Read Online The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur by Daoud Hari - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Daoud Hari
Tags: General, Biography & Autobiography
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began to find other groups in the desert who needed water, and you must of course help everyone you can. We helped many people to move along, to find one another, to find the safe routes. We brought food from Chad to people who had run out of everything.
We became lost in this work for three months, sleeping in the bush and watching for the white airplanes, the government troops, and the Janjaweed. We buried men, women, and children who could not finish the trip.
Many other groups of men were doing this as well. And in Chad, camps were forming all along the border. Everyone was helping one another, since the world had not come to help yet.
I met two women, around maybe twenty-five andforty-five in age, who had escaped a village attack, but did so as new widows. They looked behind them to see the men of the village machine-gunned down from helicopters. These two women escaped with two metal boxes, now badly dented. They contained the tools needed by traditional nurses to help deliver babies. They set up a clinic in one of the impromptu camps and were now helping many people every day, long before the first of the white trucks arrived from the aid groups. It was like this everywhere; the best way to bury your pain is to help others and to lose yourself in that.
The sight of the seven of us coming on our camels through the mirages of the desert was strange to people who had been a long time without water and were perhaps a little delirious. They were of course praying for exactly this miracle. It was good to be the miracle, and how can you stop doing that? But we were not always the miracle in time.
“You need to get that baby away from her,” some women told me as they swallowed their first sips of water and pointed to a young mother standing alone.
“Her baby is dead and she was carrying it all day yesterday and today. She will not let us have it to bury it,” one of them told me.
The little mother sipped water from the cup I held out, and she looked at me very sadly.
“I need to have your little baby now. She has already flown away,” I said to her. After a time she let me take the dead child.
Losing a child is so hard, as you may know. It doesn’tmatter 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 not 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.
We continued to move through this odd landscape of pain, saving as many as we could, and burying others.
We came upon a lone tree not far from the Chad border where a woman and two of her three children were dead. The third child died in our arms. The skin of these little children was like delicate brown paper, so wrinkled. You have seen pictures of children who are dying of hunger and thirst, their little bones showing and their heads so big against their withered bodies. You will think this takes a long time to happen to a child, but it takes only a few days. It breaks your heart to see, just as it breaks a mother’s heart to see. This woman hanged herself from her shawl, tied in the tree. We gently took her down and buried her beside her children. This moment stays with me every day.
I felt a need to know something about her from others I would later meet. She was about thirty years old. When her village was attacked by the Janjaweed, she and her two daughters and son – the eldest was six years old—were held for a week. The mother was raped repeatedly. They released the mother and her children in the desert far from any villages. That was probably cheaper than using bullets on them, or else they wanted their seeds to grow inside her. She walked for five days in the desert carrying her childrenwithout food or water. When she couldn’t carry them anymore, she sat under a tree that she found.
We became lost in this work for three months, sleeping in the bush and watching for the white airplanes, the government troops, and the Janjaweed. We buried men, women, and children who could not finish the trip.
Many other groups of men were doing this as well. And in Chad, camps were forming all along the border. Everyone was helping one another, since the world had not come to help yet.
I met two women, around maybe twenty-five andforty-five in age, who had escaped a village attack, but did so as new widows. They looked behind them to see the men of the village machine-gunned down from helicopters. These two women escaped with two metal boxes, now badly dented. They contained the tools needed by traditional nurses to help deliver babies. They set up a clinic in one of the impromptu camps and were now helping many people every day, long before the first of the white trucks arrived from the aid groups. It was like this everywhere; the best way to bury your pain is to help others and to lose yourself in that.
The sight of the seven of us coming on our camels through the mirages of the desert was strange to people who had been a long time without water and were perhaps a little delirious. They were of course praying for exactly this miracle. It was good to be the miracle, and how can you stop doing that? But we were not always the miracle in time.
“You need to get that baby away from her,” some women told me as they swallowed their first sips of water and pointed to a young mother standing alone.
“Her baby is dead and she was carrying it all day yesterday and today. She will not let us have it to bury it,” one of them told me.
The little mother sipped water from the cup I held out, and she looked at me very sadly.
“I need to have your little baby now. She has already flown away,” I said to her. After a time she let me take the dead child.
Losing a child is so hard, as you may know. It doesn’tmatter 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 not 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.
We continued to move through this odd landscape of pain, saving as many as we could, and burying others.
We came upon a lone tree not far from the Chad border where a woman and two of her three children were dead. The third child died in our arms. The skin of these little children was like delicate brown paper, so wrinkled. You have seen pictures of children who are dying of hunger and thirst, their little bones showing and their heads so big against their withered bodies. You will think this takes a long time to happen to a child, but it takes only a few days. It breaks your heart to see, just as it breaks a mother’s heart to see. This woman hanged herself from her shawl, tied in the tree. We gently took her down and buried her beside her children. This moment stays with me every day.
I felt a need to know something about her from others I would later meet. She was about thirty years old. When her village was attacked by the Janjaweed, she and her two daughters and son – the eldest was six years old—were held for a week. The mother was raped repeatedly. They released the mother and her children in the desert far from any villages. That was probably cheaper than using bullets on them, or else they wanted their seeds to grow inside her. She walked for five days in the desert carrying her childrenwithout food or water. When she couldn’t carry them anymore, she sat under a tree that she found.
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