It literally was a picture of irony.
The little girl in the photograph, whose family had fled from their home in the Darfur region of Sudan, had little to eat and no bed on which to lay her head. But she was wearing an American T-shirt emblazoned with the word “Spoiled.”
“Their vulnerability is much higher than I thought,” Paige Weichbrodt, a Girls Preparatory School teacher who recently returned from a trip to Sudan, said of such children.
The private school history teacher visited the desert refugee camp Jaach in the southeast region of the country as a guest of the organizations Silent Images and the Persecution Project Foundation.
While there, she documented the people and scenes of the camp and what progress toward assistance had been made.
“There have been so few video documentaries (of the Darfur refugees). Ms. Weichbrodt said. “We felt this history needed to be told.”
David Johnson, founder of the nonprofit Silent Images and chronicler of the book “Voices of Sudan,” spoke at GPS in 2007.
“I was taken with what he said,” said Ms. Weichbrodt, who had done her senior thesis at Covenant College on Darfur. “I was interested in taking a trip.”
Fellow GPS teacher Jane Henegar said she admired Ms. Weichbrodt’s courage and tenacity.
“Paige has had a worldview from an early age, so this was a logical next step for her, though a dangerous one,” she said. “She is not accustomed to taking the easy path, especially for a cause that matters greatly to her. This is a powerful example for our girls.”
The trip, originally scheduled for January, was delayed because of the danger in the country. The trip was taken instead during spring break for GPS.
Ms. Weichbrodt said she had a day in Nairobi, Kenya, before a flight into the Sudanese desert on an aging Russian Antonov cargo plane, to ponder the danger of the final leg of her trip.
Should the plane have to land in an unsafe area, the best she could hope for was capture and detention by the government, she was told. The worst was rape and murder.
Even in Jaach, Ms. Weichbrodt said, there was always some danger of attack, but less so than in volatile Darfur.
What she found at the camp was beyond the scope of what academic knowledge and information filtered through other sources could give her. The square 6- to 10-mile area had about 65,000 people, one motor vehicle, one horse and cart and a couple of bicycles, she said.
“In my mind I imagined an organized place to go (for the refugees) and some kind of safety net with food, water and shelter,” she said.
Instead, she said, the people forced to leave the Darfur region of the country because of ethnic and tribal conflict had to flee into the bush and now live hand to mouth.
The women in the camp, to whom Ms. Weichbrodt had more access than the men, told “horrific stories” of the killing of their husbands, the kidnapping of their children and their own rapes.
Yet, they remained strong, resourceful and hopeful, she said.
Children were everywhere, most men toted AK-47s and the desert heat reached 120 degrees, Ms. Weichbrodt said. However, parents, children and leaders were alike in their desire for education.
In addition to offering humanitarian relief, the Persecution Project Foundation has opened several wells in the Jaach area, and some of the refugees are attempting gardens.
“They are not hopeless,” she said.
Although Ms. Weichbrodt said she felt somewhat helpless amid the strife, the plastic beaded necklaces she brought — made by a GPS student group — provided a measure of happiness for many of the women and children.
“It was a symbol that somebody cared, that they weren’t forgotten,” Ms. Weichbrodt said.
Ms. Weichbrodt said her experience in Darfur may offer some insight for her students.
In addition to learning how to find information and beginning to understand what is going on in the world, she said, they may be able to realize they “can make a difference even in a terrible situation.”
Fellow GPS history teacher David Cook said he felt honored and humbled to work with a colleague who does more than talk.
“Paige sacrificed her time, money and life to enter into the midst of a genocide while it is occurring,” he said. “If the entire world acted with the character, vision and courage that (she does), I wholeheartedly believe you would encounter the complete end of genocide, wars and poverty as we know it. I hope my children have a teacher like her.”
