A Place to Call Home

I never did get an opportunity to speak to the IDPs who’d been forced out of Mayo, but I did finally get my travel permit for Al Fasher, the regional capital of North Darfur, where we would base our operations. It was now home to well over forty thousand IDPs; some estimates had placed the number at seventy-five thousand. I was desperate just to get to work—not the work of meetings and reports and never-ending statistics but the time with refugees that I’d had so little of in Iraq. Here, I was determined not to repeat that cycle.

Early one morning, I finally boarded a shiny WFP plane and flew to the rugged region of Darfur. Al Fasher was a dusty, crowded town, filled with haggard people with drawn, tired faces, goats and donkeys contentedly meandering about, and markets selling tomatoes and onions just on the verge of rotting. There was an ever-present fog of dust in the air. Although there were schools and a military base there, it was a town that had never been properly maintained. Plaster homes were crumbling, electricity was limited to the military areas, and water was a precious commodity. The influx of tens of thousands of IDPs into this decaying scene placed Al Fasher’s delicate balance at risk.

Adam had found a small office/house on a dusty main street and moved in quickly. Resources and habitable property here were limited, and we knew that we were lucky to have this place. He’d even managed to find a propane hot plate for cooking, since we would have no real kitchen. We’d been promised electricity, but the town’s power was diverted to the army garrisons, leaving us, and much of Al Fasher, in the dark.

Our bathroom was another crumbling mud, two-room outhouse located behind the office; one room held a freestanding latrine and another housed a small room for washing. To wash, we had to lug our water in from a large standing container in our front yard; bucket baths were the order of the day. Without light, washing took great effort, and since the water was dirty to begin with, I always felt dirtier after washing.

The latrine was a tiny dark room filled with more of the marauding, menacing cockroaches that seem to own Africa. When I needed to use the latrine, I was always swifter than I believed I could be, but any foray into the latrine required a delicate dance with the roaches; a run, a dip, a desperate shuffle to get in and out quickly. The enormous insects were stalwart defenders of the latrine and seemed to delight in terrorizing me. Many times, I wound up saying “the hell with it,” just peeing anywhere and then running like crazy out of there.

The desperate heat in Al Fasher enveloped the town; the bright blue sky was utterly cloudless, and the sun bore into the dusty land and into all of us for at least fourteen hours of every day. The heat was so intense that it never really wore off; it stayed tucked into everything—clothes, food, even our skin. Without electricity, there was no hope of relief. Because I was in another Muslim post, I was expected to dress conservatively. A head scarf wasn’t required, but I usually wore my baseball cap to try to keep the sun at bay. Once again, there was no wine. It seems that the things I crave when I’m away are the things I can’t have—wine, bubble baths, electricity—but the truth is I was too busy to miss any of it.

I slept on a roped metal cot with a pad over it. Tucked underneath my bed was an old fashioned chamber pot, a gift from Adam so that I could avoid cockroach run-ins in the middle of the night. It was far easier in the middle of the night to roll out of bed, feel around for the pot, squat quickly, and then roll right back into bed. In the morning, we would each carefully balance our pots as we carried them to the latrine to be emptied.

Because time for cooking and buying food was limited, I usually wound up eating tomatoes, onions, sometimes even cucumbers and bread if I was really lucky. We had no complaints about our living conditions. Considering where we were and how the IDPs were living, we knew that we were lucky to have a bed and the promise of tomatoes. The team was now just Adam and me. We rarely saw each other during the day; after morning instant coffee, we each headed in different directions to get our work done. In the evening, we saw each other briefly; I headed to bed early so that I could rise with the sun and start work, and Adam often stayed up and worked by flashlight.

I fell asleep those first nights in Al Fasher to the unmistakable sounds of shelling off in the distance. (I easily slept through the sounds now, only waking when the noise was especially loud. Quite a change from that first night in Thal several years earlier, when I literally cowered in my cot.) I knew now that these sounds of war signaled continued terrors for the people they targeted. For us, it meant that the steady stream of desperate refugees into Al Fasher would not ease.

My first destination in Al Fasher was the IDP camp called Al Mashtel, which housed tens of thousands of gaunt, tired refugees in a space meant for less than five thousand. They were huddled together when I first saw them—not for warmth, for they sat under an unforgiving and blistering sun, but rather because there was just not enough room on this patch of land for all of them. An endless sea of people, as far as the eye could see; over sixty thousand by some estimates, held hostage first by the Janjaweed terrors perpetrated back in their own villages and now held hostage here, forced into this crowded, squalid, depressing camp. They survived here with little food, little water, no shelter, and few prospects for anything better.

The scenes were mind numbing, the politics unsettling, and the victims filled with a quiet dignity that was impressive for its infinite hope against all odds or common sense.

The women, though dressed in literal rags, which were covered by the now grimy, fraying, torn veils required by their religion, were almost elegant in their small movements. Just as with the African women I’d met several years earlier in Kakuma and the returning refugees in Bamiyan, these women, too, though encumbered with hellish burdens, were as graceful and poised as though they’d been sitting at afternoon tea instead of on filthy ground amidst misery and squalor. The children—at least those who were covered—wore fraying rags. The few men here, mostly old and milling about in small groups, wore the traditional white robes and turbans of the region. All of them—men, women, and children—wore expressions of sad resignation: tight mouths, loose slumping shoulders, and wary eyes. They had seen the worst of humanity, and they were lucky to have come through it with their lives, even if nothing else. The women here had survived rape and torture and mayhem, the men had escaped certain death, and the children had witnessed it all.

Here in Al Mashtel, they were existing on barren, dry land with occasional sticks of thorn brush pushing through the earth. They had gathered scraps of rags, ragged brush, and, if they were lucky, torn pieces of discarded cardboard, and with these remnants, they had constructed small shelters and borders, a hopeful attempt to create a place they could call home. Women and children made up the vast majority of IDPs here; the men had been murdered or were missing or in fearful hiding from the Janjaweed. The women sat or squatted on their tiny plots of space, seemingly resigned to their plight. The children, dirty and ragged, ran about in search of brush, or just sat quietly drawing lines in the dirt.

This camp was a miserable place to call home. The ground here was littered with feces, both human and animal. Although some latrines had been constructed and more were planned, these rural dwellers weren’t used to latrines and so resorted to their familiar habit of squatting wherever the need overtook them. For those who did attempt to use the latrines, their inexperience was clear, for the ground surrounding the latrines was covered with feces. We would either have to teach them the proper use and cleaning of latrines or else dig defecation fields where they could squat and not worry about correct use. Here in this teeming environment, one of our first concerns was the prevention of disease, and to that end, creating better defecation areas or helping people use what was available would go a long way in preventing disease and dysentery outbreaks. Adam and I had already discussed the possibility of just going out and digging the defecation fields ourselves. No fuss, no proposals, no research to back it all up. Just do it. However, there were people here to do just that. It seemed we’d have to wait to avoid stepping on others’ toes. In the meantime, I tried to watch where I put my open-toed-sandal-clad feet, but I somehow never really paid enough attention—I was busy writing notes or speaking as I walked—and, no surprise, I often wound up with literally shitty feet.

In addition to the feces, the ground was littered with the rotting, decaying carcasses of dead donkeys, goats, and other small animals. Those lucky enough to escape with their animals had been unable to feed them or provide them with water, and they had withered and died, as so many of their owners soon would here in this fierce wasteland. Combined with the ever-present feces, the stench was overwhelming; it filled the air and attracted flies and birds of prey, giving the scene its final terrible indignity.

Throughout the camp were freestanding hand pumps for water so that people could fill up jugs for cooking and cleaning. The containers were filthy, long-used plastic jugs and were usually carried by small children, who stood in never-ending lines to fill their jugs, though they could barely carry the heavy containers once filled. They didn’t complain, for their time at the pump was playtime, a chance to meet other children and be childish while waiting their turns. Once they reached the tap and filled their jugs, they struggled to balance the heavy containers, but the water invariably splashed out onto the ground. By the time they made it home, much of their precious cargo had been lost.

The lines for water were also remarkable for the presence of animals. The donkeys, goats, dogs, sometimes a camel, lingered about in search of water, too. The problem was they would surely spread disease through the open water taps. The children and people here didn’t seem to notice or mind the animals in their line for water, for they were used to sharing. It was the health teams who watched in horror as goats drew a drink from the open tap.

As wretched as this place was, it was home for now, and the truth was these people here in this squalid camp were the lucky ones. They had survived, they had a place to stay, some food for their children, the beginnings of health care, and finally they had some semblance of protection. Protection was the one thing that the IDPs and villagers consistently identified as their primary need.

“If you do nothing else, at least protect us,” was the commonest refrain.

“What we need is protection from these evil men while we are here and a guarantee of safety in our own villages,” one man said, his fingers scurrying over his prayer beads. “You understand? We want to return home, plant our fields, and continue our lives.”

The Janjaweed, who had so brazenly attacked the IDPs’ villages, later attacked their camps, from which they looted recently donated items such as food, blankets, and shelter materials. The IDPs were so terrified of the Janjaweed that they asked aid groups not to distribute these items in hopes of preventing another attack. It was a conundrum. Our very presence here afforded these haggard and besieged displaced victims a semblance of protection, and they felt sure that even the bold Janjaweed would hesitate to attack under the eyes of international witnesses. However, it wasn’t long before several aid convoys were ambushed as they traveled about, the Sudanese workers shot or injured by land mines. But the Janjaweed reportedly failed to show their faces and quickly retreated, blaming the attacks on rebel elements.

The government of Sudan, a military dictatorship with a well-earned reputation for torturing its own citizens, was finally, and with great reluctance, allowing international aid into the region. But once allowed into Darfur, our movements were restricted, our activities and interventions confined to specific areas, usually the provincial centers. As a result, we had access to only about 15 percent of the population of Darfur, leaving the vast majority of the victims of Darfur still without help of any kind. The government seemed determined to thwart our efforts at every turn. By controlling our movements, they manipulated us and the situation to their own advantage. It was the most politically charged, bureaucratically boondoggled area imaginable. If ever I needed a glass of wine to get past the bureaucracy and the bullshit, it was then. But there was no wine to be had.

Time was running out, not just for the IDPs in Al Fasher but for the still hidden, who were so adversely affected by the conflict here. One million people were on the move, searching for safety, protection from their tormentors, help to reclaim their lost lives. Some would find their way to IDP camps, but many more, still terrified, would stay hidden and alone, starving and dying, afraid to venture into the camps.

There were also too few NGOs with just too much to do. Together, with our best efforts combined, we could only hope to slow the coming disaster, not prevent it. We needed more of everything—food, medicine, equipment, and experienced personnel. The rains were imminent, as we’d heard at every meeting, and it was imperative that we have our resources in place. Adam worked furiously to get our WHO emergency kits through Khartoum and into Darfur before the rains came and transformed Darfur into an impenetrable wall of mud and water. We felt overwhelmed some days by the scope of the unfolding events. Without world attention on Darfur, it was a battle that, we were acutely aware, we could well lose.