Women & Children of Darfur

"Perhaps a thousand women and children were standing in daylong lines for their monthly rations of wheat, cooking oil, and salt from the U.N. World Food Programme. Others, with plastic jerry cans, waited in separate lines for their turns at the water pump."


"Every day these same girls and women collected wood for their cooking fires by scavenging sticks from the surrounding wild areas. These areas were quickly stripped, angering local tribes and forcing foraging trips ever deeper into dangerous territory. As a consequence, rape was now the going price of camp firewood. If the women sent their men to gather wood, or if they came along as protection, the men would be killed. So the women and girls went alone and in small groups, often to be raped by the local men. It is the same in Darfur, but there it is the Janjaweed who rape. Many pregnancies of unwanted children were the next tragedy facing these women. The girls and women who looked at us and blinked away our dust as we drove past had the look of people who had seen all this." (pg. 73)


"Losing a child is so hard ... It doesn't matter where you live in the world for that. Babies are usually not named in Darfur until several days or even weeks after they are born, because so many babies die here without doctors or medicine. Those who do live are considered birds of passage who did not want to stay. Naming the child is therefore saved until it is clear the spirit in this child wants to stay." (pg. 65)



As shared by Daoud Hari in The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur