A Young Woman Fighting for What’s Right

Elleni Ghebremicael started organizing her phenomenal, multifaceted “Fighting for What’s Right” week before the fall semester even began.

It was only last spring that she founded the University of Richmond chapter of AID (UR-AID) with two of her classmates, and only last fall that she first heard of the organization, but for Ghebremicael, quality far exceeds quantity of time spent.

“When we began this week long educational campaign, most students didn’t even know what genocide was,” she says.

Ghebremicael’s “Fighting for What’s Right” week focused on the issues of world poverty, hunger, and genocide, with a special emphasis on the crisis in the Sudan. Among the speakers she brought to the UR campus were Colin Thomas-Jensen of the International Crisis Group; Carol Welch, the U.S. Coordinator for the Millennium Campaign; and Gayle Smith, Senior Adviser for the Center of American Progress.

UR-AID also set up a table in their student union to collect donations for Doctors Without Borders (MSF), distribute ONE bands, and offer students an opportunity to sign a petition in support of the Millennium Campaign.

Ghebremicael sees the “Considering Darfur” luncheon with Thomas-Jensen as one of the highlights of the week: “It grabbed the attention of many students who otherwise would not have been excited about the events, but because of his speech they felt more inclined to learn more and become a part of the fight.”

By the time the week ended, more than 175 people had signed up to participate in an all-day fast to raise awareness of the week’s central issues.

According to Ghebremicael, the fast was far and away the most powerful event of the week because it was a “pro-active approach” that put the responsibility on individual students to spread the word and take action themselves. UR-AID also made tags for the fasters to wear as a means of attaining even greater publicity for the event.

“By fasting,” Ghebremicael explains, “Students better understood about the luxuries they take for granted, the amount of food the average student intakes, and how it is for those living in poverty and/or hunger.”

The most difficult question that members of the Richmond community posed to speakers, AID members, and Ghebremicael herself was how anyone could pay attention to a problem as massive as global poverty while the Gulf Coast still lay devastated in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. “It bottled down to weighing domestic and international issues, which…cannot be numerically counted by importance or priority,” Ghebremicael says. “World poverty would obviously include America as part of the goal…It is important to not narrow our focus to local tragedies.”

Ghebremicael, a senior, heard about AID during an overseas study program at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland in fall of 2004. The Political Science/Sociology major, Leadership Studies minor applied to attend the “Bringing the World Home” summit in Berlin, Germany after hearing it mentioned by one of her professors.

Once back at UR, she and her two co-founders broke ground with the first AID event ever on their campus. Since then, more than 30 students have joined the organization, and an average of 50 students, faculty, staff, and Richmond citizens attend each of their events.

“[AID] gives them the opportunity to articulate their views, differences, and hopefully notice that we see eye to eye on many more important things than the media usually portrays,” says Ghebremicael. “It is an incredible feeling and a priceless thing to be a part.”

UR-AID’s plans for next semester are still very broad; Ghebremicael wants the younger leaders in the group to drive the more specific goals. However, since the organization has thus far paid attention to issues in non-Asian parts of the world, most of the spring’s events will probably be focused on topics that affect Asia.

After graduating this spring, Ghebremicael will join the 2006 Teach for America Corps, a two-year commitment to teach in one of America’s inner-city public school districts.