Scarcity and plenty
By Stan Stalla.
Sept 6, 2005 (Nyala) — My sleeping arrangement in Nyala, South Darfur, provides me with basic comforts.
The bed is a simple metal frame. Into the metal poles of the head and footboards are placed four wooden sticks of different thickness and painted blue. Stretched along their tops is a green mosquito net, which drapes down 10 inches or so below a two-inch foam mattress. The mattress sits on nylon ropes that are woven length- and width-wise between the metal frame.
When I get into bed, the ropes sag a bit in the middle, which has the effect of making my head higher than the rest of my body: a not-too-uncomfortable position for reading.
There’s a ceiling fan that pushes the hot air in circles. By early morning, it cools off enough to pull a thin top sheet over my torso. Actually, the room also has an air conditioner, but I prefer the natural swings in temperature to coping with unnatural extremes. All in all, it’s a satisfactory environment to contemplate the events of the day.
The other day, I traveled to a new IDP (“Internally Displaced Persons”) camp a few kilometers from Nyala. Ironically, in this troubled region, it has the name Al-Salaam, which is “peace” in Arabic. The purpose of the visit was to observe the first distribution of emergency food aid to camp residents.
Much of the food consumed in Darfurian camps these days is “A Gift from the American People.” Along with the USAID handshake logo, these words are sometimes stenciled onto the red-white-blue nylon sacks of sorghum and wheat, and painted on cans of vegetable oil. Long after the food has been eaten, these sacks are used as housing materials and the cans re-pounded into funnels and tabletops and even toy trucks.
The monthly food distribution process is fairly uniform. Women and men sit separately in lines on the sandy ground, until their turn to have their ration cards punched. Volunteers from their community dole out rations from scoops that hold a standard amount of kilograms.
What made this distribution different from others I’ve witnessed is that, as new residents in a new camp, the people were also going to receive nonfood items. This was to be their chance to set up their household with such items as sleeping mats woven from dried grasses, blankets, plastic sheeting that they would stretch over the tops of curved, wooden poles to make an igloo-like shelter, jerrycans to collect water from stand pipes, bars of soap, and some metal bowls for cooking and eating.
Once they had gathered all their supplies, people had a choice of walking the half-mile or so to the camp, or loading them on the flatbeds of waiting donkey carts.
In an almost cashless setting, food rations become the currency of barter. The donkey owners charge the IDPs a half-kilo of cereals to haul their supplies. So, even before reaching their makeshift shelters, many people already start with less than the minimum standard of food for the month. When they take their sorghum or wheat berries to the miller, he will charge them more of their ration, if they have no cash.
More rations are traded to buy medicine or the tomatoes, okra, and onions that complement the flour and water porridge called aseeda, which is the staple food in much of Central Africa.
After observing the steps of the distribution process, a colleague and I headed into the camp. If possible, I wanted to see what the living conditions were like inside a shelter. I asked the people I met what else they lacked. Several voices chimed in to say that they needed “bed nets,” showing me the mosquito bites on their arms and faces.
With the rainy season at hand, mosquitoes are vectors for malaria, and parents were especially concerned for their children. A young woman — she looked around 30 — agreed to have me step inside her shelter. It was bare, except for a stack of metal dishes in a corner. In answer to my questions, she told me that she had nine children, ranging in ages from 16 to 3.
Her husband had been shot last year — one of the thousands of victims of the violence that pervaded and still exists. I asked her what food she had in the shelter, and she showed me one pot with a little residue, along with three large, charred sticks outside the shelter that had been the firewood for the morning’s meal. Several of her children had lined up to receive and carry on their backs the month’s rations.
Later that same day, upon our return from Al-Salaam Camp, a Sudanese colleague invited the five of us to join her at her favorite rotisserie in town. Driving through the sandy streets of Nyala, we reached a row of wooden tables with large hunks of meat on display. We had arrived at a local meat market, conveniently adjacent to eateries with long rows of barbeque grills. The proprietor arranged chairs in a circle in the sand and sent one of his workers down the street to buy a large chunk of sheep meat.
While we talked about our impressions of the camp we had visited, our chef, using his bare hand as a cutting board, busied himself chopping cucumbers, onions, and tomatoes. Soon, the chunks of meat were cooked. We all hunched around a large metal tray, using our fingers and pieces of bread to scoop up the meat and salad, dipping them in a homemade chili sauce that made me sweat more than the midday, desert sun.
As much as the six of us ate, there was no way we were able to get through that huge pile of food. Finally, we sat back and asked our chef to put the rest in a bag, which we brought to one of the women who cleans our office. And the bill? Two thousand Sudanese Dinars, which amounts to $8. That’s less than $1.50 per person, not counting the takeaway bag that would feed another family that evening.
The contrasts of this world never cease to confound me. As I slipped under the mosquito net that night, my thoughts were of the poverty of Al-Salaam Camp, of the relative wealth of my colleagues in Nyala, and of how unfathomable for them my life in Maine would be.