The Tragedy of Darfur

Kharim and her family walked for three days. In the afternoon they would sleep in the canyons because they didn't have enough food or water to carry them through the scorching heat of the day. Like hundreds of thousands of other refugees, they made their way here, across the western border of Darfur into neighboring Chad, where the U.N. has set up twelve camps to house hundreds of thousands of refugees. Many have lived here for as long as two years, in rapidly deteriorating conditions. Children suffer from malnutrition and dehydration. Tents leak during the violent rainy season, ruining blankets and mattresses. While collecting firewood, women in the camps have been raped by armed militias and local villagers, who see the refugees as competition for the desert's dwindling supply of fuel.

As Kharim spoke, others in the courtyard nodded their heads or clicked their tongues against the roofs of their mouths. They had all lived through the same thing. The following morning at Bredjing, the largest camp in Chad, I listen as Abdoulaye Yacoub Annour, an old man dressed in a tattered white robe, describes how his village was destroyed in a three-day onslaught. "The entire village was burning," he says.

I ask Annour if he lost any family members during the attack. "I lost eight of my family," he says. I ask who they were. His eyes, slightly bloodshot and surrounded by a web of lines that disappear into his gray and black mustache and goatee, begin to well up. Supporting himself with a walking stick, he stretches out his hand and prepares the sand at his feet with the tips of three fingers, running them back and forth along the surface until it is smooth and ready to be written upon. With one hand still on his walking stick, he draws four lines on the ground.

"Four children," he says. One line for each child lost.

He moves his hand over a few inches more. He waits a few seconds and then draws two more lines, each roughly the length of a finger.

"Two sisters."

He slides over a few inches and sweeps away a little more sand, as if deliberately trying not to crowd the dead, before drawing the last two lines.

"Two nephews."