The World's Emergency Room by Michael VanRooyen

Author:Michael VanRooyen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Published: 2016-02-24T00:00:00+00:00

7

A New Era of Challenges

I woke up with the sun, wrapped up in a half-dozen itchy wool blankets inside my UN tent. I was in a refugee camp in eastern Chad, just across the border from the Darfur region of western Sudan. The climate in these borderlands is typical desert: intensely hot and dry during the day and near-freezing at night, when the clear black sky pulls away all of the heat of the day. The night had been especially cold, so I stepped into the sun to warm up.

Outside, I scanned the Kashuni refugee camp, wondering where to find some hot water for instant coffee. I also pulled out my father’s pipe and packed it with tobacco. Though I don’t generally smoke, I bring this old pipe along on trips as a quiet tradition. I toasted him with a few puffs in the desert dawn. Someday, I would tell him about this place.

Even though it was very early, I discovered that most of the camp of 16,000 had already awakened. Kids were out collecting water. Mothers were building small fires and preparing to bake the flatbread eaten at nearly every meal. The day was already off to a busy start. The bustle of the morning was a sharp contrast to the inhospitable landscape. If not for humanitarian aid (in the various forms of food, water, shelter, and protection), the entire population of the camp would likely have perished. The sand-blasted savannah could support very little vegetation, mainly twisted thorn trees that gave little shelter from the desert sun. The Fur (or Darfuris), the tribal people of Darfur, had been forced to flee to this desert no-man’s-land. At home in Sudan, they lived simple, subsistence-level lives in a sparse country that was not much more verdant than eastern Chad. But to the Darfuris, that challenging land was home. Darfur was their birthright, handed down over many generations. There, their lives had been intensely interconnected. Families depended on each other to share food, tools, donkeys, and camels. They needed each other to live, let alone prosper, in the forbidding landscape.

As inhospitable as Darfur was, a lengthy civil war for control of the region had smoldered there for more than a decade, since 2003. I was at the Kashuni camp to understand and advocate for its civilian victims. In this conflict, the government of Sudan had recruited the horse-riding Janjaweed militias (Janjaweed roughly translates to “devils on horseback” in the local dialect of Arabic) to exterminate the Darfuri tribes. The Janjaweed originated from nomadic Arab herding tribes already in conflict with the native farming tribes over Darfur’s limited water and arable land. Backed by the Sudan government, the horsemen slaughtered cattle, burned farmers out of their villages, and drove them into the desert, killing those who remained behind. The refugees at Kashuni were fortunate; many Darfuris were killed outright. As many as 200,000 non-Arab Darfurian civilians have died during the war. The extensive disruption of civilian life and extreme violence,

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