions.
The conflict in Darfur began in February 2003, when frustrated by poverty and neglect from the Sudanese government, two Darfurian rebel groups, the Sudanese Liberation Army Movement and the Justice and Equality Movement, rebelled against Sudanese President Omar al- Bashir.
Students across the nation have formed STAND, a student run anti-genocide group seeking to raise awareness of the situation in Darfur.
The situation in Darfur is explained on the STANDWeb site.
“Claiming to be putting down the insurrection, the government respondedwith a scorched-earth campaign against the innocent civilians of Darfur, enlisting the Janjaweed, a militia drawn frommembers ofArab tribes in the region, to perpetrate the attacks,” according to theWeb site.
It continues, “Since 2003, the government-sponsored Janjaweed have used rape, displacement, organized starvation, threats against aid workers, and mass murder to perpetrate genocide.”
To date, the violence in Darfur has claimed an estimated 400,000 lives and displaced more than 2.5 million people.