EASTERN SUDAN, ON THE ETHIOPIAN BORDER
ON THE ETHIOPIAN BORDER
The men bury Adara Hailu’s daughter just after sunrise Monday, Feb. 25. The gritty wind still carries a hint of night coolness, offering a few hours of reprieve from the searing punishment of the desert sun.
Calloused hands lower the child into a shallow grave in the rocky thornbush hill overlooking the swollen refugee camp. The air is fresher here. The stench from the camp’s vast defecation field reaches the hillside in occasional gusts that sting the nostrils, but it is not the overpowering presence that it is below.
The funeral is brief. The child was young, and female, and her life had not yet amounted to much. She would never be a bride, or wear the heavy gold necklace of a married woman, or paint intricate patterns on her face in blue henna. She would not know the joy of bearing children, nor the sorrow of watching many of them die.
The men pray, then kneel around the small grave and push the dirt forward. Their hands are as dry and cracked as the parched soil, but they work gently, and with reverence. The thin muslin shroud – the child’s only coffin – disappears beneath an avalanche of gravel and dust. The hole, which took so long to dig in the resistant earth, is filled in moments. It is covered with a mound of stones and marked with the spindly branch of a thornbush.
The girl was 10 years old, Adara’s oldest child and only daughter. She died of measles, the same common killer that claimed Adara’s 3-year-old son a week earlier. One child, a 6-year-old boy, still lives. He, too, has measles. Adara keens as tears cut like rivers down her dust-caked cheeks. Her frantic fingers rip and claw, loosening her braided hair and shredding her homespun dress. Her mournful cry is broken by racking sobs that seem wrenched from her soul. “My daughter, my daughter. My son, my son.”
But Adara’s piercing walls do not reach the girl’s grave on the thornbush hill, nor disturb the quiet prayers chanted by the men. As a woman, she is forbidden to follow the funeral procession beyond the edge of camp, or to witness her own daughter’s burial. She collapses in the roadway at the foot of the hill, slumped in the tired arms of neighbor women who are no strangers to such pain.
“It is to prevent her from crying a lot because the women are by nature very sensitive,” explains Tesfaye Bekele, a refugee who works at one of the camp’s feeding centers for malnourished children. He urges Adara to stop her crying, to return home to care for her sick son. But she is beyond consoling. Her body heaves with sobbing, and the tears wash her face clean.
Tesfaye shakes his head sadly. “They must not take too much time to grieve because there are so many dead. And there are the living still to think of.”
He returns to the feeding center, where the thinnest of the children already stand in long lines, clutching the yellow registration cards that are their tickets to that day’s ration of milk and, possibly, life. Everywhere, the camp hustles with the stubborn instinct to survive another day: Women slap bread dough on ancient kneading stones, children lug jerry-cans of putrid water up from the river, men head out in the futile search for firewood.
As the sun inches its way hotter above the horizon, Adara is left alone to rock herself in the dusty walking path. A cluster of men step around her, balancing another small, shrouded body on their shoulders. They wearily pick their way through the lime-patched defecation field and between the stone cairns that dot the thornbush hill. A pickax begins its rhythmic clank into the rocky earth as the men take up the low chant of the funeral prayer.
A hired gravewatcher standing at the foot of the hill makes a careful entry in a spiral notebook, add ing yet another name to his lengthening ledger of death.
It is the day’s 10th burial in the larger of the two graveyards at the Wad Kowli refugee camp.
It is not yet 7 a.m.
JAN. 30 WEDNESDAY NIGHT,
IN THE TWIN CITIES
It’s after midnight; we leave for Africa in six hours. I haven’t slept much, but there bas only been the one dream. That was almost two weeks ago…
I am in the desert. The sand is yellow-gold, as in a postcard. The sky is white-hot. On a far horizon, there are shimmering shapeless mountains. The forms waver and are without substance; the sky is too bright to look through. On the flat infinity of sand, people are walking – silently, slowly, in single file or perhaps in twos or threes helping each other along. They are black. They are Ethiopians, marching to the refugee camps.
I am walking with them. As in most dreams, I am just there. No premise of prelude. My presence, as theirs, simply is. For some reason, I am wearing my navy blue mountain parka over a shirt and blue jeans. I have a pack on my back.
Night comes and it is time to stop. We all just sit where we were standing. Instinctively, I reach my pack for a granola bar. A thousand eyes stare at me, silently.
IT IS CALLED TRAIL OF TEARS, this journey of heartache and hope. And for Adara’s daughter, as for so many, it ends here, in a short funeral march through the common toilet of a squalid refugee camp, up to an anonymous grave in a foreign land. At last she has shed the hunger and illness that were her companions since birth.
For as many years as the girl lived, the rains have not been right in the Horn of Africa. For two years, no rain at all has fallen in Tigray, a war-scarred province in northern Ethiopia where Adara tended the fields at her husband’s side and watched helplessly as, year after year, the crops failed and the children grew weak.
When the food was gone, the family ate the seeds saved for next year’s planting. When the seeds were gone, they ate the animals that would have plowed the fields. When the plow animals went gone, they ate the camels and donkeys that would have carried them to someplace better.
And when there was nothing left to eat, they walked – Adara’s family and hundreds of thousands more. They abandoned their generations-old homes and began the grisly exodus, carrying what little they hadn’t already sold for food: a cooking pot, a muslin wrap, their wedding jewelry.
So the journey began, along trails marked by the bloody footprints of peasants who went before and by the bleached bones of camels that sought water but found only dust. The trails weave across Africa, through 20 countries plagued by drought and famine, to neighboring countries only slightly less hungry.
The Dark Continent is becoming a sea of sand, awash with almost 10 million homeless. The United Nations estimates that 150 million are threatened by drought and famine; 30 million face starvation.
The human toll has been heaviest in Ethiopia, for reasons as numerous as they are complex. “God has not abandoned my country, only forgotten to rain on it,” says a Coptic Christian priest who came to Sudan with his villagers.
Fully a decade ago, drought already was so severe in Ethiopia that it prompted the 1974 overthrow of Halle Selassie. 1n 46 years as emperor, the “Conquering Lion of Judah” did much to modernize his backward country. But he also did much to hide its extreme poverty from the world, refusing to acknowledge a famine that killed almost 300,000 peasants in the north. Selassie once was photographed feeding his dogs sirloin tips from golden plates; at the same time, reports leaked out of starving farmers crawling to the capital city of Addis Abba for help, only to be turned back by the imperial guards.
The rains have not been any kinder to the current Marxist regime, run by Mengistu Haile Mariam and the Provisional Military Administrative Council, known as the Dergue, or committee. The persistent drought is exacerbated by the continued use of medieval farming practices, which have drained the lands of life. And critics of the Dergue say collectivized farming has further diminished crop production.
Again, the famine was a well-kept secret. The tale is legendary of Mengistu spending $200 million last summer to celebrate the revolution’s 10th anniversary, while thousands of his people died for lack of bread. Not until after the festivities did Mengistu let Western reporters into his country. And not until a British Broadcasting Corp. documentary aired in late October was the world shocked into responding.
But for many, it was too late. The death count in Ethiopia topped 300,000 in 1984.
The tally of suffering was highest in Tigray and Eritrea, the northernmost of Ethiopia’s 14 provinces. Beset by civil war, these provinces are controlled by guerrilla forces seeking independence – or at least a share of power – from Mengistu’s Dergue. Although millions of dollars in food aid has been rushed to Ethiopia in recent months, little has reached the north. The government blames the rebels for firing on the trucks that would carry relief to the hungry; the rebels blame the government for making food another weapon in its vast army, feeding its own troops while starving the enemy into submission.
For peasants in the north, caught in the middle, the choice has become simple: leave or die.
So they walk – some to the main cities, where government trucks bring food when they can; some to the heart of Ethiopia, where volunteer agencies run massive feeding centers for people who are refugees in their own land; some to the more fertile south, where the Dergue is encouraging (critics say forcing) the resettlement of more than 2 million northerners.
Most head west, across the border, into Sudan.
FEB. 2 SATURDAY.
EN ROUTE TO KHARTOUM
There is a blood-red sunset staining the mountains as we leave Athens. I watch it from the plane window and try to be moved, but find my heart resisting… I almost wish we had been delayed in Athens so I could put this challenge off a while longer. The busy plane trip bas been good because it keeps me from dwelling on anxieties – but bad because it made the trip too quick bringing me face to face with the inevitable all too soon.
Sudan is Africa’s largest nation, one third the size of the contiguous United States. It is host to almost 800,000 Ethiopians. Many are political refugees who have fled the war and conscription in their homeland, drifting over the border into scabby Eastern Sudan, a lifeless sore on the face of the earth that will not heal.
Since late last fall, the Eastern Region has absorbed another 350,000 famine refugees, a flood of wasted humanity spilling into crowded, disease-ridden camps where days before there was only desert and, perhaps, a small pool of water – liquid hope stagnating in a barren riverbed.
And still they come, 2,000 to 3,000 a day, a tidal wave of misery seeking peace from the growling of their bellies and the crashing of the bombs. In late February, 300,000 more reportedly were in the refugee pipelines, walking toward Sudan from Tigray andEritrea.
“You can’t really stem the tides,” says Solomon Inquai, a Tigrayan emigrant who heads the Relief Society of Tigray in England. “You see the human flood moving. It never stops. From everywhere people are moving, and you just can’t stop it.”
But leaving Ethiopia does not ensure life. Sudan is a country that can no longer support itself; almost 5 million Sudanese – a quarter of the population – are threatened by drought. At the same time, the nation is struggling to take care of more than 1 million refugees from four countries.
“Sudan can’t feed the refugees. Sudan has a famine of its own and can’t even feed the Sudanese,” says Gayle Smith, a free-lance journalist from Cambridge, Mass., who has lived in Sudan for five years. “But the Sudanese are tremendously generous.”
When the newest influx of refugees arrived in Eastem Sudan, there was no food. Water, when it could be found, was stagnant and foul with human waste. Farmers and nomads who once roamed the vast steppes of the high desert were suddenly jammed 10 and 20 to a tent Measles and malaria spread like brushfire, decimating a population of children whose resistance was long since gone.
Refugees who bad been kept alive by guerrilla armies on the long march through Ethiopia began dying in huge numbers once they reached Sudan. In early January, Tigrayan leaders unofficially reported 120 deaths in a single day at Wad Kowli, the largest of the refugete reception centers in Eastern Sudan. The situation “as similar at Wad Sherife and Tukl Baab, camps to the north.
“This is actually a catastrophe, a real disaster,” says Hassan Attuyah, Sudan’s deputy commissioner of refugees. “We were not well prepared to receive these real big numbers. Before, we tried to solve our own problems, and for a long time we did not ask for help. But the problem is too big.”
At first, Sudan’s appeals for aid went largely unheeded as the world’s pity focused on Ethiopia. “At Christmas, when you said famine in Africa, it meant one thing: Ethiopia. We desperately tried to tell people it was more than just Ethiopia,” says WilliamDay, a. Save the Children-United Kingdom relief worker at Wad Kowli.
Then, Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy’s Christmastime visit to camps in Sudan brought attention to the refugees and prompted an expanded relief effort by the international community. Aid now is being targeted to Sudan in record amounts. Volunteer agencies are multiplying their once-sparse staffs. For example, the international Rescue Committee had four people working here when winter began; now there are almost 40.
“If interest can be measured in TV camera crews, interest in the Sudan is strong,” Day says. Now, six months after the migration began, the official death counts at the refugee camps are finally dropping. Instead of 90 deaths a day at Wad Kowli, there are 70 or 75. Instead of 30 deaths a day at Wad Sherife, there are 15 or 20.
As is the way with nature, many of the weakest – the very old and the very young – already have died, leaving fewer to share the meager rations of food and the dwindling water supply. The surviving children are being inoculated against measles as fast as the vaccine arrives. The malnourished, those who weigh less than 30% of normal and have arms as thin as walking canes, are herded into mass feeding centers each day to sit hour after hour sipping from plastic cups, where life takes the form of sugared milk.
So, in Sudan, there is reason to hope. Journalists and relief workers who have been in Ethiopia say the situation there remains grim by comparison. In Bati, said to be the bleakest of Ethiopia’s in-country refugee camps, the healthy are put to work scraping mass graves from the scorched earth. Others toil in the Death Houses, corrugated tin sheds where they wash the dead and stack them on pallets like so much firewood. They are paid in food.”The misery there is so great, you can touch it,” says llpo Mattila, a Finnish magazine writer who had just toured Ethiopia before coming to Sudan’s Eastern region.
That knowledge – that things are even worse at home – is sometimes the sole comfort left to the survivors huddled in Sudan’s Eastern Region. Too many still go to bed hungry. Too many have made the mournful trips to the spreading cemeteries, to bury loved ones far from home.
At Wad Kowli, the hired gravewatchers – healthy refugees paid to count the burials – recorded 2,053 deaths between Jan. 26 and Feb. 24. Camp officials estimate that as many as 5,000 have died there since mid-December, when the first wave of Tigrayans spontaneously settled this desolate stretch of the Atbara River.
The estimates are conservative. People die in the crude buts they call home and are buried at night, away from the prying eyes of doctors who would sign their death certificates and government officials who would reduce their family’s food rating. No one is able to guess the total number who have died in the 32 refugee camps in Eastern Sudan. Nor are they willing.”You want to know bow many dead?” snaps Julian Murray, Wad Kowli field officer for We United Nations High Commission on Refugees. He points with angry exhaustion to the thornbush hill at the far edge of the camp. “Go count the graves.”
FEB.2 SATURDAY, MIDNIGHT,
IN KHARTUM
We walked off the jet into a warm night wind, which carried the exotic smells of a foreign city. And “foreign” now has meaning, perhaps for the first time for my all-too-homebound life. The airport was right out of a movie set (an untraveled American’s only reference point!). Armed police were everywhere, purposely visible, as we passed through a chain-link fence to the terminal. Above, on the terminal roof, a crowd of people jostled and bumped against the railing shouting wildly to Arabic to passengers below. We collected our bags off a short conveyor belt that spitthings rudely onto a dirty linoleum floor.
The drive from the airport certainly didn’t show Khartoum’s best side, but I suspect there is none. We drove along a rutted, paved boulevard which edged rows of anonymous buildings. There is no neon here – no glaring light or signs of electric seduction.
We turned off the blacktop and bounced over pocked, dirt roadways to the hotel. In the rainy season, all must be pervasive muck. I find myself charmed by the lack of concrete roads, and by dirt and litter that would make my teeth clench at home.
“In Sudan, we do not say you are ugly Americans. We say you are ignorant Americans.”
Omer AI Amier is talking about his country, trying to explain Sudan to a first-time visitor. He is a tall man with a row of gold teeth and a gracious, if tired, manner. He is an unemployed government worker looking for a job; he identifies himself as a philosopher and humorist.
Like many Sudanese, Omer is quick to express a sympathetic welcome to the Ethiopians seeking refuge in his country. But he is concerned that the problemsof his people will be ignored lily the United States and other privileged nations because of the crisis created by the refugees.”My children have no bread to eat at home. The refugees are just adding to my pain,” he says. “Why do you provide a good living for the refugees when I am suffering?”
Sudan ia a country where, as many foreigners say, nothing works. “This is a land of ensh’Allah, mumkin, bucarra and malesh. That’s God williling, maybe, tomorrow and what can you do?” says John Benson, a Lalmba Association relief worker at the Wad Sherife refugee camp.
Electricity is sporadic, sanitation is nonexistent. Flush toilets are found only in hotels catering to Westerners. A narrow, paved road runs from the capital of Khartoum to the Eastern Region and on north to Port Sudan; travel through the rest of the country is done at great risk over the roadless desert, through soft sand and hard ruts. Gasoline is scarce because of civil war in the south, the site of the nation’s oil refineries, and because of Sudan’s weak position in the international financial market. Fuel is rationed at two gallons a week. The official price is about $2 agallon; the black market price ranges from $7 to more than $30. Food is almost as dear. For several days in February, schools were closed in Khartoum because there was no gas for the school buses and no bread for the students’ lunches.
“Sudan is not a country where you can go to the store and buy it off the shelf,” says Mike Menning, a former St. Paul resident who beads the U.N. refugee commission’s Eastern Region office in Gedaref, 200 miles east of Khartoum. “People who scrutinize the situation from a distance aren’t aware of the problems of getting simple things done here – getting food on the table and gas in your car.”
The country’s primitive ways makes relief work difficult, prompting criticism from the Western World. Food aid sometimes sits in port for days for want of trucks and fuel to haul It to the refugees. Meanwhile, Sudanese citizens living in drought stricken regions are becoming refugees in their own land: 40,000 have come to Khartoum from the south, and are living in camps as dismal as anything in theEastern Region.
“The Sudanese are not wealthy people living a luxurious life,” Menning says. “Yet, they see all these things the refugees get free: shelter and food and medical care.”
He agrees with the Sudanese, who say they must be helped if they are to help the refugees. Although there is no official talk of closing the border to the hundreds hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians rumored to be heading west, Menning and other relief workers worry about the political fallout of feeding outsiders while the Sudanese go hungry.
Sudanese officials echo that concern, and stress the need for more foreign aid to Sudan. The United States government expects to send nearly 500,000 tons ofgrain there this year. But even with that and more from other donors, the country will be 400,000 tons short of what it needs to feed its own people, let alonethe refugees.
However, the Sudanese say the borders will stay open as long as their neighbors need a refuge from hunger, war or political oppression.
“We have been caring for them for 17 or 18 years now,” says Mohammed Habib, the SudanJ Commission on Refugees field officer in Kassala, near the Wad Sherife refugee camp. “I think we will continue, no matter how many come. We have no choice.”
Omer agrees, even if it means his own children will be a little hungrier.
“It is an old custom with the Sudanese, from the old tribal system,” he says. “When relatives in rural regions have problems and come into the town, and they need food and medical help, you help them. You share what you have. It is shameful if a relativecomes to you and you turn away. You would have a very naughty reputation, and no one would help you. And when they come from Assubia (Ethiopia), we help them because we are all brothers. Aren’t wefrom the same planet?”
FEB. 5 TUESDAY,
IN KHARTUM
After just three days it is very apparent to me that one bas to abandon all things – all attitudes – American to survive here. I am doing well enough, I think. But my journalistic ego and anxieties and insecurities crossed the ocean with me. How can I do this justice in words?
We leave for Showak, our unofficial base in the Eastern Region, by bus at 7:90 Thursday morning. Another wave of experiences to absorb, another set of unknowns to face, accept a come to terms with. I find myself quite envious of those reporters who have done their work – faced their tests – and are going home.
Home. It is only five days behind me but seems so far, so distant, that I can no longer picture myself there. At this moment, I can’t imagine being curled on the couch with Don, watching bad TV and reading trash novels. The thought makes me want to weep – I don’t know why. About the only thing of home I can see is myself jogging along the parkway or around the lake – where the air is cold and fresh everything is clean.
FEB.7 THURSDAY
IN SHOWAK
Yesterday and today we finally saw the real Sudan: the camel markets, tbe desert, tbe bus, tile language, the tukls (straw buts), the nomads. Never have I seen a land so inhospitable to life. Seeing the desert, even from the bus window, goes a long way toward explaining why this is happening.
The trip here was quite the Sudanese adventure. The bus was crowded and small but fairly modern, with closeed sides and windows. Large baggage was strapped on top. Carryons were stuffed on overhead shelves, and what didn’t fit was stacked in the aisle.
A young man, the driver’s helper apparently, would periodically carry a bucket of water back through the bus, nimbly negotiating the bags and boxes and knees and feet, to pass out tin cups of water. I never saw a drop spilled.
We took what is called a “Pepsi stop,” about halfway to Gedaref – the Sudanese version of stopping at a freeway rest area. Susan Smith, one of the American Refugee Committee nurses, taught me Third World bathroom etiquette: a long walk to a semiprivate bush for an open-air squat. The Pepsi stop was rank with feces and puddles, and, of course, flies. But somehow it all seemed rather private anddignified.
Tomorrow we visit Abuda and Um Ali, two small settlements of political refugees near Showak. The inadequacy of words grows as this experience deepens. Right now I feel overwhelmed and anxious and frightened and, perhaps above an, bumbled.
In the midst of a dying continent, a few more hands would not seem to matter much. But Western relief workers multiply their skills ten-thousand fold by teaching health and hygiene to African medics who in turn teach refugees who, eventually, teach others when they return home to Ethiopia.
So an eight-member crew – seven medics and an administrator – sent to Sudan in February by the Minneapolis-based American Refugee Commitee will touch the lives of 70,000 refugees.
The ARC, small by relief agency standards, has a five-year history in Thailand, stationing medical workers there to care for Cambodian refugees. Now it has expanded to Africa, where refugees again are fleeing the dual threat of guns and hunger. To increase its effectiveness in handling the demands of a burgeoning refugee population, the ARC teamed with the Colorado-based Lalmba Association, another small relief agency with 22 years of experience in Ethiopia and Sudan.
The ARC team will spend six months to a year in Sudan’s Eastern Region, at camps or settlements near the Ethiopian border. Their in-country expenses are paid and each receives a $125-a-month stipend held for them until they complete their duty tour.The crew includes two doctors, four nurses, a nutritionist and an administrator, hand-picked either for their experience in Third World relief work or their specialty training:
•Dr. Mark Litzow, 31, an internist from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. Litzow has no previous overseas experience. He is in charge of a hospital at Wad el Hilewu serving a settled village of 10,000 and a refugee tent zone of 6,500. He also oversees smaller clinics at the nearby settlements of Abuda and Um Ali, and teaches at the Lalmba hospital in the village of Showak.
• Kris Lenz Litzow, 33, Litzow’s wife and a nutritionist who worked at St. Marys Hospital in Rochester and previously worked with migramt workers in Wisconsin and Colorado. She supervises feeding centers at Wad el Hilewu, Abuda and Um Ali.
• Sister Patrice Coolick, 43, a physician’s assistant and a member of the Catholic Sisters o.f St. Joseph in Kirkwood, Mo. She worked in the Tbai-Cambodian border area and spent several years doing relief work in the mountains of Peru. She works with Litzow in the clinics at Wadel Hllewu, Abuda and Um Ali.
• Jerilyn Green, 40, a licensed practical nurse from Philadelphia. She served in the Peace Corps in South Yemen and worked on the Thai-Cambodian border. She is working at the clinics in Wad Hilewu, Abuda and Um Ali.
•Dr. Karen Kruger, 29, a pediatrician from Chicago who received her medical degree from the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. She is working at the clinics at Wad el Hilewu, Abuda, Um Ali and at the hospital in Showak.
• Sister Katharine Donohue, 46, a registered nurse and teacher from the Sinsinawa Dominicans, a Catholic community in southwestern Wisconsin. Her family lives in Minneapolis. She worked in Thailand and with the rural poor in South Carolina. She is supervising a feeding center at Wad Sherife, a large refugee camp on the Ethiopian border near the city of Kassala.
• Susan Smith, 31, a nurse practitioner from Calgary, Alberta. She has worked in Botswana, Thailand and in an Eskimo village in the Arctic. She is teaching African medics at Wad Sherife.
• Rick Cheney, 29, a St. Paul native who has done volunteer work with refugees in the Twin Cities and in Thailand and is working as an administrator for the American Refugee Committee in Sudan’s Eastern Region.