awesome technology

The US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Google Earth have come up with a truly awesome use of technology. Get a mind-blowing perspective of the crisis in Darfur using google earth. You'll need to go to the ushmm to download a Darfur layer for google earth. Google has updated the satellite imagery for this area, along with providing icons that identify destroyed villages, displaced persons and multimedia content to tell individual stories.

The actual satellite imagery is pretty detailed as well.

The satellite imagery of Darfur and Chad was taken between 2003 through 2006, some imagery shows what the village looked like before the attack. In other cases, villages may have been rebuilt by returnees or occupied by others. - ushmm.org

The image above is of the Abu Shouk camp, which was just what it looks like, a tent city in the middle of a desert.

As violence in this part of the remote region of western Sudan increases again, there is an expectation at Abu Shouk—and across Darfur—that no one will be heading back to their villages any time soon. In the face of that reality, the camp has undergone a slow transformation from a settlement of plastic-covered shelters hastily constructed with branches, to a community that has many of the trappings of permanence—and home. - oxfamamerica.org