Over time, that will mean one third of the dangerous fuel-gathering trips to the countryside, one third the loss of trees, one third the smoke inhaled by Dawelbiat and her young ones, one third the air emissions. And now that she is buying her fuel in the marketplace, she’s spending a third of what she used to and has more money to feed and clothe and educate her children.
Her stove—known as the Berkeley-Darfur Stove—is the brainchild of the Darfur Stoves Project (DSP), a US-based Oxfam partner organization that draws on the work of engineers at the Lawrence-Berkeley National Laboratory in California. DSP worked with women in Darfur to develop a stove suited to their needs that would use less than half the fuel of a traditional three-stone fireplace and significantly less than other stove models that are available locally. The result is a portable 12-sided metal stove - around 12” in every dimension - that is as advanced in its design as it is simple in its construction. And whose frugal output is a match for the scarce resources of the Darfur camps.
On a day in December, while her daughter and a friend play on a mat behind her and a neighbor holds her ten-month-old baby, Dawelbiat sits down on a low stool next to her stove and begins to cook her family’s mid-morning meal. The kitchen is a low mud-brick building, shadowy but brightly lit where the sun slips in through the doorway.
She places a pot of water on the stove, adds a few pieces of wood to the firebox, and sets the fire going with a match. When the water boils, she sprinkles ground millet into the pot and stirs it with a long, carved wooden stick until she’s created a thick porridge—known as asida—which she sets aside in a bowl. The next course is mullah, a soup made of onions fried in oil with dried meat, crushed tomato, okra, and spices. And finally, tea. In the space of an hour, Dawelbiat and her fistful of kindling have produced a meal for six.
At the compound of Oxfam partner SAG (Sustainable Action Group) in nearby El Fasher, the usual sounds of a Darfur town—the roar of vehicles, the clatter of grain mills, and the bleats and brays of animals—is replaced with the banging of metal on metal. Here in a building sided and thatched with sorghum stalks, eight men from the Al Salaam camp work at tables assembling Berkeley-Darfur stoves. They smile at visitors and get back to work, bending and hammering metal into its designated size and shape. To the list of benefits of the stoves can be added one more: employing survivors of the conflict, who—uprooted from their homes and farms—struggle to find any work at all.
So far, SAG and the workers from the camps have produced and distributed around 9,000 stoves. With enough funds, they’ll create 15,000 stoves in 2011. Some will go to the camps, others to rural areas hard up against the deadly combination of deforestation and armed conflict.
Dawelbiat is shy with strangers, but her praise for the stove is effusive all the same. “The stove is good because it’s efficient and saves fuel and cooks faster. It’s better at keeping the kitchen clean, and there is less smoke. You can easily cook with it and easily move it around. Even a small portion of fuel can make your food.”
“More people should have these stoves,” she concludes.
It is a point that no one argues.
]]>It's called the West Salvation Road, and it remains unfinished. In Darfur, where nearly two years of violence have left close to one-third of the region's six million people homeless, salvation is just a dream. The rutted dirt roads that link the villages offer little hope that deliverance will come any time soon.
Darfur is not an easy place to navigate no matter what mode of transportation you choose. Heat, banditry, mud and dust, armed attacks, even little boys throwing stones—all of it conspires to make travel across Darfur slow and exhausting.
In parts of the south, up to 40 inches of rain can fall in a year, leaving sections of roads deep in sloppy silt. When it's dry, the fine sand piles in drifts across the roads, swallowing vehicles to their axles. Sometimes, the only way to get where you want to go is to put on your shoes and walk.
It was the shoes that kept catching my eye at Abu Shouk, and other temporary camps where tens of thousands of homeless people now wait out endless days. Mostly, they were slip-on sandals, leaving the wearers' heels to crack in the hot sand and their toes to cake with dust.
Were these the shoes that carried some people across sizzling plains and dried-out riverbeds on their long trek to safety? Many of the people fleeing their torched homes left on foot—and walked for days.
I look down at my boots, glad for the thick leather and lug soles insulating my feet. Could I have trekked the desert in flip-flops?
The only walking I've done is to the market—just once—a half-hour trudge through waves of red sand lapping over one of the few, and very busy, paved roads in El Fasher. Dodging the slower but heavily burdened donkeys, tiny blue and white taxis rattle past in a steady stream. Their interiors are packed with more passengers than it seems could possibly fit. But fit they do, and they don't look unhappy about it. It's better than walking.
Mostly, aid workers in this capital of North Darfur don't walk. They drive, or, more properly, are driven. It's hot, and offices and guesthouses are spread out across a city that some say numbers 200,000 people while others say is twice that. In a place without street names or house numbers, residents must be hard to count.
Driving in Darfur takes skill and patience. It helps to have a sturdy truck since miles of dirt tracks and sharp rocks take their toll on even the toughest vehicles. Breakdowns and mishaps are common. A flat tire and a smashed rear window—courtesy of a little boy tossing a stone—punctuate the round-trip expedition of an Oxfam convoy to Tawila, a town nearly two hours from El Fasher.
The better drivers know how to plow through the sandy drifts to firmer ground. Others simply get stuck, every wheel of their towering transport trucks sunk in the sand. For these drivers, patience is paramount. It could be a long time before they dig out again.
At Zam Zam station, a small trading post of thatched stalls near one of the camps for homeless people, a collection of trucks headed toward Nyala, the capital of South Darfur, has pulled off to the side of the road. Piled high with jerry cans, sacks, plastic chairs, and wooden pallets—all powdered with dust—the trucks look like they're here to stay. Banditry plagues South Darfur and the speculation is that the trucks, with their valuable cargo, dare not make the journey—yet.
So, the drivers wait, catching up on their sleep in the midday heat. One has pulled out a bed strapped to the back of his cab. Others tinker with a giant gear pried loose from the underbelly of a truck. Two watermelons cool in the shade behind one of the wheels.
Endurance, I think, must be a prized virtue among those in the Darfur driving profession.
In this poor and undeveloped place, the four-legged conveyances that compete stubbornly for street space seem more reliable than the four-wheeled variety. Donkeys don't get flats. They don't guzzle gas or require painstaking repairs or expensive new parts. All they need is food and water.
But at Kebkabiya, thousands of these precious donkeys suffered a grim fate last summer. They died of starvation, their carcasses littering the streets.
The donkeys belonged to some of the 60,000 homeless people who have streamed into Kebkabiya after being driven from their villages by the ongoing violence. It wasn't easy for people to leave the town to gather the grasses their donkeys desperately needed. In June, July, and August, the sturdy animals began to die—2,800 of them.
"It was a very big problem," recalls Esther Kabahuma, one of Oxfam's public health promoters. There were so many carcasses around that people began shoving them into the nearby riverbed to get rid of them.
"This town was stinking," adds Kabahuma.
Somehow, linking that word—stinking—to these dependable beasts sums up the sad truth of Darfur: What was good has gone bad. Even the completion of the West Salvation Road might not be enough to bring back the old Darfur.
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