A leader from a nonprofit organization spoke to an audience at the Tempe campus about solutions to atrocities taking place in the Democratic Republic of Congo Monday night.
Falling Whistles, based in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., helps raise awareness and funds in an attempt to bring peace to the region, which has been ripped apart for years by civil war.
In addition to seeking peace, founder Sean Carasso spoke about how his organization is bringing awareness about the individual problems attached to the armed conflict — abductions, rapes and the death of children.
Falling Whistles has educational displays set up across the country in places like shopping malls in order to draw the public’s attention. These displays teach people more about the war in the Congo, Carasso said.
The organization raises money by selling whistles.
“Make their weapons your voice and be a whistleblower for peace in Congo,” he said, reciting the organization’s motto behind the whistle.
Falling Whistles has 20 full-time members and an “army” of people across the country talking about the horrors in the Congo, Carasso said.
Carasso heard about the travesties in Congo after backpacking through Africa with a few of his friends for three months, eventually arriving in the war-torn nation.
While there, they went to many different rebel groups and base camps, “poking [their] noses where they didn’t belong,” Carasso said.
The travelers met five boys who were taken by a rebel army and were forced to kill, and forced others to kill. They escaped and fled to the National Army for protection.
However, when the boys arrived, they were beaten and treated like enemies of the state.
The boys told Carasso about children who were too small to carry guns, yet were still fighting. Instead of guns, they were given whistles.
The children who are given whistles are sent to the front lines in battle, Carasso said. Their goal is to scare off the enemy by blowing the whistles, and when the fighting starts, they act as a human shield for the army behind them.
After they get shot, they are instructed to fall so they can act as a blockade for other soldiers to hide behind.
After Carasso heard about these children, he said he was angry and in tears. That night, he wrote a blog and forwarded it to 80 of his friends and family.
They forwarded the story to all of their friends, and by the next morning, there were thousands of e-mails in Carasso’s inbox, all of them from people wondering what they could do to help. This outcry was the beginning of Falling Whistles.
Booklets of Carasso’s blog are sold today to help raise funds for the organization.
The war in Congo is the deadliest and largest war in the world, with estimates putting total deaths at least at 6.9 million, around 1,500 deaths a day, he said. There are also 1,200 rapes committed every month, about 70 percent of the world’s rapes.
The presentation was organized by global studies senior Scott Ross, who has been involved with another nonprofit organization that works with kids in Uganda called Invisible Children.
“[The presentation was] really good for raising awareness about the conflicts going on in Congo,” Ross said. “I enjoyed [the presentation],” painting freshman Matt Marshall said. “He was really down to earth and easy to connect with.”
Reach the reporter at connor.radnovich@asu.edu
