NEW LIGHT ON DARFUR TRAGEDY ACTRESS AND ACTIVIST GO TO REFUGEE CAMPS TO DOCUMENT CONFLICT'S TOLL.

Byline: BRENT HOPKINS Staff Writer

The children's smiles belie the suffering all around them.

Stick-thin arms, threadbare clothes, vacant eyes -- these kids from Darfur are the faces of a faraway statistic. And as most people prepared to trade presents and celebrate a new year, Stacey Martino and Gabriel Stauring left the comfort of Los Angeles to connect those real-life stories to the numbers of a conflict on the other side of the world.

Martino, a Burbank actress, and Stauring, a Redondo Beach social worker, spent Christmas and New Year's Day along the Chad-Sudan border, interviewing refugees from the region's three-year civil war.

By shedding light on a conflict the United Nations says has claimed 200,000 lives and displaced 2 million people -- and some advocacy groups put the toll higher than 400,000 killed and 2.5 million displaced -- the pair aims to remind the rest of the world that this isn't just something to gloss over when it pops up on the evening news.

``We're up north, where it's very, very cold, and we saw a little boy running around in a T-shirt,'' Martino said via satellite phone from Chad. ``We saw a little girl in a summer dress. Seeing them cold on top of the hunger was just so hard for me. Hearing about the women going for firewood and being attacked, that really, really affected me.''

And she hopes it will do the same for people back home. After seeing a replica refugee camp earlier this year, she contacted Stauring, co-founder of Stop Genocide Now. He'd visited the region the previous year and was interested in planning a return trip to shoot video to post on the group's Web site, www.StopGenocideNow.org.

The pair left on a 14-day mission Dec. 18 and began posting footage three days later. They planned to catch a flight home Friday.

During their journey, they visited five refugee camps that house tens of thousands of displaced Darfuris. They heard tales of starving infants, murdered spouses, 20-day treks on foot to escape Janjaweed militiamen. The sobering stories even got to Stauring, who says the conditions have worsened in the year in between his visits.

``We need to get regular people everywhere to feel like this matters to them,'' he said, also via phone from Chad. ``This crisis is going on four years and it's getting worse and expanding.

``When I was here a year ago, Chad was relatively safe. The people who made it here after walking 10 or 20 days were fairly safe. But now all the (nongovernmental organizations) are pulling out, and even the food distribution is being handled by refugees themselves. The whole region's exploding because of this.''

The fight began in 2003, with mostly Arab militias targeting indigenous tribes in the remote part of the northeastern African nation.

Rather than merely seeking financial support, SGN is using its Web site to encourage readers to become activists themselves. After they read the stories, the group instructs them to post comments and contact their local legislators and media.

Building awareness of the cause has not been an easy task, said Alex Meixner, policy director for the Save Darfur Coalition. The Washington, D.C.-based group, which has worked with Stauring in the past, brings together faith-based and social-justice groups to spread the word on the situation, hosting rallies and concerts.

``There's not anywhere near a saturation of knowledge on this, but it's on the upswing,'' Meixner said. ``The knowledge and the advocacy that it leads to is absolutely essential if we're going to stop this.''

If the video portraits stir enough hearts back home, SGN hopes it will bubble up to force more broad action. Though politicians have voiced support and the United Nations has created a task force that met to discuss the crisis Thursday, the bloodshed and displacement continue.

``The world, especially a superpower like the United States, has everything it needs to stop this genocide,'' said Tsai Yi Chan, a Santa Monica volunteer with SGN who stayed behind to coordinate the video project. ``The only thing that's lacking is political will. ... If political leaders know that their constituents care about this, they will listen to these demands.''

brent.hopkins(at)dailynews.com

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(1 -- 3) Stacey Martino, left photo, and Gabriel Stauring, center photo, spent their holidays interviewing Darfur refugees and shooting video.