The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur (9 page)

Like camels, donkeys are loyal unto death. Donkeys suffered terribly as they carried children out of Darfur into Chad. They kept going without enough food or water— three days without water will kill a donkey. A camel, by comparison, will deflate after many days without water. He will get smaller and older looking, with a drooping head. But when he is refreshed with water and grass, he is beautiful again, strong, big, and young-looking again. Donkeys cannot do that. Some donkeys went longer than three days without water, because if there was any water at all, it was given to the children riding on them. When these animals reached the camps and finally felt the children slide down, many of the donkeys straightaway fell dead, having done their loving work. The NGOs in some camps made piles of hundreds of these dead donkeys and burned them in great fires that were terribly sad for the people to see, especially the children. These animals were like family, so full of modesty and devotion.

The donkeys who survived the trip were happy now to be moving wood and water around the camps.

My investigator and I sat on straw mats in the precious shade of a small tree. Seven people, collected by the sheikh as we walked, sat with us to tell their stories. A few wanted the world to know the terrible things they had suffered and demanded that we tell their stories personally to the U.N. secretary-general, whose name they knew. Some thought we must know him as well as they knew their own sheikh. Others were quieter in their pain and spoke to us only out of respect for their sheikh and his request.

Often, then, the stories came pouring out, and often they were set before us slowly and quietly like tea. These slow stories were told with understatement that made my eyes and voice fill as I translated; for when people seem to have no emotion remaining for such stories, your own heart must supply it.

It helps many people just to have someone listen and write their story down; if their suffering is noted somewhere, by someone, anyone, then they can more easily let loose of it because they know where it is. Only little comfort can be given, however, to a woman or girl who has been ravaged. The pain is written deep into her flat eyes and flat voice. There is, she believes, nothing for her now. We would listen with heads bowed, careful to tread only where she would accept another question and perhaps one or two more.

The first day was very hard on everyone who told a story and everyone who listened. The dust of the camp was
streaked down the faces of even the most experienced investigators. The coming days would be no easier.

The attack stories were often like my own, though I realized how lucky our village had been to have Ahmed’s leadership. So many villages were caught completely by surprise: surrounded, burned alive, massacred from helicopters above and Janjaweed below, with only a few escaping, or a few coming from other villages to find everyone dead and the bodies burned in heartbreaking positions; mothers died trying to protect their children and husbands died trying to protect their wives. Hundreds of thousands were dead. Millions were homeless.

While I was waiting that first evening for the return of some teams who had ventured farther toward the horizon of this great camp, an administrator stepped out of the office and saw me. “Daoud!” he said. “What are you doing here?”

He knew the work I was doing was against the law for a refugee in Chad, so I walked slowly toward him, giving myself time to think. Halfway there, a man in his late thirties, wearing a dirty and ragged robe and head shawl, suddenly appeared from the bush at the edge of the camp and walked toward me. He seemed very intense and maybe a little crazy. Pain came from his face like heat from a little stove. He shook my hand and would not let it loose, patting my hand quietly.

“You are Zaghawa,” he said, “and I need to tell you something alone.”

He led me a short way into the bush and motioned for
me to sit down with him in the sand, which, under my circumstances, I was very pleased to do. The man’s wife approached quickly and pleaded, “He’s not right in his head. Please don’t ask him your questions.” But I could tell the man had something he needed to get out, so I asked his wife if I could just listen to him, like two Zaghawa men who should be friends anyway. She agreed and stood a few bushes away, pacing a little and watching us.

They were from North Darfur. Their village had been attacked and destroyed a few months before my own.

“Everybody ran away as fast as they could. My wife over there held our two-year-old son tightly in her arms, and she ran one way through the bushes. Thank God she found a good way to go. I took my four-year-old daughter, Amma, and we ran as fast as we could another way around the bushes. They caught me, the Janjaweed, and I let go of her hand and told her to run. But she didn’t keep running; she watched from some bushes as they beat me and tied me to a tree with my arms back around it like this”—he made his arms into a hoop behind his back.

“One of the Janjaweed men started to kill me in a painful way. My daughter could not bear to see this, so she ran toward me and called out,
Abba, Abba
.” These words, which mean “Daddy, Daddy” filled his throat with emotion, and he paused a long time.

“The Janjaweed man who had tied me to the tree saw my daughter running to me. He lowered his rifle and he let her run into his bayonet. He gave it a big push. The blade went all the way through her stomach. She still cried out to me, ‘Abba! Abba!’

“Then he lifted up his gun, with my daughter on it, with blood from her body pouring down all over him. He danced around with her in the air and shouted to his friends, ‘Look, see how fierce I am,’ and they chanted back to him, ‘Yes, yes, you are fierce, fierce, fierce!’ as they were killing other people. My daughter looked at me for help and stretched her arms in great pain toward me. She tried to say
Abba
but nothing came out.

“It took a long time for her to die, her blood coming down so fresh and red on this—what was he? a man? a devil? He was painted red with my little girl’s blood and he was dancing. What was he?”

This man had seen evil and didn’t know what to do with the sight of it. He was looking for an answer to what it was, and why his little daughter deserved this. Then, after taking some time to cry without talking, he told me he no longer knew who he was.

“Am I a woman who should stay in this camp, or a man who should go fight, and leave my wife and son without protection?” He looked at me as if I should know the answer to his life now. He waited for an answer that I could not give.

“You are still alive,” I said. “They didn’t kill you.”

“What is a better torture than this?” he snapped. “What was better torture than to have to tell my wife and son this?”

His wife came over again and sat near her husband. She picked some small leaves from the shawl that wrapped his head. She told me that his mind was not the same after the attack. “Thank God we have our son, and he is good,” she
said. “I told my husband that Amma is gone and we must think about the future. But he cannot let go of what he saw.”

The woman told me she found a man in the camp who writes and has ink and a quill for that. She had him write down helpful passages from the Koran on small wooden tablets, which were then washed so the inky water could be given to her husband to drink. It is an old cure that often works very well—but had only worked a little for him. They would try again, she told me. Her husband nodded.

When I came back to the same camp a long time later, and I asked the sheikh to help me find this family, the man had gone away, and his wife did not remember me. She seemed more dazed than before. She still had her son, she said, who was at the camp’s school that hour. I had come back because the story that would not leave the man’s mind was now in my mind, and was in my dreams among other stories, waking me almost every night. I thought that talking to him again might help us both, but now he was gone, perhaps to fight and be done with his life, as I was doing in my own way.

It is interesting how many ways there are for people to be hurt and killed, and for villages to be terrorized and burned, and for children to die in deserts, and for young mothers to suffer. I would say that these ways to die and suffer are unspeakable, and yet they were spoken: we interviewed 1,134 human beings over the next weeks; their stories swirled through my near-sleepless nights. I found that if I made little drawings of the scenes described to me, it would sometimes get the stories out of my head long
enough for me to get some sleep. I would wake and make these drawings, and then I could sleep a little. These stories from the camps, mixed with things I had seen with my own eyes, such as the young mother hanging in a tree and her children with skin like brown paper and mothers carrying their dead babies and not letting them go… I was thankful that I could not draw them very well—stick figures, really. Even so, it helped.

When the genocide investigation came to its end, I returned to N’Djamena, Chad, and had a last meal with Dr. John and the others. Genocide is not always easy to prove, so the many interviews were necessary. The United States and others used this investigation to determine that, yes, the government of Sudan was conducting a genocide. The U.S. government did not do too much else, but the American people, as they always do, helped a lot, as did the people of Europe and many other places. The proof of a democracy is surely whether or not a government represents the hearts of its people.

Using the stipend I received from the genocide investigators, I got a cell phone. I wanted a cell number to leave in the camps and with my cousins in case there was news of my family and especially of my missing sister. I also wanted it so I could continue to take investigators or perhaps journalists into the camps and into Darfur. I gave this number
to people in the American Embassy and other places:
This is my cell phone number. I speak English, Arabic, and Zaghawa and will take reporters and investigators to the Darfur refugee camps and into Darfur. I translated for the genocide investigators, if you want to talk to them about me
.

Soon after that, I got a call from a group of journalists from South Africa and other African countries—four black men and one white. They were fearless for their stories and wanted to go everywhere to see the violence as it was happening.

I began asking my cousins, friends, reporters, and other well-connected foreigners for the phone numbers of people who could tell us how to travel safely in dangerous territory. My cell phone began to fill with the numbers of sheikhs, drivers, Chad military men, and even rebel commanders—anyone who would help a reporter get in and out alive.

The reporters were so different from the NGO workers. They didn’t care about paperwork or the legalities of borders. They just wanted to write stories that would help people. Also, they drank a lot.

If the genocide investigators were like angels from heaven, these reporters were like cowboys and cowgirls coming to clean up the land. When I said goodbye to these African journalists after our trip through the camps and a little into Darfur to see a destroyed village and talk to people fleeing and to some rebel groups, I asked them to tell other reporters to please come write more Darfur stories. They agreed to contact their journalist friends around the world and send them my phone number.

One of my friends told me that some people were asking whether I was really from Chad or was in fact from Sudan. There is always someone to report on everything you do in such places. The fact that we had crossed the border and talked to rebels was soon known by many. Chad and Sudan have a love-hate thing, and at this time they were trying to cooperate. Sudan was telling Chad that I might have been taking reporters across their border. My friend suggested I find some work where I could be invisible. I asked her to call me if it looked like something bad was going to happen. When you start to worry about these things, you see people following you, even if they are not. But maybe some were.

Soon after the African journalists left, I flew from N’Djamena to Abéché in a U.N. plane with two women from New York. Megan and Lori were not reporters, but they were adventurous. To make a difference in the world, they had taken jobs with an international agency that helps women and children refugees.

I told them about the problem with women collecting firewood near the camps and they wanted to interview as many women and girls as they could about that and also about the lack of education for the refugee children. We went to ten camps. Megan and Lori returned to the United States and shared their stories with the Congress, the State Department, and the United Nations to advocate for money for more education in the camps and to provide armed security to accompany the women. This eventually happened for a time, thanks to many others who also argued
for this. There is never enough help sent to solve the problems of poor people, but this effort did help many women at some camps. And it made me feel that I could do something.

It is not enough to say we did this and that: you must let me take you into some of these tents. Here is a woman in a small shelter of wood sticks and white plastic, living with her four small children. Her husband and two other children were killed when her village was attacked. Her surviving children often go to sleep hungry because the monthly food ration from the U.N. is not enough. Even so, she always sells some of the wheat in the nearest market so she can buy nutritious foods such as milk, meat, and vegetables. She is trying very hard, but you can see that her children have patches of deep orange in their hair, which means malnutrition. She doesn’t have enough blankets for the cold nights, just two thin and scratchy blankets that do not keep anyone warm. There is a big hole in the sheeting where the water pours in when it rains, despite her twig stitching to mend it. And of course she must leave her children to gather firewood.

Three young girls in another tent also must gather firewood. The eldest of these is fourteen. The youngest, maybe nine, wears a dusty black shawl that covers her head like a hood to hide her face. She never looks up and it seems she is willing herself into the sand. They have been raped many times, but they need to go back again soon for more fuel. They cry to talk about it.