Webster City residents will join people in more than 150 cities nationwide this weekend in a vigil for Darfur. More than four years of conflict in that region of Sudan have left at least 200,000 people dead and two-point-five million displaced by violence. Tiffany Jones is helping to organize the Sunday vigil in Webster City.
Jones is the educational coordinator for the First Congregational United Church of Christ in Webster City, which is hosting the vigil. She says, "We’d like to educate the public as to what’s going on in Darfur. We will be having a slide show presentation and we will also be having interaction with other members of our congregation to show what exactly is happening in Darfur."
Jones says members of the Webster City church decided to get involved and bring more awareness to the conflict in Darfur . Jones says: "We have not seen as much involvement over the past two years as we did at the very beginning of this and the genocide keeps getting worse." The vigil in Webster City begins at 5 P.M. and the public is invited. This is one of at least two Iowa events scheduled for Darfur awareness on Sunday. The Darfurian People’s Association of Iowa is holding an event at Hoyt Sherman Place in Des Moines at 4 P.M. A major rally is also scheduled Sunday near the White House in Washington D.C.