By Zenitha Prince

Washington Bureau Chief

Sudan AME Minister  (Photo by Mark Mehlinger) African Methodist Episcopal minister, the Rev. Gloria White-Hammond is the recently elected chairwoman of the Save Darfur Coalition, the premier advocacy group committed to ending the conflict in Darfur.

ST. LOUIS, Mo.—Her smile is sweet, her manner demure and her voice soft, yet standing among the throngs at the 48^th quadrennial conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church was one of the loudest voices in the fight to end crises in Darfur and Southern Sudan.

The Rev. Gloria White-Hammond, in the past six years, has become an outspoken leader in advocacy efforts for the oppressed—mostly women and children—and will be even more so as the newly elected chairman of the board of the Save Darfur Coalition, a network of religious and humanitarian organizations.

The Boston pediatrician said her work is directly tied to her calling as an A.M.E. minister.

“I certainly wouldn’t get out there if I didn’t have a sense of [God] calling me,” she told the AFRO. “It’s really out of a recognition of this is why I was put on the planet—not only to serve God but to serve God’s people.”

In her work with the Coalition, White-Hammond met with President Bush to push for his intervention in the Darfur crisis and also helped secure the assurances of the presidential candidates that they would address the situation when they claimed the helm of the White House. She was there to see the organization develop a mailing list of more than a million people, organize a march on Washington that numbered in the thousands and become the leading voice on this issue. But there is more to do, she said.

“My goal in the year I serve as the board chair is to think through how to more efficiently share the resources of all the different groups that are working in Sudan and how to more effectively collaborate so that we can see the changes on the ground in Darfur,” she said.

In two weeks, White-Hammond will leave on a trip to Addis Ababa, where she will meet with African Union representatives to discuss ways of addressing different crises in the continent. She will also visit Darfuri refugees in Chad and Burmese refugees in outlying areas of Thailand.

Venturing into such dangerous situations can be terrifying.

“You have to go for it even when you’re scared,” she said. “I’m sure [biblical heroines] Esther [and] Deborah were scared, I’m sure Rosa Parks was scared, but we’re here because our mothers and mothers’ mothers marched through—knees knocking, throats dry and parched, hands shaking—because they had a vision.”

Like many great leaders, White-Hammond’s vision was blurred at first until her mission became clear.

In 2001, a friend and parishioner, Liz Walker, invited her and her pastor husband to join a group of ministers on a trip to Southern Sudan, where an ongoing war with the North had created a humanitarian nightmare. She balked at the idea at first, White-Hammond said, and went along out of a concern for her friend and husband. But what she saw there and later in Darfur, changed her life.

“I’ve heard stories, over and over again, of unconscionable abuse…women being raped; young girls, as young as 5 years old, who’ve been raped as well, multiply; burnings; people displaced; women who’ve had their ears cut off or their eyes gouged out…what you see is awful and that really is the face of genocide,” she said.

“It’s a very heavy burden when you realize how much devastation they’ve experienced. And they, like you and I, were living everyday life and all of a sudden, genocide erupts and their lives are turned completely around,” White-Hammond added. “At the same time what I see consistently is what I called an indefatigable capacity to hope. So as one woman said to me, ‘we’re dying but we’re also living.’ And I understand that I have to work to stop their dying but there are also opportunities to facilitate their living.”

While in Southern Sudan, the minister became part of an elaborate underground railroad that liberated about 6,700 enslaved women and children. And when she returned to the United States, she helped found My Sister’s Keeper, a faith-inspired coalition of women who work with women in untenable circumstances—with a current emphasis on those in Sudan—to develop a sustainable local economy and to agitate for  peace and human rights.

Already the group has assisted by sponsoring the training of a Sudanese doctor in HIV/AIDS prevention, helped the villages of Panliet and Akon acquire grinding mills, have raised and donated funds towards a hospital in Aweil and is currently on track to complete the Kunyuk school for girls in Akon in August.

White-Hammond said those efforts should not be mistaken as rescue efforts.

“When we say come and come alongside them, we’re not talking about us rescuing them; they are very resilient and it’s really coming alongside them to support them in their drive to live life,” she said.

In all these efforts, White-Hammond said, the A.M.E. Church has been a stalwart supporter in official and unofficial ways. Four years ago, the church passed a resolution about Sudan and the importance of addressing that issue, and A.M.E. churches have been steady sources of thousands of dollars in donations.

“The A.M.E. Church has a rich history of mission work in western Africa and Southern Africa and the Caribbean and I see it as my mission to further that work and to really get us into some of these hotspots, where we especially need the voices of African Americans raised,” said White-Hammond, who is co-founder and co-pastor of Bethel AME Church in Boston.