DAY SEVEN: TWENTY-FIVE STRANGERS

With our feet, legs, and bodies sore, we keep walking with strong, unbreakable hearts. We bore the pain of walking approximately 40 kilometers every day for six days, which as a student at a high school told me was “impossible”. And soon this impossible chapter of all our lives will come to an end.

It was easy to see that by Day Seven the pace for the Walk for Darfur team had definitely slowed. But the pace did not matter, by the end of Day Seven our team screamed in unity “We walk for peace, we walk for action, we walk for the people of Darfur.” We had one more day left of walking. The biggest day of the walk yet: The rally for the people of Darfur.

On this day, being a Saturday, there were no high-school presentations, no making a difference through our words. There was just the Walk for Darfur team walking on the Queen Elizabeth II Highway waving on as cars pass us by, making a difference through our actions. With Day Seven being our last major day of walking we all were wearing our hearts on our sleeves. Emotion from this walk poured out of each individual. We all have shed blood, sweat and tears for this journey and it’s ending is a mere 24 hours away. This isn’t the end of the journey for the people in Darfur though; they won’t have hundreds of people cheering for them at the end of their walk. All they will have is hope. Hope that people will care. Hope that people will share their pain. Hope that the violence will end. Hope that this is the last mile they will ever walk for safety again. Hope for peace.

When we reached the Leduc School, the Walk for Darfur team ended the night with a full team supper, poetry, gifts and even dancing. The whole team was smiles, laughs, but mostly tears. This was our last night together, the last night we would sleep next to twenty-five strangers on a hard gym or church floor. But now with our last night at hand, we were not strangers anymore; we were a family.

The struggle we have faced the past seven days have made us very tight knit. We unified for a cause, all with different personalities and similar views on life.

Tomorrow is going to be the day that we show the people of Darfur that we care. We will be their voice. We will be the change. We will give them hope.

Like our logistics coordinator voiced today , “Momentum. Onward and upward. For the people of Darfur.”