A Southern California human rights activist trapped in an African hotel room in the midst of a gunfight between soldiers and rebels crawls across the carpet, feels something hot under his fingers and flinches.
"I touched a bullet," he says, voice and hands shaking.
Gabriel Stauring, 41, posted the video footage on his website last week after traveling to the Central African country of Chad to document Darfur refugees for his Redondo Beach-based group, Stop Genocide Now.
He was scheduled to return home Feb. 1 from his three-week trip. But when rebels attacked the capital of N'Djamena, Stauring's flight was canceled and he found himself hiding in the Le Meridien Chari hotel, caught between two rebel targets: the presidential palace and the airport.
With only a handful of French troops protecting the hotel, Stauring frantically e-mailed friends, family, the U.S. government and international aid groups for help.
He had been warned by United Nations workers in Chad that his trip was dangerous. President Idriss Deby, a former general, was clinging to control of the former French colony, a republic more than twice the size of California with a mostly poor, rural population of 10 million. A coup by rebel forces rallying in the east seemed imminent.
But Stauring had heard similar warnings before his first trip to Chad in 2005 and two subsequent trips -- and survived them all unscathed.
This time, he arrived in the capital Jan. 14 and traveled east with three fellow Americans, past mud huts, down remote dirt roads to sprawling Darfur refugee camps -- makeshift villages clustered near the eastern border with Sudan, where rebels had been massing. There was talk that the Sudanese government in Khartoum was helping rebels prepare for a coup.
But trouble seemed to spare Stauring's group, which included fellow Stop Genocide Now staffer Katie-Jay Scott, 27, of Portland, Ore., and Joshua Sundberg, 32, and Jeremiah Forest, 32, leaders of the Laguna Niguel-based nonprofit World Abundance.
In the camps, Stauring videotaped and wrote about the tens of thousands of refugees who had seen their families massacred during the five-year conflict in Sudan's western Darfur region. It was inspiring to see friends from past trips, Stauring wrote on the Stop Genocide Now blog, but depressing to see them still living in the camps.
"I try to act with the urgency I would act with if it was my family sitting out here in the middle of the desert," he wrote. "I'm not sure that I have been living up to that."
