She spreads pages and pages of children’s bright colorings across her desk. Almost all the drawings depict guns, blood and death.
Katie-Jay Scott has seen lots of pictures like these before, but this time she witnessed their creation firsthand.
“Watching a 9-year-old draw something like that is like nothing you’ve ever seen,” Scott said.

She had heard Fatna, a woman from Darfur, tell her story on film, but during the 12 days Scott spent in refugee camps in Chad in January, Scott was about to speak with Fatna face-to-face about the day her village was attacked, the day she fled Darfur with her seven children, the day her husband was killed.
“Her eyes are deeper than I imagined from the pictures and the video. Her pain more apparent with every word she speaks,” Scott wrote in her online journal.
Scott said seeing the reality of the Darfur crisis firsthand strengthened her commitment to fight harder, act faster and hold onto hope.
Almost three years have passed since the 27-year-old Portland resident placed a green bracelet around her wrist that read, “Not On Our Watch.” It represented her commitment to take action to end the genocide in Darfur, a western region of Sudan nearly the size of France. In September, she took this commitment on full-time as an employee for Stop Genocide Now, a grassroots organization aimed at protecting populations affected by genocide.
Scott, a Portland State University alumna who majored in sociology, has brought her energetic voice to rallies across the country, raising awareness and urging action to stop the ongoing genocide in Darfur.
According to the United Nations, since 2003 more than 2 million people have been displaced, including 250,000 who have fled across the border to refugee camps in Chad. The fighting between the corrupt Sudanese government’s military, the government-funded Janjaweed militia groups and Darfurian rebels claimed the lives of between 200,000 and 400,000 Darfurians.
Scott has worked with the Lane County Darfur Coalition in Eugene.
“I really respect all that she’s been able to accomplish,” Coalition member and University senior research assistant Roz Slovic said.
Scott said the movement has grown, but not fast enough.
University psychology professor Paul Slovic’s research explains why that may be. He said that our automatic intuitive responses have evolved to respond to what is immediate and close to us, and as the number of people affected by tragedy increases, people’s ability to empathize with those individuals decreases.
“Statistics are human beings with the tears dried off,” he said.
Scott said she wants to “put a face on the numbers of genocide.”
While in Chad, Scott and her team from Stop Genocide Now uploaded daily journal entries, photos and videos onto their Web site. The organization calls it i-ACT (interactive activism). The group challenged viewers to take part in daily activities: sign a divestment petition, write to the president, tell a friend. The idea was to create a connection between the people they met in Chad and people around the world who can take action.
Scott said Darfurians worked to replace tents around the camps with more permanent structures. The brown homes, built from mud-dried bricks, created better protection from the wind and rain, but they also stood as a signal of fading hope.
“The idea to build a small home out of bricks is a good idea,” Scott said. “But I think it’s also their realization that there might be a year six and there might be a year seven.”
When Scott and her team were scheduled to leave Chad, fighting broke out between rebels from Chad and the Chadian government in N’Djamena, the country’s capitol city. Gunfire pierced through the glass of the French-owned hotel where Scott and her teammates spent the night. Bullets splattered holes in a wall just above her head.
Scott said she doesn’t know if the gravity of the situation has completely sunk in yet, but as she talks about the violence, it’s clear her concern isn’t about her own experience but about the circumstance she left behind.
“The urgency of the situation has completely increased,” Scott said. “It’s totally, completely deteriorating. We left Chad worse off than when we arrived.”
She said the resilience and strength she saw in the eyes of so many of the Darfurians she met gives her hope that they will continue to hang on until the crisis ends.
Back in the U.S., Scott is talking to groups about the trip, doing interviews and planning events. She learned that students in Portland watched the team’s daily updates in their classroom, and she is going to speak at the school soon.
She’s making plans to return to Chad in May. She said her commitment to working toward helping Darfurians return to a safe Darfur has increased 100 percent.
“They feel forgotten,” Scott said. “There is just no way that I would ever be able to leave the people of Darfur in the situation that their in right now, ever, after going out there and visiting them.”