A Return to Abu-Shok

It was not until late October that I was able to return to Abu-Shok in North Darfur. I’d heard it had become a “show camp,” but I still remembered it as a vast desert wasteland where small shelters dotted the bleak landscape and where our little clinic stood alone. I was stunned as I approached the camp and gazed upon a veritable village of some sixty thousand. So orderly and well organized was the camp that it even boasted a bustling little marketplace. Sturdy shelters had sprouted up everywhere, and this once dreary place was filled with life and hope. I asked staff in our clinic there about Hawa, the midwife who had suffered and lost so much in the carnage in Tawila, but she was nowhere to be found. No one could say for sure where she had gone. I asked at the other NGO facilities, but she had simply vanished. I asked, too, about Halima, the lady from Kabkabiya who had worked as our registrar, but no one knew her either.

Though Abu-Shok was an oasis amid misery, it housed only sixty thousand of the more than one and a half million displaced, desperate, and dying Darfurians. Babies were still dying needlessly of malnutrition and preventable disease. Starvation was an everyday occurrence for pockets of people trapped and hidden in Darfur’s darkest corners. Insecurity made them inaccessible; our aid and food programs could not reach them, and they could not escape. As my assignment there ended and I packed for home, I couldn’t help but wonder if any of us had really made a difference, and that persistent worry made my good-byes that much harder.

Saying good-bye to the people I’ve worked with has never been easy, but it was especially difficult in Darfur. I had been in Darfur for several months on this last visit, and I knew the region well. I knew how the sun sneaked up quickly in the morning and then disappeared just as swiftly in the evening. I knew the sounds of the call to prayer, the almost dreamlike melody of the chant. With my eyes closed even now, I can see the haunted, hungry eyes of the children there. I can hear, too, the sound of a dying baby’s cry and a mother’s wail of sadness. But I can hear, too, the unforgettable music that the laughter of Darfur’s children creates. For even in their deepest misery, they somehow managed to find joy.

It is the staff and the displaced in the camps, too, that I will always remember. Their names and stories, like so many others in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Balkans, and Kakuma, flow through my memory like pearls on a string. In Darfur, there were Hawa and Halima, Talya, and Aliah. And Hossein, the little boy who finally received a soccer ball courtesy of the reporter who’d covered his story, and Mohammed, the tailor who’d been provided with money to help him learn a new trade, something that wouldn’t require his hands.

And I will never forget the staff in our clinics, many of whom lived right there in the camp, and who, despite their own tragedies, trekked each day to the clinic to care for their neighbors with a quiet grace and steady hand that so often took my breath away. I wanted to be one of them—to have that unselfish, unfettered heart and mind.

To that end, I am a work in progress.

The people of Darfur continued to suffer. The region is vast, often remote, and frequently too violent to traverse. The situation is complex and requires far more resources than are currently available. The world’s attention has moved on to other crises. I can’t remember when Darfur last made the news.

In 2009, IRC and nine other aid groups were expelled from Darfur after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for President Omar al-Bashir for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur. He retaliated by banishing the aid that was so desperately needed there.¹ And so, fifteen years after the madness and evil set in, Darfur is still under siege, still waiting for rescue, still praying that it will all end.²

And, despite the bureaucracy and the bullshit, I long to be there again.