A group of 35 community members listened to panelists discuss how to solve issues in Africa from abroad.
While Africa may be thousands of miles away, it’s important for students in this country to address the drought, malnutrition and corruption plaguing the Somali people, a group of panelists said at an event last night.
The situation is “desperate,” officials told the group of 35 faculty and students — many of whom were members of the university’s living-learning Global Communities program — at the “Humanitarian Crisis and Refugees in the Horn of Africa” lecture in Riggs Alumni Center. The event was the second of a four-part series called “On the Move: A Speaker Series on Cross-Border Mobility,” which seeks to bring global issues closer to home.
The panel was comprised of Charity Tooze, the senior communication officer for the United Nations Refugee Agency; Ahmed Elmi, chairman and cofounder of the Somali American Community Association; and Wanjiru Kamau, founder and executive director of the African Immigrant and Refugee Foundation.
Tooze and Elmi focused their lectures on statistics about malnutrition and information about American and Somali non-governmental organizations; however, Kamau honed in on the importance of Americans taking the time to learn about African countries and cultures.
“You can’t afford to be saying, ‘Kenya is in West Africa,'” she said.
Senior international business major Sonaly Patel said she attended the event for exactly that reason.
“I try to learn as much as possible and try to educate others about the situation,” she said. “You need to have all of those perspectives represented to solve the issue.”
Although the event was about the Horn of Africa — which includes Eritrea, Djibouti, Ethiopia and Somalia — the panelists spoke mostly about Somalia, a country whose government is controlled by the terrorist group al-Shabab.
Tooze said the United Nations Refugee Agency provides Somalis with food vouchers and emergency assistance packages. However, weather conditions have prevented planes from being able to land in the country recently, so aid has been dropped from the air.
Global Communities; the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism; the international development and conflict management minor; and the agricultural and resource economics college co-sponsored the event. Jessica Rivinius, communications director for START, said students of all global studies minors study cross-border mobility.
Lisa Hendricks, coordinator for the international development and conflict management minor, said the event supplemented her students’ coursework and that it is beneficial for students learning about the subjects to hear a wide-array of perspectives from people involved with the issues.
“We’re all globally focused programs, and these topics seem to be of particular interest to our students,” Hendricks said.
Freshman history major Ben Cutler, who also attended the first event in the series held in October, said he enjoyed the panelists’ perspectives on the issue — and how it can affect the world at large.
“I thought it was interesting, and it gave me a new perspective to think about the world and conflicts,” Cutler said. “As Americans, we have a responsibility to, like, step up, and we need to help shape the world around us. Through education is one of the best ways to do that.”
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