Sudanese Aid Worker Unprepared for Survivors' Stories

With several hundred women waiting to be registered at one camp in Darfur, the war-ravaged region of western Sudan, I had ten minutes to fill out each questionnaire, taking down enough information to qualify the women for upcoming distributions of food and other essential items.

Ten minutes should be enough time to cover the basics — how many people in the family, where they were originally from, how they came to the camp. But it was never long enough.

As we questioned the women, stories came pouring out of them: whose child was burned, whose daughter had been raped and whose husband had been slaughtered. It's hard to turn away from that.

The women I met are just a few of the nearly 2 million people made homeless by the conflict in Darfur and the nearly 3.5 million people affected by it. February marks the fourth anniversary of this war, and as it enters its fifth year, the situation is growing more desperate for many.

There were signs of progress in 2005 — a drop in death rates, for example — but conditions began deteriorating again by the end of the year. Security concerns recently forced humanitarian groups to scale back operations, limiting the number of people we reach. Some agencies have had to pull out altogether.

I've spent more than 16 years as a relief worker in Sudan, gearing my career toward helping women, who often bear heavy shares of the daily burdens. Early in my career, women in the western Sudanese region of Kordofan told me about working from 5 a.m. until dark to take care of their fields, their families and their homes, while their husbands sipped tea under shady trees. But the challenges are even greater in Darfur, where women are often responsible for the family's survival in a place where surviving itself is a feat.

I took my first trip to Darfur shortly after joining CRS in the fall of 2004. In Khartoum, Sudan's urban capital, I'd heard about the conflict, but wasn't prepared for what I found in the field. When I came home, I searched the Internet for corroboration because I could not believe the tales. And, because the media had glossed over what was happening, I had trouble making anyone pay attention to what I'd seen. "This is war!" I kept saying.

'I Could Not Believe the Tales'

One woman told me about returning from a well early one morning to find gunmen on horseback torching her village. People were running haphazardly in every direction, unsure of how to escape a danger that seemed to surround them. The woman heard the sound of her own small children screaming from their hut as it burned. She was unable to save them. With her grandmother beside her on a donkey, the woman walked for days to reach the humanitarian camp where I found her.

Other women I met talked about going without food and water for three days as they carried their children over the border into Chad to reach safety. They described their fear of collecting firewood outside the camps after being attacked and raped. They talked about giving up their own food rations so their children would have enough to eat. And, over and over, they talked about death.

When I was a girl, my father encouraged me and my six sisters to seek out schooling, though highly educated women were rare in Sudan at that time. "If a woman has an education, she has power and can defend herself," he would tell us. Even with an advanced degree and a job with an international agency, I struggle for independence — until a couple of years ago, I could not leave the country without my husband's written permission. The women I meet in the field have even fewer means of self-defense.

The very presence of humanitarian agencies helps reassure people in Darfur. I've seen children who know little about CRS use charcoal to draw the agency logo on a market wall. Women have told me they feel more secure when convoys of aid vehicles are coming and going — largely because the activity deters local militias. When we are there, people in Darfur see that the world remembers them, and our attention may help them survive.

When I first went to Darfur, I didn't sleep well, just thinking about the women's stories. Now, I worry more about what will happen if we stop sharing their tales.