FEB. 22 FRIDAY,
IN SHOWAK
I’m growing quite accustomed to this land except maybe the cockroaches that share the toilet and shower) and don’t even see things as exotic anymore. Today the barren Atbara looked green to me, because my eyes were finding the green and able to overlook the scorched, cracked brown that is all-present. And the skinny babies are no longer a shock. Nor do the rags worn by the kids and the women look anything but ordinary and totally acceptable.
I don’t know if all that is good or bad. There’s something to be said for coming to terms with a place and accepting it for what it is. But, too, when you stop seeing things as wrong, you stop fighting to make them better.
“We brought a truckload of grapefruit to Tukl Baab one day, and when we opened the back of the truck they all fell out. There were thousands of grapefruit spilled all over, there for the taking. But not one kid came and took so much as one grapefruit.”
Emily Copeland, a former St. Paul resident who is studying relief efforts in Africa, tells that story to illustrate her admiration for what she calls the “self-discipline” of the refugees.
There are many such stories in the camps in Eastern Sudan: Stacks of grain sit untouched in the Middle of Wad Kowli while people wait hours to receive their daily flour ration; older children escort their younger brothers and sisters to the feeding centers, then wait outside in the bot sun for eight hours while the younger ones drink their milk; thirsty people politely wait their turn at the water spigots. There is no shoving or cheating here, not even much shouting or anger.
“I’d shudder to think what would happen if you put 100,000 Brits or Americans in a place like this. You’d have mass rioting,” says William Day, an administrator for Save the Children-U.K. “Yet we herd these people into trucks and line them up at feeding centers and push and prod their children and take away their dignity to keep them alive.
“And it’s got to be done, doesn’t it? You see them coming in all trusting and wide-eyed and looking for help.”
But what Day views as tolerance from a “beautiful people,” others see as a sign that the refugees lack the hope and energy to fight. “A lot of what appears to be a gentleness, a malesh, is really depression,” says American Refugee Committee nurse Katharine Donohue.
Dr. Jean-Marie Tromme, medical director at the Swiss Red Cross clinic at Wad Sherife, agrees: ”These people, they never get angry. From time to time it is necessary to get angry. But they are in such bad physical and moral condition, they are depressed. It will take time before they recover some hope, some life. Time, and food.”
That depression, and the resulting dependency, is inevitable in a refugee situation: People with nothing must rely on others. Zemuy Ghbremeakel, an Eritrean who fled the army here, explains: “It’s not good to be a refugee, but they have food to eat for the time being, and it is better than dying.”
So relief-agency volunteers put food into hungry bellies, always feeling they can’t do enough to stop the suffering and death. Yet some worry about doing too much – or doing the wrong thing.
“Once they reach the point of being fed, then what?” says Susan Smith of the American Refugee Committee. “Are we going to keep feeding them? Are we going to increase that dependence? If that’s so, we’re doing them far more harm than good.” Many relief workers express frustration about the Band-Aid nature of their work. For Smith and Patrice Coolick, also of the American Refugee Committee, the solution is to teach the refugees basic hygiene and health even while they are nursing.
“You can’t afford not to teach,” Coolick says. ”It’s not a luxury here. It’s a necessity. That attitude comes with time as you realize you are wholly inadequate alone.”
And the U.N. High Commission on Refugees, which oversees the care of refugees in U.N.-member nations throughout the world, has seemingly strict policies purposely designed to end the dependency syndrome: Full-ration feeding is to be stopped after the second harvest, thus forcing the refugees to return home to farm their lands, or find work in their new land. The commission also promotes long-range development projects designed to make people self-sufficient without destroying their ancient cultures.
But there hasn’t been a second harvest in Ethiopia or Sudan. There hasn’t even been a first. Meanwhile, people are hungry.
“We’re still struggling with their basic needs,” says Mike Menning, the commission’s regional officer in Gedaref. “Trying to improve their musical instruments, or whatever, seems a little silly when people are dying. Not that it’s not a good idea, but you have food and water to think of first.”
There are some development projects at work in Eastern Sudan: A crew works in the Elephant Forest near Gedaref studying better techniques for making charcoal and teaching camel herders the importance of reforestation; brick-building and mat-weaving factories are being set up in some villages, allowing people to use their skills to earn an income.
But the projects are small and speculative. The Africa famine is huge and immediate.
“If we wait for that, we’ll all be in our graves,” Menning says.
The best that can be done for now, be says, is to settle the refugees by village so they have a support system, provide enough aid to keep them alive, but not so much they’ll want to stay.
“The only real solution is for them to go home,” he says.
Those who return to Eritrea will be provided with seeds and tools to recover their farms. Those who stay eventually may be given a plot of land to cultivate, or jobs in some of the development projects.
“But I would suspect it’ll be two years before anyone goes back,” Menning says. “If the rains come this year, some of the men will go home to plant. But I’m not too optimistic about the rain. And the Dergue is still bombing the shit out of Eritrea.”
FEB.24 SUNDAY NOON,
IN WAD KOWLI
Time passes slowly in Sudan. The past two hours have felt like two days – restless, hot, fitful days when nothing is accomplished and sleep won’t come to kill the hours.
The drive back here last night, mostly by dark, was another riotous experience. We enjoyed the rare comfort of an enclosed Land Rover with cushioned seats. But we also carried a load of party food and several boxes of European-style bedpans. The boxes quickly disintegrated, prompting the ever-ebullient Dr. Serge (the man with the cognac eyes) to eliminate the boxes and let the individual chamber pots find their own niches. The result was an amusing cacophony of clanging, rattling tins jouncing against one another, the windows, the truck interior and us. In most circumstances, it would have been maddening. (How many times have I slammed the dashboard of my car to make it stop rattling?) But out here, with these great-hearted people, it became a game. Serge dubbed it “Wad Kowli: A Symphony for Bedpans.”
I wonder if people are born with great attitudes, or learn them through life?
FEB. 24 SUNDAY NIGHT, IN WAD KOWLI I took a walk through camp today and stumbled on a death at the clinic. It was a young girl, 12, with cerebral malaria. A group of men washed and wrapped her, all very discreetly and quietly, then tied her to the branch pallet and carried her off on their thin shoulders for buria.
What a bizarre scene. Marching to death through the common toilet. We passed two other funeral parties on their way in, shouldering their picks and shovels where they recently bad shouldered their dead. We also passed a group of villagers wrestling a cow to slaughter, and a Save the Children Fund feeding center where the children were singing with a battery-operated bullhorn and dancing. They were songs of war and famine and hope. Small boys sat on huge milk cans and drummed between their legs, making lovely percussion. It was a wonderful antidote to death.
Two other funerals were taking place just a few feet away. I felt little emotion – not like at the large funeral Jean and I witnessed two weeks ago. Mostly I felt shame for standing there and intruding on their grief. The dead girl hardly seemed real to me. She was a wasted figure wrapped in a white shroud and a green wool blanket. 1I knew nothing of her life or personality or hopes or beauty. How sad. There are so many deaths, so many sad stories, so many refugees. It becomes harder and harder to see them as individuals.
I tried to talk with her father, but got only the barest facts of their journey here – an escape from famine and politics. Nothing of his emotion or of his daughter. I have to admire his refusal to make his grief public.
When a person dies in the highlands of northern “Ethiopia, the body is washed and embalmed and shrouded, and lain in state in the church or mosque. Relatives come from far distances, and all the villagers gather to honor the dead. The mourners keep vigil through the night, then march to the cemetery to bury the dead in the full light of day. The men chant the death song, and the women keen. It is tradition.
But at Wad Kowli, the traditions of death must concede to the demands of life. Funerals are immediate and, except for village elders or men of stature, brief. There is no church, no vigil and, sometimes, no shroud. Women are banned from the graveyards and must do their keening at home. Above all, the mourning period must be brief.
“All the traditional ways are already forgotten because of the problems,” says Desalegn Tsehay, an Eritrean refugee who works as a nurse at the YMCA feeding center. “Now death becomes common, and there are other things to be done. If it is a food ration day, they must forget the dead and do what they must to live. Now if a man dies in the evening, they do not keep him over. They do not have the mummy system here and the flesh will be spoiled, so they bury as soon as he dies. Even in the night.”
Only for the dead does the jounrney end here, in these sad camps in Eastern S’udan. For the living, the Trail of Tears goes on. As the water runs out in one place, some will move to another. As financial support slows, some will find work, or a patch of ground to plant some seeds. As the years go by bringing no great changes, some – only the fortunate few – will emigrate to countries like Wast Germany, Canada or the United States. And as the rains begin to fall again, bringing life back to the land, others will simply go home to start over.
Officials here say voluntary repatriation – going home – is the only attractive solution to the refugee crisis. They also say it’s not a realistic solution.
“The refugees want to go home if their problems are solved. If not, they will stay,” says Hassan Attnyah, Sudan’s deputy commissioner on refugees.
If their problems are solved. If the wars end and the heavens rain. If the unexpected happens.
“I can’t tell who’s hoping and who really has reason to believe the refugees will go home,” says John Benson, a Lalmba Association relief worker at Wad Sherife. “If you are given food and water, why leave? It’s like creating a welfare state. On the other hand, some say why stick around this dump?
“I guess the rains will tell.”
The rains are supposed to fall from July through September. Although few are optimistic that they will last that long, or come at all, some of the young men already have started the long walk home to plow and plant. If there is a harvest, the women and children will follow. If there is not, more will die.
But going home does not mean an end to the problems. “They have sold everything,” says Save the Children’s Dr. John Seaman, an author on Third World relief work. “And even though they survive, they go back to nothing. And assuming the rains come and the wars end and the economy returns to normal, they have nothing to start over with.
”The tragedy is not so much the people who have died as those who have been reduced to that condition. We have reduced a rich, landed people to a landless laboring class. That’s a very difficult thing to put right.”
Many will not go back, regardless of the weather. Hundreds of thousands fled northern Ethiopia before the famine to escape the war. The prospects are especially dim for refugees from Eritrea, where eight separate guerrilla factions are fighting against the Dergue and against one another.
“If we get enough food here, we will not be returning. We will stay sleeping here, because we do not like the war,” says Onur Musa, an old man who came to Wad Sherife with this brother, only to watch him die.
“All of them say they will stay in Sudan until the conditions in Ethiopia are better – the rains and the political conditions,” says Mohamed Osman Ali, the Sudanese government’s project manager at Wad Sherife. “Only God knows when that will be. And as the conditions change, some will go home but others will come. So there will always be people here.”
And as long as there are people here, they will need to be fed. The U.N. refugee commission has ordered a garden hoe for each family, but there is not enough cultivable land in this part of Sudan to provide each family with a farm. The desert continues to expand 3 miles a year, leaving Sudan less and less able to feed itself and its guests.
Sufficient aid is pledged through May, according to Mike Menning, the refugee commission’s field officer in Gedaref. The comission has requested another $96 million through October for Sudan, but pledges are well below that. $1.5 billion has been requested from the U.N.’s 125 member nations to feed Africa for the next year; about half is pledged.
“Right now there’s enough food in the pipeline, but you never know when the food in the pipeline will arrive or if it will arrive,” says Chris Oswald, a Save the Children relief worker at Wad Kowli. “Sometimes there will be ‘No fuel and the food will sit in Port Sudan for three or four days.
“And at the moment it’s still front-page news, but what will happen when the public loses interest?”
Colleague William Day shares that concern: “Sudan is the current flavor of the month, but who knows what it will be next month.”
Erratic food rationing has prompted some refugees to leave the camps already, returning home despite the fighting and drought. A village of 1,300 living at Wad Kowli requested permission to return to ilgray in late February. Officials at Wad Sherife say no one there has asked to repatriate, but refugees count the huts and say that some are missing each morning.
“If there is no grain and no water here, then it is no better than in our country,” says Kuhrom Zemay, an Eritrean refugee who works as a medic at Wad Sherife. “It is better to go home and die.”
Even if there is enough food for the body, it does not necessarily nourish the soul. Patrice Coolick of the American Refugee Committee says there was a high incidence of suicide in Thailand two years after the first Cambodian refugees arrived. “The same will probably happen here,” she says.
So in the land of ensh’Allah, mumkin, bucarra and malesh – God willing, maybe, tomorrow and what can you do – death seems to be the only certainty the future holds for these people, no matter where they go.
“What will happen to my people?” says Zemuy Ghebremeakel, an Eritrean medic at Wad Sherife. “They are going to die. If there is not going to be peace in Ethiopia, they are going to die. And if they stay here? … ”
He does not finish the sentence. He does not need to. He simply looks over the desert, to the graveyard.
MARCH 1 FRIDAY,
EN ROUTE TO THE TWIN CITIES
As we touched the tarmac at New York’s JFK, the passengers all burst into applause yelling “America” and “USA” and “We’re home.” I am told it’s tradition.
It’s 10 p.m. Detroit time. 9 p.m. at home. And 5 o’clock Saturday morning in Khartoum. We seem so much farther than that from what we experienced in Africa. Just stepping onto a SwiSsAir DC-10, still in Khartoum at that movie-set airport, made the previous month seem distant and ephemeral – like the lake mirages in the desert, always there but always beyond reach and never with clear, tangible definitions. The transition from then to now bas been like a journey back from (or maybe to?) Oz.
Jean and I did all the expected once back in “civilization” – squealed at the hot shower, marveled at flush toilets, bought things simply because they were there. I had my much-thought-about beer, and enjoyed it.
But all that post-Sudan reaction somehow didn’t feel right. Maybe because it was all too easy to slip back into the Western World. I wonder where I carry the residue of Showak and Wad Kowli and Wad Sherife. Does it wash off in the first hot shower? I must remind myself that I was there. I saw those people. I lived at those God-forsaken camps and was clutched by the children and old women, and I lay awake and listened to the night sounds.
There are so many visions, so many children, so much to remember. I wonder what will stay with me, in my heart, as the years fade the images in my’ mind. Already it is life I remember more vividly than death, the laughs of the children I hear more distinctly than the cries of the mothers, the dances I see more clearly than the funerals…
At Wad Kowli, a woman molds a proper cooking stove in the dirt. She mixes clay from mud and dung and straw, and carefully shapes a ring around the firepit. The stove will be easier to cook on and more efficient.
At Wad Sherife, the children clear a space in the defecation zone for a playing field. They mark it out with a few thorn branches and stones. In the late afternoons, they gather there to play soccer or tag or yard games they learned from the khawajas.
At Wad el Hilewu, a small boy makes a pull-toy from a sardine can. With the help of his father, he punches four holes in the four corners of the tin can, then pokes two sticks through the boles as axles. Crude wheels are fashioned from mud. Twine is threaded through a fifth bole punched in the front of the can. It bounces clumslfy behind him as he walks through camp.
And at the camp called E1 Fau, the refugees are planting gardens. Jane Swan, an International Rescue Committee nurse, says vegetables are growing there:
“Have you ever been in a cemetery where you see rows and rows of white markers and nothing else? Like Arlington? That’s the feeling yon get at Fau. There are these rows and rows of white tents, except now they’re dirty white, sitting on the brown dirt. Nothing else.
“But the last time I was there, I noticed something different. People have dug little, tiny round plots in front of their tents, and there were things growing there. I was amazed at what they done with absolutely nothing: planting, and building thorn fences between their tents, and walking really far distances to get: wood. They’re not supposed to do it, but they do it anyway.
“You know-those things they’re planting? They probably won’t survive. But it really speaks to the resiliency of people. People are finding humanity when there is none.”
MARCH 4 MONDAY,
AT LAKE SUPERIOR’S NORTH SHORE
We are wrapped in the warmth of a townhouse at Lutsen, watching winter rage outside with an anger that still surprises me, no matter how often I witness it. The world is white and bitter and defies survival. That much, I suppose, is not unlike Africa. Within one week, I have been able to watch the opposite ends of nature’s fury. But here I’m with friends in a cozy shelter, with music and refrigerator and telephone and touch-controlled heat.
The effects of Africa will make themselves apparent over time, I suppose. There are some initial feelings I pray will last: a greater serenity and patience with myself, less anxiety over situations I can’t change and that can’t change me.
There are other things that may not be so positive: a too easily aroused outrage at life’s injustices, patience with impatient Americans. I have to promise myself – then remind myself frequently – not to pull the old “you have no idea what hard, inconvenient, painful, poor, is”. That’s superior and arrogant and tiresome.
Maybe the goal should be to do as I saw others do: Let the way I live and act be testimony to how I feel. I hope I never forget what Patrice Coolick told me, so typically wise:
“The poor have an incredible amount to teach us about patience and thankfulness and an openness to life. We’re not poor so we’ve never had to wait. But that’s what the poor have grown up with – having to wait and having to share, because nobody can have it all.”