TOWNSEND — North Middlesex Regional High School sophomore Emily Messing and her friend and volunteer assistant Stephanie Roberts, a senior, sat outside the lunch room selling home-baked cookies and brownies and hand-crafted rope and bead bracelets, as students milled around, browsing and buying.
They didn’t hawk, and they didn’t have to. Items sold quickly for 50 cents to a dollar. The event was short, sweet and successful. In just over an hour, the pair had netted more than $100 for the cause: helping the strife-torn Darfur region of Sudan.
Emily launched the project on her own initiative and made the bracelets herself. Her mother supported the effort. Together they baked 100 brownies in three hours, she said.
Also on the table was a petition that may be as important as the money, she said. Some who stopped at the table signed it; others shopped. More than a few did both.
The petition is part of a lobbying effort, Emily explained. She plans to send it to Sens. Edward Kennedy and John Kerry, U.S. Rep. John Olver and President Bush.
“I feel strongly about the genocide in Darfur,” she said. This event was to raise awareness, too. “They can’t help if they don’t know,” she said.
She originally targeted a charitable organization called Dollars for Darfur, but found what she believes is a more direct route to the same goal, she said. The high school fund-raising challenge coalition where these dollars will go to gives half of the money in direct humanitarian aid, such as food and potable water, she said. The other half is used for political lobbying. — M.E. Jones
