The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur (7 page)

“You can cry, but you must move also,
let’s go
. You must
get your children behind those trees and keep going—go, go go!”

One hundred people had wisely left the village in the days before the attack; we were now struggling with the one hundred and fifty remaining. The older people willing to go needed the most help; we were constantly coming back to help this person and again for the next person, with the bullets cracking in the trees and RPG rounds exploding in the center of the village and setting huts on fire. We were checking flaming huts and carrying the people who could not run. There was a sort of slow dreaminess to all this

I am dead, I am dead, this is how I died, it is not so bad
, I was thinking, afraid to look down at my body because too many bullets were flying around for me still to be okay. I kept moving, moving, carrying the people to the trees and up into the rocky ravine, looking back and hoping to see no one else needing help, but seeing them and going back.

The small, camouflage-painted Land Cruisers of the attackers were now visible at the lower part of the village. The defenders had moved quickly enough to pin them in place and buy us this time. Defenders from other villages nearby had heard the helicopters and were coming over the hills to help. The Sudanese Army troops and the Janjaweed are cruel but they are not stupid, and they did not rush into this little valley so quickly and become trapped; the defenders had thought this out very well.

Large-caliber machine guns were firing into the village from far enough away that attackers could only spray the area and hope to kill people without seeing them. The helicopters
were mostly shooting at the defenders at the east end and not at the people escaping to the west. They would all surely come after us when the defenders were dead, so we knew we had to keep moving.

This pushing of the people into the mountains went on for perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes, though it seemed like many hours. You have to keep going, keep going, up steep places and onward to places where Janjaweed horsemen would not be able to follow.

I could see, as we moved the last of the people out of the village, the Janjaweed now charging in on their horses, shooting into the huts as they came. We had everyone but the defenders out by this time. We slipped into the rocks and watched from above for a moment before we continued on, pushing at the rear of this exodus to keep it going.

Being ready to go had worked a great miracle, as all but the defenders were now safely out of the village. I looked behind me, far down to the sand, and could see no children’s bodies, no women’s bodies, on the sand or between the huts or trees. A very good view, under my circumstances.

Behind us, the defenders held down the attackers and we heard their firing dwindle over the hour. Finally it was silent. We kept moving through all that day and all that night. The fast march was hardest on the children and on the old who had chosen to come, but the great fear now was that the helicopters would come looking for us, as they often did after an attack.

People cried as they walked, thinking of what they had
left behind, and they cried for the defenders and some of the old people who had stayed.

We could settle down some of the boys by saying,
Someday you will have this great story to tell your children
. There was nothing, however, that could be said to the young girls and the women, who could not see the future anymore. Our village was gone. Some of the best of our men were dead. There was no reason not to cry as they walked in several dark lines through the mountain.

The surviving village defenders caught up with us toward dark. My brother Juma was among them, but I did not see Ahmed with him. Juma looked at me sadly when he came closer. This was enough.

“Fatah,” he said. “Our brother Ahmed is killed. Maybe we will see him soon.”

We held each other. He told me that the badly wounded were staying about three hours back on the trail so the women and children would not see them. It is considered impolite for a man, whose job is to be strong, to present himself to women or children when he is badly hurt.

I had thought in my heart that Ahmed and Juma were probably dead. Seeing Juma alive was very good, but Ahmed’s death hit me very hard now. We would have to tell Mother and our sister. It might be too much for them.

They stood and listened as Juma and I told them. They appealed to their God for strength that starry night.

In the morning, and the next morning, we could hear bombing and helicopters in the distance; other villages were dying.

On the third day of our flight we came to a water point where some of our people were waiting for us, including Father. He had some of our camels and other animals in his care. He already knew about Ahmed and looked much older on account of this news.

Fifteen of us, the younger men, decided to ride camels back to the village to bury the dead and retrieve the hidden supplies of food and clothing. The attackers would have taken all they wanted by now, burned the village, and gone away. We needed to bury the bodies before the wild dogs and jackals destroyed them. We gathered some tools for burial and rode back.

The village was mostly gone—sixty or so scorched black spots where a whole world once celebrated life. The nunus of millet, many mattresses and blankets, mounds of trees, and parts of huts were still smoking, which we smelled long before we entered the wadi.

Thirteen bodies were on the ground, mostly near the eastern side of the village, where the defense was made. The Sudanese troops and Janjaweed had of course removed their own dead, so these thirteen were the defenders of the village and some who had come to help.

I found Ahmed. The effects of large-caliber weapons and perhaps an RPG round were such that I barely recognized his body, but it was Ahmed. I dug a grave as we do, so that he would rest on his right side with his face to the east. I put the pieces of this great fellow in the deep sand forever.

“Goodbye, Ahmed,” I said to him. And I knelt down there for a long time instead of helping the others. It was raining a little.

Finally, I did stand and go help the others.

After we retrieved some hidden supplies and packed them on our camels, we prepared to leave. Mixed deep in the ashes of the smoldering huts were of course the bones of the old people who had refused to go, but we could do nothing for these now until the rains would reveal them. The wild animals would have no use for these fired bones.

A few birds were singing in the trees. Not many, but a few.
Well
, I thought to myself,
they will come back in time, like the people
.

But for now it was ashes and graves. This had been a good village.

When we caught up with our people we men stayed mostly together with the wounded defenders, going back and forth to the women for the food and for the traditional medicine and teas they would prepare. In this way our village, though now a moving line in the desert, was still the same people helping one another.

The people of other villages joined us here and there, until we were a great mass of people moving across the land. Every morning we would have to bury several of the wounded who died in the night. It was good for some of them to die, since there was no morphine or other medicine. You can usually see in a man’s eyes if he will be blessed to die before morning.

On the fifth day we came to a remote and grassy valley, and some of those with animals to sustain them decided they would hide there and make a temporary life. Those with no animals had no choice but to continue on to Chad.
My mother and sister were among these who stayed—she would go no farther. My father would keep moving with some of the animals and the other people while they needed him. The camels provided wonderful milk and rides for the children, who were suffering. He would come back to Mother with our animals when he could. In this way, my mother and sister became what the world calls IDPs, which means internally displaced persons—refugees who are still within their home country.

And in this way, too, the other people continued on for seven more days, walking to Chad, marking their way with graves.

Six of my old friends and I began to scout ahead on our camels. We would take water to the people from the water points we knew. This was becoming critical, because the rain time was over and the little wet spots in the desert quickly dried. We 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 and
forty-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’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 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 children
without food or water. When she couldn’t carry them anymore, she sat under a tree that she found. There was nothing she could do except watch her children die. She took her shawl and tied it to a high branch in order to end her life. We found her that same day, a few hours too late.

After these months, we began to see white trucks over on the Chad side of the wadi; the aid groups that respond to crises were beginning to arrive. We could see them in the distance over the hot desert—sometimes great lines of them. It was time to go talk to them. Things would be different with these people arriving. I felt good about this, but my friends didn’t know about these groups and had no sense of what they could do. These groups had saved my life in Egypt, so I felt warmly toward them.

My six friends and I had tea over a dinner fire. I told them we should go into Chad and see what these groups could do now. We could help them.

“You go ahead, Daoud, and help your friends in the groups; you speak English and so that is what you were meant to do,” the eldest of my friends said. In his kind authority I could hear Ahmed. Because of my schooling, my fate would always be a little different from my friends’.

Perhaps because we knew we were about to part, we tossed a little animal bone around in the moonlight, just as we had done as children but a little slower. In the game called Anashel, you have two teams of eight people each. We had three against four that night, but no one cared. Someone throws the bone far away into the sand. Everyone runs for it. If you are the one to find it, you try to run it back to the goal area without being caught and wrestled
down, although you can throw it to your teammates. Children play this game at night, when there is at least a half-moon for light and some cool air and no chores left to do. The girls and boys play it together.

There is another game, called Whee, but we were getting too old to play it, so we stayed with Anashel. But so you will know: In Whee you have eight on a team, and try to get your team members across a goal line, as the other team tries to get across theirs. You do battle in the middle, of course. The challenge is that everyone must hold on to one of their feet, so they will be hopping on one leg. This is a very, very hard but very funny game, and it goes on for several hours; you have to be young and strong. The girls would often win because of the work they do carrying water and wood.