Sudanese refugees in Chad seeking aid find only shared misery
By Emily Wax, Washington Post
BAMENA, Chad, March 11, 2004 — Standing in a line waiting for water, in the middle of the central African desert, in one of the poorest countries on Earth, two women — a Chadian peasant and a Sudanese refugee — became good friends.
It was 8:30 in the morning when they met. For Hamisa Ibrahim, 31, the line that had taken 20 minutes each day since she was a girl now took half the day. Instead of a dozen local women, there were more than 200, most of them unfamiliar faces from Sudan.
For Jamisa Yousife, 30, who arrived from Sudan in January, Ibrahim’s well was her only hope. She brought her camel, her goats, her donkey and her groggy, sickly children all in search of water. The women started chatting, and friendship followed.
“Are you feeling well?” Ibrahim asked in Arabic of her friend on a recent morning. Yousife lowered her bright brown eyes, embarrassed about the line of her fellow Sudanese, all collecting water that wasn’t theirs.
“You are kind for asking,” she responded.
But the kindness of the Chadians is surpassing their means. As thousands more refugees flee war in Sudan, desperately poor villagers in Chad are breaking under the strain of sharing their brittle soil and scarce water with the newcomers. At the well in Bamena, both women — with their nearly identical first names, ages and dire material prospects — are nervously watching the arrival of more families with nothing to eat and nowhere to go but here.
Two months ago, the 20-year-old Sudanese civil war seemed nearly over. U.S.-backed peace talks between the Arab-dominated government in the north and African rebel forces in the south were advancing. But fighting in Sudan’s western Darfur region has sent a constant flow of refugees across the border into Chad. A total of 130,000 people are estimated to have crossed into Chad since December, with 25,000 arriving in just the past two weeks, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.
For the most part, villagers in Chad have empathized with the refugees, citing tribal ties and remembering their own civil strife. At the well, Ibrahim pointed to the rusted tanks, rockets and bullet casings that dot the landscape here like an open-air museum of Chad’s 30-year civil war, which ended two years ago.
“We know despair and suffering,” she said. “You don’t see any schools here. You don’t see any health posts.
“We are all suffering in Africa, it’s our fate,” she said with a shrug.
“You are always caring for me,” Yousife said. “I thank you.”
“I am trying,” Ibrahim responded, while a giant dust storm raised by the hooves of Sudanese livestock — thousands of cattle, camels, goats and sheep — approached with a sour smell and the deep sounds of mooing, and descended on her village.
Limitless Solidarity
Colonial powers drew the border in 1956 that separated Chad from Sudan, but tribal ties have been stronger than national identity for those living on either side. Those bonds have saved lives in the months since Sudan’s government responded with bombs and militia attacks to an uprising by militants in the Darfur region.
When the fighting started, Mohamed Sandel gathered his eight children, his wife and his aging father, and told them to get ready to flee across the border. His wife collected their mattresses, cooking pots and sacks of sorghum. They moved to his brother-in-law’s compound of mud huts in Chad, two miles away. They piled their house inside his. Twenty people slept under the same straw roof under the stars.
Sandel watched through binoculars as Sudanese government militiamen moved into his home.
“Don’t worry,” his brother-in-law, Ibrahim Mohammed Hashem, told him. “We can receive you forever, if you want.”
The men are part of the Zagawa ethnic group. As blacks, the Zagawa in Sudan feel persecuted by the Arabs who dominate the Sudanese economy and government. Sandel said he was called “slave” by the Arab militia. “I was told, ‘You, black, go.’ ” Such attitudes are a source of solidarity with Zagawas in Chad.
Sitting in his cool hut, Hashem and other men said they were prepared to fight the Arabs and to go to war for their Sudanese brothers. Hashem has given Sandel land to build a new home and he is sharing his food and water. Within view, five carcasses of cattle and goats rotted in the sun, all dead from dehydration.
There are concerns that Sudan may bring the war to Chad. In late January, two Sudanese planes dropped bombs on a Chadian town, Tine, where 40,000 refugees have moved into homes constructed of sticks and blankets. Arab militias have rustled cattle in towns farther south along the border.
Although Chad’s president, Idriss Deby, is a Zagawa, he has not challenged the more wealthy and powerful Sudanese government, which backed him in his struggle for power.
In the southeastern Chadian town of Adre, black Chadians and black Sudanese rebels joined to attack Chadian Arabs. They killed a prominent chief, raising tensions between blacks and Arabs. Aid groups fear battles like this may lead to a wider war.
“Yes,” Hashem said. “I know that we all may suffer, too. We share everything, and if we must, we may have to share war, too.”
‘We Have Nothing Here’
Many Sudanese refugees are well-educated and in search of work as well as water and shelter. But there are no jobs. Amina Tinjany sat recently in a field with a group of 30 women — all with college degrees, all once teachers — who are now hungry.
Tinjany has lost 10 pounds since she left Sudan. She felt dizzy. Her orange polka-dot scarf and dress were falling from her body. She tied it onto her shrinking waist with a frayed blanket. She cried and then she shouted, “We have no food.”
These women crossed the border three weeks ago. Men on horseback rode into her village, she said, stealing cattle and burning huts. The men of her village are gone, she said, perhaps killed by the bombs, perhaps kidnapped for use as soldiers by the rebel group. She didn’t know.
Tinjany, 29, used to teach Arabic studies and education. Now she writes letters, begging for help. She wrote open letters to the Chadian people, to Britain, to God and to the president of the United States. She explained that she had attended her district’s best schools and that her tribe was once a prosperous group of businessmen, government workers and health care professionals. The letters were written in Arabic and English, but there is no way to mail them.
She looked over the sad scene of her friends. Zenia Ibrahim, 35, used to teach math. Now she tended to her father, passed out under a tree, with two broken legs. He was injured in the bombing. She brought him here in a wheelbarrow. Another woman — a history teacher — had shrapnel stuck in her leg. Her flesh was turning purple.
“We have nothing here,” she wrote, as tears streamed over her brown skin. “Will we just rot here like our animals have? We are all Muslims. We are all black. Does anyone care about us?”
When she first arrived in Chad, some local women came and donated what they could: ground nuts, some tea, some sugar. But after a few weeks, they said they were running out and had no more to offer. Tinjany gathered a few teachers and offered their skills to the village. But the Chadians couldn’t even afford the salaries of the teachers at the one school in Tine.
“Chad is a very little and underprivileged country and we have no more to offer,” said Tom Dillo, the governor of Tine. He held a satellite phone and papers tallying the refugee flow. “There is a saying in our community that you can’t close a big hole with a little hand. We will have nothing left to offer except the soil to bury us all in.”
A Friendship Cools
Back near the Bamena well, Ibrahim and other Chadian women formed a committee to gather blankets, food, shoes — anything extra that they owned — for the refugees.
“The only thing separating us is our huts,” said Ibrahim, whose home is made of mud, but keeps the sand away. One night she awoke to the sounds of a woman crying in the desert who had lost her family. Another night, she found three orphans.
There was another reason she and the other women donated. Most of the refugees were women and children. The men were gone, some dead and others fighting. Since many men had two or three wives, they left behind large families and dozens of mouths to feed.
“The women here have a close relationship,” Ibrahim explained. “We know they are hurting.”
The village women donated 17 sheep, 50 sacks of sorghum, seven bags of sugar and three bags of tea.
The refugees rejoiced. It was enough to help them survive another week. Ibrahim gave one of her best dresses to Yousife, an orange one with flowers and a sweeping head scarf. For a few days, everything seemed better.
But the only thing the villagers couldn’t offer enough of was water. The village of 7,700 people and 5,000 head of livestock has just three wells. There has never been so much demand for water, never so many people going to the same sources.
So the friendship of Ibrahim and Yousife cooled off where it began: at the watering hole.
Ibrahim, who has four children and is herself one of three wives, watched in shock as five of her cattle, 29 of her camels and three of her horses died because of the water shortage.
The refugees’ livestock also ate her grass. She wondered if sharing was endangering them all. Her husband was upset. His other wives were blaming her. Her children were hungry.
“I wish I had anything left to give,” she said on a recent morning, as a group of Chadian women gathered by the well. “I feel so angry now. We have so many problems. Now, I am thinking we are going to have a lot more.”
Her friend Yousife and some other Sudanese refugee women came over.
“We are angry, too,” Yousife said. “We don’t even have a space to live. We are suffering so much.”
There was silence.