The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur (11 page)

We went through the once-beautiful town of Furawiya. Some thirteen thousand people had lived here and in the surrounding villages before everything was attacked and destroyed. This was the picture-book town of North Darfur, with huge trees along its river, and mountains on each side of the sandy bottom that held the town. The destruction had been most cruel. Villagers escaping up a hillside were machine-gunned from helicopters. Philip and I saw the hill still littered with at least thirty-five bodies—many of them children.

We slowed down while driving in the sand along the wadi that had once held the larger market town near my home village. Forgive me for not using the names of some of these villages, but it is to avoid causing further trouble for those still hiding in these areas.

In the wadi there were no bird sounds—so unlike the place I remembered. The silence was deeply spooky. We arrived at the site of the old village, and there we saw some passing rebels resting under trees and others who had always lived in the area whom I recognized.

I showed Philip where the sheikh’s home had been, now a black spot in the sand with the remains of some mud-walled rooms. Other patches of black sand were visible up and down the wadi. Some of the larger trees were burned, but newer trees were green and might someday again shade village life in this place.

Philip interviewed some of the rebel troops. A few people who had been living in the secret areas of the mountain valleys, and who were in the village that day to learn what was going on from the rebels, gave me some news: my sister Aysha and my father were nearby and had been told of my arrival.

My father, now very old, was still walking great distances and taking care of animals. I had kept in touch with him. My mother had set up a place in some hidden dry stream and was finding ways to plant some millet, as women do. I wasn’t sure if my father was well enough to get to her very often as he moved the animals to grass and kept himself invisible to the Janjaweed and the government troops and their airplanes. But he would have left some animals with her for milk and perhaps some chickens for eggs.

I saw him before he saw me. He was wearing a white jallabiya and a small white cap, all dangerously visible but very traditional. He was more stooped over than when last
we met, and a little smaller—the big sturdy body that I had known was almost gone. He was talking to some other older men, gesturing with one skinny arm.

He turned to me as I came near. His eyes were milky and I could tell that he could barely see, but he knew my steps or somehow felt that it was me. We embraced gently. He felt thin and fragile but held me in a very strong way. It was hard to let him go.

“My father,” I said.

“Daoud, we have been hearing all about you. It is so good to see that you are alive. You had some trouble yesterday with some rebels.”

Darfur is like that. News travels fastest where it seems to have no way to travel at all.

“Take some tea with us,” my father said, leading me to a tent. We sat down with the other men, who were uncles and cousins I hadn’t seen in these years.

The tent flap later pushed open and my sister Aysha entered in flowing bright green with two children holding her hands. She laughed when she saw me and then just smiled and closed her eyes to float in this moment.

“Daoud, the city man, has come to visit!” she said. “You honor us simple villagers.” Everyone laughed. Aysha is the funniest of my sisters.

The tent was soon filled with cousins who wanted to greet me. It was a great joy to be surrounded by family, talking and laughing as if our world were whole again—holding tightly my father’s hand, knowing my mother was alive and not far away, imagining Ahmed was out watering the camels. Yet this small tent now held the entire remnant of
a once great valley of villages. This beloved world was nearly lost, but here was some of it yet. We ate well; Aysha brought smoking trays of richly seasoned goat meat for everyone. Philip sat with us as part of our family now. He had made this happen, so how could he not be my brother?

Why is it that the person from far away is always the wise expert? For no other reason than this, I was consulted regarding the problem of the day: a young girl refused to marry an older man arranged for her, and she had tried to poison herself. I told them that this girl should not be forced to marry the man, and she might try to kill herself again if this was forced. The men nodded in agreement. The old ways were perhaps bending a little, and this Juliet might be free to marry her true love instead.

That night was the first deep sleep for me in these years since the attack. This was 2005, and the attack had been in 2003—a long time not to sleep much.

Even so, I woke up and stood in the moonlight for a time, waking not from nightmares but from the comfort of this place, which had come into my sleep like the smells of spiced tea and mint. The sands by moonlight looked as they had when I was a boy and played Anashel and Whee late into the night with children now blown far away. Sandstorms will come, covering these ashes in a few years, and who will ever know that loving people lived here, and that the mountain in the moonlight, cool and silent there, is called the Village of God and is filled with all our hopes for our people?

I would like to tell you that Philip and I and our driver made our way safely back to Abéché, but it wasn’t exactly
that way. It was important to get out of Sudan before dark, and because I would tell the driver to turn here or there, at this tree or down that wadi, he was never sure if we were safe in Chad or again in dangerous Sudan. “Sudan? Chad? Sudan?” the driver was always calling out to me while raising his hands in the air to emphasize his point. Philip thought this was very funny. The driver simply didn’t want to be killed that night. And it actually
was
funny after a while. When you are with the British for some time, strange things seem funny. The driver kept going faster and faster as the sun went down. This is not a good idea in a darkening place with no roads. I leaned forward to tell him to slow down, but I was a moment too late: we hit a hole, spun around, and crashed badly. Philip was in front, wearing his seat belt, and was not injured. The driver was shaken but okay. I was in back without my belt, as I was leaning up at that moment, so I crashed headfirst into the driver and broke my nose, which was bleeding furiously as we all climbed out of the wreck. We were in a bad way on the Sudan side, and all Philip could do was point at my nose and laugh. This made the driver finally laugh, also. I started to laugh but it hurt too much. We limped into Abéché and Philip paid the driver in cash for his car. We then found our way to one of the bars in Abéché, which are filled with flies and black market traders. A few drinks improved the pain in my nose and neck.

We discussed only the brighter moments of the trip: seeing my family, of course, and a moment in Furawiya when Philip had stepped close to take some video of an unexploded five-hundred-pound bomb in the sand of the
wadi. He had somehow tripped and fallen headlong onto the bomb. He lay sprawled over it for a long moment, wondering if his next move would be a bad idea. I looked at him and thought,
Well, the British would laugh
, so I laughed. He whispered for me to please help him get up carefully, which I was happy to do, since the moment was in God’s hands, certainly.

“If it had been me to fall on the bomb, you would have laughed,” I said to him in the bar in Abéché.

“If it had been
you
to fall on the bomb, it would have been funny,” he explained.

He flew away the next day and I waited for the next reporters willing to brave Darfur.

A call came soon from British television, Channel Four. British television is a big thing all over the world, but if you grow up poor in Africa, especially in a former British Crown colony, it is a very big thing. They wanted my help. British television did. Amazing. I went to N’Djamena to prepare to meet them. There was a little problem first, however, as the love-hate thing between Chad and Sudan had changed again and rebels backed by the government of Sudan suddenly attacked N’Djamena in Chad. I woke up in that city to RPGs exploding in the streets outside my small room. You do not need an alarm clock to wake up in that city even on a normal morning, but this morning that was especially true.

Though it is the capital of Chad, N’Djamena, a city of about three quarters of a million souls, is located exactly on the country’s border with Cameroon, as if it were waiting for the right moment to cross the river and escape its own poverty.

The heat wakes you up in N’Djamena. The children playing outside your door also wake you. I had taken a small room in a low, mud-walled building of eight families, so I can testify to this. Men and boys on camels, riding along the dirt streets to market, shouting from camel to camel, wake you up, too—though it is not unpleasant to hear this as you wake, for the French and Arabic of N’Djamena blend together very musically. Little scrappy motorcycles also wake you up and you can smell their smoke. The old diesel engines of yellow Peugeot taxicabs begin their daily prowl down the mud streets, and their rumble and
smoke also come into your room. Many of the women of this city begin their march to the river to wash the family clothes; they talk and laugh as they pass your window. And you might get a cell phone call from friends who want to know what you are doing today.

I normally would open my eyes to my electric fan going back and forth, plugged into the tiny gas-powered generator chirping outside my door. Everyone has one of these generators. Chad has a great deal of oil and a great deal of oil money, but somehow the people only get a few hours of electricity a week.

French fighter jets from their base by the airport fly low and fast over the city on a usual morning. This is a courtesy in case you are still lazy and need to wake up.

The land beyond the town is flat desert with sparse patches of acacia, jujube, tall palms, and, in the summer rain time, a little green grass. Everything is otherwise brown except for along the river, where women lay their bright clothes along the banks to dry after washing them in the clearest currents. N’Djamena is a trading crossroads, so camels, sheep, and goats are everywhere. Some families grow cotton near the river. Some go fishing in the Chari and the Logone rivers and in Lake Chad, once the third-largest lake in Africa—though it is quickly drying up. Tilapia, catfish, and salanga are sold in the town market and fried by women in the open-air bars. It is the best of the many smoky smells of N’Djamena.

Most women wear long, bright clothes—a few wear thin, fluttery veils. The men wear their loose turbans or
linen caps. Some wear traditional white robes, the jallabiyas, but most dress Western style, with matching light brown shirts and slacks. Most people, like me, are tall— I am six feet—and are also a little thin because of all the walking, the hard work, and the dieting that is one of the many advantages of poverty.

You can walk along a mud street in N’Djamena, with old apartment houses beside you, and smoky street stalls selling richly spiced kebab lunches for your only meal of the day, when suddenly you are at the door of a four-star luxury hotel. Chad has oil wells, so there are a few grand hotels for the rich, who come to quickly take the money away before it ruins the charm of our mud and straw cities. I expected to meet the British TV people at one of these hotels, but I woke up in an unexpected way and had an unexpected day.

At around three-thirty in the morning, trouble began with terribly loud RPG explosions and mortar and machine-gun fire. The rebels, who were no such thing, but rather the agents of the government of Sudan, swept in from the east, the south, and the north. The Chad Army helicopters hovered over the invasion, avoiding firing where it would hit civilians.

At about five-thirty I could not stand it any longer and went outside. If I was going to die, I did not want it to be from a stray round killing me on my mattress. Let me at least be standing on a street and watching all of it.

Chad Army Land Cruisers were speeding this way and that, and the ragged trucks of the rebels were going that way and this. Young rebel soldiers, not even fourteen years
of age, would jump out of the trucks where they could and run into homes to beg for street clothes so they could hide among the civilians. They had been taken as soldiers against their will, drugged, and sent into battle. But some were wise enough to do this dodge, and everyone would help them.

RPG rounds were hitting these trucks full of child soldiers; the streets were filling with the bodies of the dead and wounded. I walked to a friend’s house not far away. Trucks of men shooting would go by, but they were not shooting at me. If you were unlucky, of course, you could get hit, but otherwise the soldiers were fighting one another and not the people.

My friend knows many in the Chad Army and they began to call him on his cell phone. This guy was wounded at this address, and that guy was wounded somewhere else. Could you come give us a ride to a hospital? So we, like many other groups of friends, drove madly around the city, avoiding bullets and taking people to the hospitals, which filled quickly but still did an amazing job of helping everyone they could. By noon, all the rebels had been killed, taken as prisoners, or had run away. About 250 young boy soldiers were captured and, I pray, later sent to school instead of to their deaths.

Some 400 troops were wounded in the two hospitals. In the evening, President Déby visited the hospital. It was so loud with screaming and so flowing with blood that the sound and smell of it was impossible for all but the bravest doctors and nurses. The rest of us checked on our friends.
Many people were dead, but after two or three days people found their way back to the markets and outdoor bars to talk it through.

Megan called me from New York; Philip from London; others from all over.
Yes, I am okay
.

The British TV crew arrived in time to interview many of the prisoners and to see the city as it recovered.