OK, Chad isn't rad

One week ago, I was in N'Djamena, Chad, on the last leg of my two-week trip. Today, rebels and government forces are battling for control of the city, and residents have been describing the sounds of artillery fire and gunshots to news services. It's the perverse nature of my job that I feel a twinge of pain not being there, or rather having been there too early.

 

Instead I'm on my way to Cape Town for some holiday R&R, followed by a reporting trip in southern Africa. I'll be watching the developments in Chad on the news like everyone else - OK, not everyone else - and thinking about the people I met on my trip there.

 

After two days on the border, I spent three days traveling with UNHCR in Sudanese refugee camps scattered around the town of Farchana. Two years ago, friends told me, these were wretched, unimaginable places where even the UN staff on-site lacked basic things like clean water. In the intervening months the state of the camps improved, and today upon visiting them you feel like you're in a poor but functioning town. NGOs have built schools and helped establish markets where people can earn a bit of money selling basic goods like meat, vegetables and clothes. Families living together cordon off private spaces with simple fences made of thin wooden sticks, inside which are a series of UN-issue canvas tents. It's not home, but the people who have lived there for a year or longer have created a sense of permanance.

 

The ranks of the camps have been swelling in recent months as violence in the area worsens, and it was easy to tell the new arrivals apart. On their tents you could still vaguely make out the letters "UNHCR" - they were only partially obscured by the sand and dust that blows everywhere in eastern Chad. In the newest camp, Gaga, I was looking to interview some of these recent arrivals, so we pointed ourselves in the direction of the whitest (i.e., least sandy) tents we could see.

 

I spent the morning talking with a handful of families about what brought them to Gaga. These were people who had fled janjaweed attacks in Darfur but settled just over the border in Chad, in the hope of remaining close to their native villages. Moving farther from Darfur reflected a loss of hope, a sense that this war wasn't going to end soon and they had no choice if they wanted to protect themselves. In many cases, they'd recently been the victims of violence. I met one man in his 40s who wore a white bandage on his bald forehead - covering a wound he said he suffered at the hands of the janjaweed two weeks earlier, when one of the militiamen struck him with the butt of his rifle.

 

The interviews weren't easy - I had to conduct them in French because my Chadian translator didn't speak English (I met few Chadians who did). But it was easy to glean a common theme: despite the steady increase in janjaweed attacks, most people told me they left the border reluctantly. They clung to the belief that they might, one day soon, be able to return to Darfur. Those of us out in the rest of the world who are following this story know that that faith is probably misplaced, that diplomatic efforts to resolve the war are failing and that no one predicts it will end anytime soon.

 

But these people, of course, know nothing of the high-level discussions. So they have hope. One of them said he was sure the people in rich countries - he pointed at me - were seeing what was going on and were working to stop it. That's why he was even talking to me, he said - he thought I was there to help.