They may not be as familiar with her acting skills as their American counterparts, but that didn’t stop children in the Central African Republic from coming out in droves this weekend to shake hands with award-winning actress Mia Farrow.
Farrow is in the region for a weeklong tour and to raise awareness about a crisis most recently aided by Hollywood heat throb George Clooney—the unsettling situation in the Darfur region. The 62-year-old actress and U.N. goodwill ambassador is set to visit the more than 150,000 people displaced by the fighting.
“It’s called a forgotten crisis, a forgotten humanitarian crisis, but forgotten implies that it was once remembered,” Farrow told news reporters. “I’m not sure it was in anyone’s consciousness … it’s undetected.”
Farrow added that it is hard to motivate American people to aid helpless victims (most of them children) in the Darfur region because many don’t understand what is going on there. The actress tried to sum up what has transpired in the impoverished nation over the last year: “Instability in the area boiled over into a rebellion in October in which insurgents captured several towns. French-backed government troops then recaptured the towns in early December, but now they have been accused of burning villages to flush out insurgents.”
Frankly, I don’t think you would find many who would disagree with Farrow’s assessment of the general public. Most Americans struggle to keep up with what’s going on in their own backyards; trying to grasp what is unfolding a half a world away, Farrow says, is going to take time.
Be that as it may the actress is forging ahead with her mission. Farrow already visited dozens of street children at a UNICEF-sponsored project. In addition, the actress recently met with President Francois Bozize, who led a rebel army that overthrew the previous government in 2003 and was elected president two years later.
“He was completely frank. He said, ‘We feel abandoned; we’re desperately in need of help. There is only so much we can do here and we’re doing all of it,'” Farrow told reporters.
According to the United Nations, the violence has affected 1 million people in the Darfur region, nearly one-quarter of the country’s population, which is why Farrow says attention and funds desperately need to be raised to aid victims there.
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