In 2004 three young American activists, with the help of the rebel Sudanese Liberation Army, slipped into Sudan and Chad to make a movie about the genocide taking place in the Darfur region of Sudan.

Their cameras caught graphic images of burned-out villages so devoid of life that even the birds had left. Refugees in camps in Chad bear hideous physical scars and tell of rapes, bombings, and seeing family members murdered before their eyes.

That film, Message from Home: Darfur Diaries, also became a book, Darfur Diaries: Stories of Survival.

On Friday, Jan. 26, at 7:30 p.m. during Shabbat services, one of the activists, Aisha Bain, will speak on Genocide in Darfur: An Eyewitness Account, a program at Temple Sharey Tefilo-Israel in South Orange.

“One of the things we had in mind was filming the children who are the most marginalized and try to see the conflict through their eyes and voices,” said Bain in an interview from Washington, DC, where she works as the Asia program associate at Global Rights: Partnership for Justice.

The film, done with Adam Shapiro and Jen Marlowe, has had more than 165 screenings and has been seen at film festivals throughout the world. It captured the “Best of Fest” award at the Tri-Continental Festival in South Africa. The United Nations Security Council viewed segments of the film as did the human rights caucus of Congress.

“In the West, we’re so easily desensitized to conflict and suffering,” said Bain, a native New Yorker and daughter of a Haitian mother and an Israeli-Jewish father. “We see it and then we turn the channel. So we wanted to show these people had a society and culture and were teachers, farmers, religious leaders. We wanted to show what life was like for them before the conflict, using their own voices.”

So far, 400,000 people have been killed and more than two million are refugees, according to the Save Darfur Coalition, an alliance of over 170 faith-based, advocacy, and humanitarian organizations founded by the American Jewish World Service and the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The UN has characterized Darfur as the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.

The Jan. 26 program is just one way in which Sharey Tefilo-Israel is raising awareness about the Darfur crisis. Its TSTI Save Darfur Committee has participated in rallies in Washington and New York and been actively involved in advocating on behalf of Darfur, according to member Carla Boden, who helped organize the program.

“The Jewish tradition of tikun olam teaches us that there is a humanitarian obligation to reach out to those in need,” said Boden. “This temple has been amazing. We have a banner hanging outside the temple from the Save Darfur Coalition. We are going to address our Hebrew high school this week. We really just want to raise awareness because, although many people have heard of Darfur, they don’t know the statistics, just how staggering the situation is.”

In addition to Bain’s presentation, the temple will have on display an exhibit of paintings drawn by adults from the Darfur Rehabilitation Project, a Newark-based nonprofit organization that was founded by Sudanese refugees. Its mission is to inform the American public about the human rights violations, unite Darfurian expatriates to bring increased international attention to the crisis, and promote conflict resolution, democracy, and respect for human rights in the region.

Marlowe, the primary author of the book, described the “scorched-earth campaign” she saw inflicted on Darfur by the Sudanese government-backed Arab militia known as Janjaweed, sent to crush a rebellion in the region.

“We saw bomb craters, shrapnel; we saw child soldiers while in Chad,” said Marlowe in a phone interview from Jerusalem, where she is working on a play. She also works on conflict resolution projects between Israeli and Palestinian teens.

Marlowe, who was introduced to social activism through Reform Jewish youth groups growing up in Philadelphia, said that despite the Darfurians’ almost indescribable suffering, they made valiant attempts to rebuild their lives and establish makeshift schools for their children, efforts, she said, that touched her deeply.

To help in these efforts, the filmmakers have partnered with the Darfur Peace Development Organization to rebuild schools through the donation of a portion of the profits from the book and film.

“The stories we heard were similar — their villages were attacked by air; then came the ground troops with government soldiers and more killing, raping, looting, and burning,” said Marlowe. “We talked to a woman who had a four-year-old son who had been partially paralyzed by shrapnel. One boy talked about how his brother was shot in front of him as they sat together. There were people who saw their fathers, their kids killed. Some of the children were so traumatized they had no words to tell us what they experienced so they had drawn us pictures to express their trauma.”

Bain said Dafurians are under no illusions about the cause of their suffering.

“They understand this is not the first time the Sudanese government has suppressed its own people for its long civil war,” she added. “Every Darfurian of every age we talked to knew exactly what was going on and did not blame the Arabs. Not once did we hear anyone talk about the Arabs with hatred or as being their enemy. They lived at peace with the Arabs for hundreds of years.”

Most troubling for Bain is that four years after her trip, the conflict has now spilled over into Chad, creating a new wave of refugees. A proposed 60-day cease-fire between Darfur rebels and the Sudanese government negotiated by New Mexico’s Gov. Bill Richardson appears to be tottering.

The situation has grown so dangerous that humanitarian aid groups, on which 3.5 million people are already dependent, are pulling out of the region.

“Things continue to deteriorate in Darfur daily,” said Bain. “I would never have believed four years later I would still be talking about this. We know it’s happening; ‘never again’ is happening again and again.”

For more information about the program, call Boden at 973-376-2445.