On the edge of existence
By Katherine Grant, Financial Times
April 1, 2005 — Darfur is now a household name in Britain, but a year ago, when I was among the first aid workers to be sent to this remote province of western Sudan, even old Africa hands might have been hard pushed to place it on the map. I was part of a UNHCR team charged with setting up the first refugee camps in the Sahel scrubland on the border with eastern Chad, where the number of displaced and traumatised Darfurians was growing rapidly.
Conditions were tougher and more basic than any other field posting I had experienced in five years of working in Cambodia and Afghanistan, and in those early weeks I was regularly overcome by a suffocating sense of panic at the scale of the task ahead. The cost – in terms of brute human suffering – of any failure on our part would be high.
Most refugees had come straight from their newly razed and evacuated villages, and many had lost family members, including children, in the attacks conducted throughout the Darfur region by the now-infamous Janjaweed horsemen. Women were giving birth in the wide, dry river-bed; small families of unaccompanied children were turning up with nobody to take care of them; the refugees’ sheep and donkeys were dying in their hundreds of cold and hunger.
To worsen matters, one of Africa’s legendary winds, the Harmattan, blew relentlessly across our corner of Chad, rendering all of our work a battle against the cold and against a constant facial assault of fine sand. A wind-blown carpeting of sand covered every surface inside the office including our laptops, camp-beds and toothbrushes. Visibility was at a minimum – we tripped over refugee shelters and tethered goats while visiting families or trying to remember where we had parked our vehicle.
I lived and worked in a tiny whitewashed building which was furnished with a few rough wooden benches and tables and an outdoor latrine. Bathing was an exercise in personal fortitude with cold, rusty water from an oil drum outside. Food – which apart from a few hours sleep each night represented our only distraction from work – was hard to come by, and always the same: rice, and a kind of stew with potatoes. On the rare occasions we saw a villager carrying a chicken down the street, we would pursue him at a run, clutching currency, in an attempt to persuade him to part with such a desirable commodity.
Amid this sand-filled chaos, I was simultaneously trying to register arriving refugees, supervise distribution of food and other materials, conduct interviews with refugees about abuses they had suffered before leaving Darfur, and ensure that water was being trucked to the camp in sufficient quantities every day.
Water was our waking nightmare, the worst of many logistical problems. There was no natural supply at the camp, and every day hundreds of new refugees were arriving at the camp on foot. We were paying extortionate prices to the local authorities to transport water in rusting trucks from a nearby village and at the same time conducting a desperate search for the water table using state-of-the-art European drilling equipment to crunch our way through 80 metres of Chad’s rock strata.
I found it very difficult when it came time to leave, having sat under thorn bushes in the whipping wind with the refugee committee, drunk glass after glass of hot, sweet tea with them in the fly-blown market at the edge of the camp, and heard their many versions of the tale of terror playing itself out on the other side of the border. This encounter between myself and the refugees seemed so unfair; we had built the camp together, but now I was able simply to get on a plane and fly away. They had no option but to stay in this precarious and desperate place.
The debate is now on in the corridors of power as to whether or not the abuses in Darfur constitute genocide. The UN is refusing to use the label, thus lessening its obligation to intervene – if necessary by force – to stop the killing. But genocide or no, the violence continues in Darfur, and going home for those in Chad remains a dream. The refugees will go on suffering in their camps, and this year another generation of aid workers will no doubt shake the sand out of their socks every morning and wonder why the world allows this outrage to continue.
– Katherine Grant worked for six years until late 2004 in the field with UNHCR, the United Nations agency for refugees. She is now an aid worker with Unicef.