STOP 'HOTEL DARFUR' Program

Submitted by JennieMurray on Tue, 05/16/2006 - 12:00am

Author Info:

Jennie Murray, Youth Director at Grace UMC, Mt. Juliet, TN and Assistant to the Director of the YWM

“STOP Hotel Darfur”
(All Resources Included)

A program that we recently used in our Youth Group is entitled “Stop Hotel Darfur.” We realized that we as a faith community are called to BE the Body of Christ and no longer remain by-standers to the genocide, violence, and displacement sweeping across the Darfur region of Sudan, Africa!

The program is designed to be an awareness/ informational meeting, a call to repentance for fear and complacency, and a call to action! We feel that all three of these goals were met when we implemented the program with our group.

Along with this outline and description is a downloadable PDF of a 35 slide Power-Point Presentation we designed to be used in this program, as well as all the other resources used.

Program Outline:

First, we announced to the group that our youth meeting would be 3 hrs. long (1 hour longer than our usual meeting length) in the Youth Newsletter several weeks before initiating the program
Then, we began the meeting with a prayer and the Youth Director presented an Intro…
- An explanation that tonight’s message is difficult to hear/see but that we as a faith community, Christ’s Body, are called to love our neighbor and stand-up for God’s oppressed Children
- A brief run-through of the Holocaust (grossly brief…however, the focus of tonight is Darfur… )
- A brief run-through of the Rwandan Genocide…

Then, We Watched Hotel Rwanda… (This is obviously where the bulk of the programming time goes: NOTE: This movie was created to be able to be watched by any age and is half as graphic as the Passion of the Christ. The Directors and producers made sure that the film would portray how terrible it was but that this is not any close-up or harsh violence. The sixth graders and their parents were fine with the film’s level of candidness.)
Then, after the movie…We did a run-through of the current situation in Darfur
After the run-through a Youth, who is very passionate about this effort, read a poem written by a refugee of Darfur who is a Christian and speaks about how the world has forgotten the people of Darfur but God has not! At the conclusion of the poem she shared some of the things on her heart about this tragedy.
After this, the Youth Director came back up and talked about what is probably going through their heads…things like “My family is Safe…”, “What can I do…”, etc…
In response to this, they discussed the small, Protestant-Christian community Le Chambon, in France which is now considered a significant part of the ‘Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust!’ This community of only 5,000 knew that protecting the Jews was the human and Christian thing to do, therefore, they helped rescue over 5,000 Jewish Children, more than the amount of their entire population. (see resource below)
We then had a responsive prayer time asking forgiveness for being complacent and by-standers when God’s people were in pain or need. (This is included in the PowerPoint-can be found, for download purposes, below)
We then ended with a song of reflection, action, and worship….We chose to use “To the Ends of the Earth…” During this time, we had the students, as they felt led, go to a table in the front to light a small candle as they say a prayer for the Darfur people and situation then had them sign a “Million Voices for Darfur” campaign postcard. (NOTE: these postcards are part of a campaign and are intended to be sent to the White House to Pres. Bush to inform him that we are ready for him to take action on Darfur as he said he knew we must when he wrote “Not on My watch” on the top of his paper during an informational meeting about the situation in Darfur) (click the resource link below to receive postcards).
We ended with our normal circle-up closing (time for prayer concerns and praises) but offered that if there was something viewed or heard that was difficult to them, please see the youth minister or one of the other youth workers to talk it out. Also, we asked them to think and pray on the issue and then come to the Youth Minister if they felt like they knew what our ‘next steps’ should be in to ‘Stop Hotel Darfur.’