Dinner and a Talk with Nicholas Kristof
Yesterday Nicholas D. Kristof, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and columnist for the New York Times visited NC State and gave a talk titled “The First Genocide of the 21st Century: Report on Darfur.”
The Park Scholarships Speaker Series and the Political Science department co-sponsored this event, and I was the main student coordinator for the event. The whole day I was running around making sure all the rooms were ready, dashing off to Kinkos to get program brochures made, and getting audio/visual equipment ready. I got to meet him before he gave his big talk and was there in the wings to help with the DVD he wanted to show.
The speech was excellent, discussing the Darfur crisis with first hand experiences, providing the history behind it, and showing why we should care about what’s going on. I was telling people earlier that I would rather have to keep the fire marshal out of the room than have any empty seats, but we packed Nelson Auditorium like no other event I’ve seen before. Kristof even asked the people standing in the back and along the sides to come down and sit by the stage. Turn-out was great.After the talk, I joined a few faculty members and other students for a dinner with Kristof. There about 12 of us, eating in the executive board room in Peele Hall. We chatted about the Darfur issue a bit more, then moved on to other topics. It was a nice dinner…Kristof is really an amazing guy. We were all so impressed with how casual, easy-going, and nice he is. And he has so many stories and experiences to tell.
I think the Darfur Awareness Week we put on was a success, and it was a real pleasure to interact with such a famous columnist like Kristof.
