Free The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur by Daoud Hari Page A

head. Because I had been to this camp before, I had been worrying that the people who knew me here would certainly call me Daoud, when the genocide investigators had hired me as Suleyman, citizen of Chad. I was still wanted by the government of Sudan ever since they tried to extradite me from Egypt for immigration violations. If Chad arrested me for false papers or for working illegally instead of staying in a refugee camp, they might send me to Sudan, which would surely be the end of me. This had been hanging over my thoughts as we traveled.
    Familiar smells and the low rumble of a great crowd greeted us as we rolled down the windows: babies crying but also children laughing and running after us, stretching out their fingers to touch ours; mothers calling for their children to be careful, the crunch of bundles of firewood being unloaded from the backs of donkeys, the braying of those donkeys, the smoke and smell of a thousand little fires, of spiced and mint teas brewing, of hot cooking oils and overheated, dirty children. A gauze of this sound, smoke, and dust extended over the tangled nest as far as one cared to look, except where the women wore their beautiful colors, which stood out through the sticks: clean and bright reds, oranges, yellows, brilliant blues and greens. The women of Africa, as the world knows, have a genius for color, and they decorated this place with themselves, as they always do. The bold colors they had put away beforethe attacks were now waving from their lean bodies with defiance—the flags of resilient life.
    Perhaps a thousand women and children were standing in daylong lines for their monthly rations of wheat, cooking oil, and salt from the U.N. World Food Programme. Others, with plastic jerry cans, waited in separate lines for their turns at the water pump.
    Every day these same girls and women collected wood for their cooking fires by scavenging sticks from the surrounding wild areas. These areas were quickly stripped, angering the local tribes and forcing foraging trips ever deeper into dangerous territory. As a consequence, rape was now the going price of camp firewood. If the women sent their men to gather wood, or if they came along as protection, the men would be killed. So the women and girls went alone and in small groups, often to be raped by the local men. It is the same in Darfur, but there it is the Janjaweed who rape. Many pregnancies of unwanted children were the next tragedy facing these women. The girls and women who looked at us and blinked away our dust as we drove past had the look of people who had seen all this.
    Except for the food and the tattered canvas, and for some drawing paper and pencils so the children could make pictures of huts and cows and helicopters shooting people and airplanes dropping bombs and men with bayonets stabbing the people identified in these drawings as the children’s uncles, brothers, sisters—except for these, the world’s charity seemed almost invisible here. Perhaps the wealthy nations had finally blown themselves away and were nolonger available to send their usual token remedies for the problems that their thirst for resources has always brought to such people as these. It should be said that much was being done that we could not see at first glance: groups such as Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), Oxfam, and Italy’s Intersos were hard at work here, but the smoky misery of homeless human beings stretching to the very horizon cannot but upset your heart.
    Canvas and plastic make very hot shelters in a desert, and these were what the world had sent—exactly the wrong thing and not nearly enough of it. Perhaps there was no right thing to send; the grass huts of Darfur, so cool in summer and warm in winter, were impossible here because of an insufficiency of grass and wood poles, of space to put them up, and of young men alive to build them. What, indeed, could be built quickly enough for so many? Even so, with all the