The outdoor lunch area at the Milken Community High School and Middle School in Malibu looked like it was having one of those crazy department store holiday promotions, where kids have five minutes to grab all the toys they can carry and then race back to the check-out counter with their free booty.

There were girls and boys, hurrying to tables piled three feet high with crayons and pencils, paper and coloring books, plus all kinds of toys and board games. Then they would return to their "team" at picnic tables to fill up big cardboard boxes - not, however, for themselves, but for the hundreds of thousands of children in the growing African refugee camps of Darfur, Sudan, and nearby Chad.

In under an hour on this sunny Southern California mid-December morning, some 50 students from St. Paul the Apostle School and Milken had packed almost 15,000 items collected from the efforts of thousands of local students, which would soon be taken away in a U-Haul truck and shipped to the camps with the help of the International Medical Corps.

"What a gift it is that you are giving to be able to share some of what you have with children who are just in a horrible, horrible situation, who have lost parents, who have lost sisters and brothers, who literally have no food to eat and think nobody in the world cares about them," Rabbi Harold Schulweis of Valley Beth Shalom told the Catholic and Jewish students after the boxes were all packed and taped.

"When we talk with survivors of the Holocaust - when 12 million people, many of them Jews, were massacred in Nazi Germany - the biggest thing they say is, 'We felt when we were in those concentration death camps nobody cared.' Our objective as an organization, and, hopefully, it's one that you share, is to make sure that those children in Darfur know that somebody in the world is caring about them."

In October 2004, Rabbi Schulweis founded Jewish World Watch in a single synagogue to combat modern-day genocides and other egregious violations of human rights. Today, JWW is a coalition of some 50 synagogues that also reaches out to other religious congregations.

The Encino-based group chose Darfur as its first advocacy campaign because of the 400,000 black African Muslims who have been murdered by the Janjaweed Militia and nearly 2 million people who have been displaced. Through donations to the International Medical Corps and International Rescue Committee, water wells and two health clinics have been constructed in the refugee camps. Newly installed solar cookers have also lessened sexual assaults on women, who must leave the safety of the camps to gather firewood.

Daniel Huskey, 13, St. Paul's student council president, said he knows all about the murders, rapes and displaced population of Darfur. It amazes the eighth-grader that the United Nations and United States haven't done anything to stop the carnage. Packing toys and school supplies is his way to concretely help victims.

"I'm here doing this because I'm in a middle class family and I'm really lucky to be supported by parents who make an income that can support us and give us food," he told The Tidings. "I've been to Third World countries because my mom is Colombian, and I've experienced poverty. I've seen what these people go through, and I feel a connection with them.

"So that's what I'm doing here," he stressed. "I want to make sure that their lives can be as great as possible. We all are here on this world to help each other."

Susan Bjelajac, vice-principal of St. Paul the Apostle, said Daniel and 22 other students from the parochial school jumped at the chance to do some physical labor for their counterparts in Darfur. With her junior high religion class just finishing comparative religion projects, packing up toys and educational materials with a Jewish school was a perfect hands-on exercise.

"The way that we teach religion at St. Paul's is that you might know your faith, but you have to live your faith," she said. "So, what's important is that you are the hands of God in the world. And this is part of that.

"Kids need to do something at this age, because their faith to them has to be part of their life," she pointed out. "It just can't be in their heads. And there's a lot of things that they can get confused about, in terms of what's happening in the church. So this has to be part of church for them, or we lose them."

Last year in seventh grade at Milken, Michelle Nabaci learned about the plight of the people in Darfur. She helped raise $10,000 at her school to send them, because she realized how lucky she really was and knew she wanted to raise her voice on their behalf.

After the 14-year-old helped load a box, she and all the other students went to a front table to decorate and pen messages to the children of Darfur. "The reason why we want to help you guys so much is because that you guys have hopes for the future and that people do care about you," she wrote.

Michelle said she came out today because actions speak louder than words. Sending packages halfway around the world, together with personal messages, was a message of compassion.

"I think that what we're doing is also amazing because it's a Catholic school and a Jewish school helping a Muslim country," the adolescent mused. "We all have the same goal to help someone.

"And we're all coming together as one, regardless of religion, and we're helping another religion whose members want freedom, too," she added. "So it's really special, and it's a miracle."