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

bright people in the world and so much wealth, could there not be humane shelters for such times if we are a family? Let a peace prize be reserved for those who can someday do this moral favor for humanity.
    I had a pretty good idea where my mother and father were hiding at this time, and also my sister Aysha and her children. My surviving brothers were here and there, according to reports from cousins. My second sister, Halima, who had lived near our home village, was with her children in an area that I cannot mention. I was in regular contact with all of them thanks to cousins on the move.
    My third sister, Hawa, who lived in her husband’s village in South Darfur, had been missing along with her husbandand children since the attack on their village. I thought my new work in the camps might help me find her and her family if they were still alive. I was looking for and asking about them always. More than four thousand villages were being attacked and destroyed, so this would be difficult.
    There were perhaps twenty of us in the team: half translators and half genocide investigators from the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe. We translators had been trained for several days to ask questions without causing further harm to people. I was moved by the sensitivity of these investigators. Some were very young, coming straight from universities, while the elders had worked in Bosnia and Rwanda and other hard places.
    The manager of the camp, who worked for one of the big relief agencies, greeted our team. I stood a little back, not wanting to be recognized or introduced by my new name. Our leaders went into the administrator’s office and I felt safe momentarily. But then the woman in charge of our group got a cell phone call from one of my cousins, who had tracked me down and wanted to tell me that some of our other cousins had been attacked the previous day. She came out and said she had a call for a
Daoud
. Did anyone know a Daoud?
    Some of the other translators knew my secret story and looked at me. I breathed deeply and smiled, walking forward.
    “Some of my friends call me that. Sometimes my cousins call me that nickname. Daoud is the same name asDavid from the Bible. They call me that because I don’t mind fighting with bigger men.” She still looked a little curious.
    “We all have many nicknames,” one of my translator friends said quickly to the laughter of others. The woman raised her eyebrows, handed me the phone, and said, “Okay. I get it,” and walked back inside. She was going to be cool about these things.

11.
Two and a Half Million Stories
    We soon split into groups to begin our work. With one of the investigators, I went to find a sheikh I knew. Each camp is like many villages pushed together, complete with their sheikhs. We asked this sheikh to help us find refugees willing to talk about what had happened to them. As he took us for a walk, I told him where my sister’s village had been and asked if he knew about her family. He did not.
    “There are many other camps,” he said in a gentle way. “Perhaps they are alive and you will find them.” I could not imagine how many times he must have had to say this to worried people. There are registries of names in each camp, of course, and I always would check these, but there is too much confused movement, too much fear and illiteracy, and too many displaced people—two and a half million now—for these lists to be complete. The sheikhs, however, always know better than the NGO lists.
    We walked with him through this mass of people. Veryyoung boys followed us wearing dirty and torn shirts and shorts. They ran around us, bouncing, trying to shake the white people’s hands, practicing the few English words they had learned in their now burned schools, or in the roasting canvas classrooms of the camp, or under trees when the school tents had blown away:
Hello, Good morning Thank you, How are you? What is your name?
    I looked for a boy I met