Angelina Jolie ‘Transformed’ in Chad

“If I can draw you in a little because I’m familiar, then that’s great. As long as [you] end up looking at them, that’s the point.” — Angelina Jolie on the power of celebrity.

Here are some of the highlight’s from Angelina Jolie’s recent trip to a camp housing Darfur refugees in Chad via Newsweek:

…But you do have photographers following you now. It took me a while to agree to do it. I guess I saw that so many times the picture comes before the knowledge and the substance and I certainly didn’t want to do that to myself or the organization.

And also, I really just was shy. I was shy about sitting on the floor and talking to a woman and having a camera take a picture because I thought it was making less of my conversation with her. But… I was changed by the faces of the people I saw. “It is something that I am incapable of describing…those faces and that place and those people. And so I think it’s just—let the people speak for themselves through the camera. And if I can draw you in a little because I’m familiar, then that’s great. Because I know that at the end you’re not looking at me, you’re looking at them.

Do you still go with so few people? I can’t believe you take no one with you… I take no one. I [go] by myself on a commercial plane and into the field with my backpack.
You still do that? Yes, I just did that on my last trip. I met the photographer there.






In the camp? No, in the airport. We didn’t even realize we were on the same flight. We landed at like midnight and got up at like 5 in the morning to catch the WFP [World Food Program] plane [to a town near the camp].

People will look at these pictures of you in Chad and ask, “What can I do?” What should they do? There are great NGOs like SOS [Austria’s SOS Kinderdorp] and there are great NGOs inside and under the U.N. that you could send aid to.

It’s important for the American people to know that a lot of people believe—I certainly believe—that it has been their outcry and their interest that has motivated our government. I think that the American people have paid attention to Darfur—a really amazing groundswell of people that really care, and are moved and emotional about the things they’ve seen when it is brought to their attention.