Arrive Magazine - May/June, 2010

First Class

TRENDSETTERS

John Prendergast

Long before Bono started writing Op-Eds and Brangelina became synonymous with do- gooding around the world, John Prendergast was creating a new brand of on-the-ground humanitarianism. And, like most great stories that speak of happy accidents, Prendergast, 47, found his calling in the early 1980s while pursuing something else.

“I was all about working with youth in
inner cities,” says the Washington, D.C., res-
ident who doubles as a citizen of the world.
“I had my whole career track mapped out
and I was really excited. And, one night, I
just happened to see footage very late at
night. I had a sprained ankle from playing
basketball. I was sitting up in my chair and
couldn’t move. I didn’t have a remote con-
trol, so I would watch just whatever came
on TV. And these images started flashing
about Ethiopia.”
This was before “We Are the World”
and Live Aid shared the plight of starving
Africans with the world, and Prendergast
was transformed.

“I saw these pictures and was utterly
devastated,” he says, “broken by what I
saw. I just didn’t know that human suffering
existed on that scale. I felt very compelled
to just go and understand.”
Prendergast ditched his career plans
and bought a one-way ticket to Ethiopia.
The news didn’t sit well with his parents.

“It was shock and awe,” he jokes. “And
just confusion about, Where again? And the
usual misperceptions of Africa were no dif-
ferent inside my household than most others.
Just this big vacuum of information about
a seemingly terrifying place where war and
famine were the only things we ever saw.”
In the ensuing years, Prendergast served
as the Clinton administration’s director of
African affairs; appeared in various 60 Min-
utes segments; served as a consultant on TV
shows, films and documentaries pertaining
to the world’s trouble spots; co-wrote with
the actor Don Cheadle the New York Times
best-seller Not on Our Watch, about Darfur’s
genocide (a second book is in the works);
and co-founded Enough!, a “project to end
genocide and crimes against humanity.”
“I felt like we should work on creating
something that could help bring these com-
plicated issues that are usually reserved
to back rooms inside the Beltway to the
broader interested public,” he says of the
creation of Enough!. “Not everybody walk-
ing down the street is going to care, but if
one out of every 500 people cares enough
to write a letter to their member of Con-
gress or the president, that’s going to get
people’s attention.”
These days, Prendergast is optimistic
about the U.S. approach to Darfur and what
he says can be accomplished.

THAT’S ENOUGH!

We want to build a movement of people against genocide, against war crimes, so that the one piece of advice I’d give and the one entreaty that I would make would be to join the movement. Get involved in one of the organizations like Enough! that is educating and empowering people to help become an effort to transform U.S. foreign policy, so that the United States can be a more effective problem solver in these places around world, and in a cost-effective way.

At the end of the day, we don’t want to be sending American troops to places because we ignored them for so long (i.e., Afghanistan) that we had to send billions of dollars in humanitarian assistance because these countries fall apart. So we can save money by investing a little bit in diplomacy in the near term and we can save billions in the long term— and American soldiers’ lives. —John Prendergast, enoughproject.org