FEB. 15 FRIDAY NOON,
AT WAD KOWLI
I am now convinced that hell is not the firepit of religious lore. Hell is the complete loss of privacy, dignity and self-determination.. It is bathing with a dirty cup of water in the street, defecating in an open field as people walk by, having no curtain to draw while you make love, displaying your sickness and sores to the world in the hope someone will make them better, relying entirely on strangers for your survival strangers you can’t even talk to human being to human being, someone who merely gives you the barest sustenance to keep your body going but can’t give you anything for your soul.
I have seen hell.
It is called Wad Kowli.
FEB.15 FRIDAY EVENING,
IN WAD KOWILI
I pray God we find a ride out of here tomorrow. What seemed tolerable on Wednesday has bad a cumulative effect, and by today I could barely see the laughing children for the squalor and sickness. I didn’t want children pullng at my hand, shouting salaam and hoping for a touch of my damned white skin. Today, I put my head down and walked last, refusing to aknowledge them, hoping they wouldn’t follow. But they thought it a grand game and ran after me squea1ing and clutching.
Maybe it was the heat (worse every day) or maybe it was the home visits we did this morning. But today I had no smiles to give to children.
Where do they get theirs?
They come so far, and suffer so much. They want little more than a place to rest, a few cups of grain, and something to drink.
But they can’t stay here. Wad Kowli, perched on the once-mighty Atbara River, is dying of thirst.
“There’s no water,” says Julian Murray, the U.N. refugee commission field officer here. “That doesn’t mean there’s not enough water. It means there’s no water.”
Rationing began in early February, a daily and desperate re-enactment of the biblical miracle of the loaves and fishes. Two days of water is stretched over four. The cup that washed one head now washes three. It is still cool at night, so the thirst is not as great.
That is little consolation to Murray, who watches helplessly as the water level steadily drops, an inch a day, and the camp population not-so-steadily increases, some days by only a dozen, other days by a few thousand.
Not only is the water supply from the Atbara inadequate, it is foul: A pollution study stopped counting bacteria levels at 3,000 per milliliter; anything more than 10 is considered dangerous. Some refugees take extra time to filter their water. Instead of filling their cans directly from the stagnant ponds – all that remains of this stretch of the Atbara – they dig holes in the muddy river bottom and let the water seep through the cleansing sand.
But many have neither the time nor the energy for such luxuries. When water is life, you drink it.
Oxfam volunteers erected three 50,000-liter storage tanks and arranged for trucks, the most precious of commodities in Sudan, to haul water from a wetter spot upriver. But it is only enough for 15,000 people, at most 20,000. The population of Wad Kowli is more than 90,000 and growing. Simple dehydration still causes 30 percent of the 70-ood deaths each day. There is talk of building a filter system to pull water out of the river mouth if the rains come, but Oxfam geologists are skeptical.
”For two months during the rainy season, the river is all defecation, muck and mud. It’s like pea soup,” says Graham Miller, a geologist from Australia.
And if the rains come, the trucks will no longer be able to haul water or food through the axle-deep mud. “Everybody must go,” Murray says. “Everybody.”
A mass evacuation began Feb. 13: forty refugees at a time, crammed into the back of a beige Bedford lorry with their meager belongings for a three-boor trip through the rutted desert to Safawa, a preplanned camp situated on a wetter stretch of the Atbara.
“It’s bloody humiliating,” says Louise Dyer, a Save the Children nurse from South Wales. “To line people up and dump them on a truck with their belongings … But there aren’t any other options.”
FEB.17 SUNDAY,
NEAR WAD SHERIFE
I am ashamed at how good it felt – and bow easy it was – to come back to relative comfort and sanity. We scooted out of Wad Kowli at the first opportunity yesterday with the French ambassador, then bitched a ride to Showak with a British relief worker and were quickly convinced to stay there overnight. We played team Trivial Pursuit, of all things, with some Lalmba folks. “How many dimples in a golf ball?” – a complete escape from refugee problems.
It was all too glad to get away from the stench and the dust and the smoke and the death and the degradation that is Wad Kowli. A shower, even cold, felt great.
Electricity is marvelous. And conversation with similar bright people was reassuring. Already my mind is putting behind me the worst of what I saw. Today we lorried to Kassala for 3 pounds (about 80 cents) each, body to dusty body with 30- plus Sudanese and several sacks of melons. The people are so gentle and generous. Everywhere we go we are adopted and taken care of. Here we are, rich khawajas who are decadent by local standards – yet everyone wants to – give just because we are guests and that is the right thing to do.
FEB.18 MONDAY,IN WAD SHERIFE
IN WAD SHERIFE
My eyes are sore and scraped iron the relentless dust that pounds this wretched camp. My heart is unable to absorb all this insane suffering. It is so unlike anything experienced at home. Or maybe it’s not. Maybe there are those at home just as destitute. In the land of silk and money, that would be a greater tragedy than this, the African holocaust.
The old woman crouches on the stoop of Mohamed Osman Ali’s office while the men argue about her fate. She is a widow of the Amharic tribe in Ethiopia and somehow has come here, where the population is mostly of the rival Eritrean tribe.
“The only thing I can give her is the dry rations, but who will cook the food?” says Mohamed, the Sudanese Commission on Refugee’s settlement officer in charge of the Wad Sherife camp. He faces a Swiss Red Cross doctor, speaking in the soft but insistent voice he uses to dispatch the hundreds of crisis decisions he makes each day.
“You took her as an inpatient at the hospital because she complained of pain in her legs, but now you say she cannot stay in your beds because she is not sick. So I try to have her admitted to the Kassala psychiatric hospital where there is food and beds, but they say they cannot take her without a doctor’s signature, and I am no doctor, huh? So you write the note. She is mad, yes? Crazy?”
The doctor leans across the chipped metal desk, shaking with indignation. “You mean a mental disorder? No! She speaks a different language. That is her only madness. I demand that you find her a shelter and provide her a home.”
“And who will take care of her?” Mohamed snaps back. “Who will cook her food? She has no relatives. She can hardly walk.”
“She will care for herself. She is walking all over the place today, and if she cannot cook, she can eat with us at the hospital,” the doctor says. “But she must have a shelter.”
Mohamed sighs and nods to an assistant. So be it.
He waves the old woman out of the office as he prepares to meet the next of a dozen people who wait at his door with their demands. But first, he turns to a visitor. His patience has returned.
“Mine is a hard job,” he says. “But it is beautiful hard, because you are dealing with human beings, yes?”
Oxfam volunteers began the frantic well-digging at Wad Sherife in early February. One day toward the end of the month, they struck water at 15 feet. “Now that there is water, the camp has come to life,” says Josephine Harder, a Swiss Red Cross nurse who runs the camp’s largest feeding center, where milk and porridge are given to more than 5,000 malnourished children each day. “It is very different here now. Before, they were like zombies. No one talked. But now it is like a marketplace. Now, while there’s water and food, it’s a pleasure to be here. I can see the progress.
“But I would like some cooking pots for the women.”
Harder is 55; half her life has been spent as a volunteer in the Third World. She is short and rather stout, and wears a bright, checked bandanna over her steel-gray hair. Her eyes are faded blue, as if she had spent too much time squinting against the searing desert sun.
Among the volunteers who work throughout Sudan’s Eastern Region, Harder is known as “Saint Josephine” for her tireless work with the refugees, especially the children. But visitors are warned that Harder can be tough and abrupt, and harbors no fondness for journalists.
It is a reputation she earned during the early weeks at Wad Sherife, when refugees flocked to the makeshift camp from Eritrea – 7,500 by early December, 33,000 by Jan. 1, 65,000 by mid-February – only to find that the promise of food and water could not be kept.
“In the beginning it was terrible,” Harder says. “People just dying in front of your eyes of starvation. I was horrified that there was no notice getting out.”
That – and Harder’s view of the media – has changed some since Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy’s Christmastime visit to Eastern Sudan. “So many TV cameras came with him, so now the world knows,” she says. “Now it is getting better.”
So the volunteers watch with guarded hope as the stronger children wiggle their bare toes in the mud that collects beneath the dripping water spigots. They smile again, but the worry haunts their eyes. Harder remains angry because the women are finally given rice and spaghetti, but no pots to cook in. Sardines are donated as a food staple to a people who don’t eat fish. An American restaurant company sent 120 boxes of sugar, each containing 2,000 teaspoon size packets. It takes two days to open enough packets to make one day’s worth of high-energy milk for the children in the feeding centers.
Dr. Jean-Marie Morre, medical director of the Swiss Red Cross clinic here, also is skeptical “To me, it is obvious. Once another disaster happens somewhere else in the world, everyone will forget about Wad Sherife. At one moment here, it was horrible. And it will be horrible again.”