Melinda worked on Oxfam's Darfur response from the beginning of 2004 until the middle of 2005, and returned again at the start of 2007.
"A woman came up to me in tears and described how her village had been attacked by militia and she had watched her child burn alive. That was four years ago, shortly after I arrived in Darfur, but I still remember it vividly today.
Then, the conflict was at its height with violent burning and looting of villages and mass displacement of hundreds of thousands of people. The first time I went to Kalma camp in South Darfur it was just a piece of wasteland, with the earliest arrivals taking shelter under plastic bags and twigs. We went to assess the conditions there and we thought the area could shelter 27,000 people at most. Little did we imagine that Kalma would eventually provide refuge for over 100,000 people, or that over two million would in time live in such camps across Darfur. Nor did people expect the camps would still be here now. They were only expected to be short-term.
Oxfam's initial response focused on providing water and sanitation. In a major humanitarian crisis, toilets are not always the first things that spring to people's minds! But they are incredibly important. In the early days, women in the camps kept stopping me and telling me what they really needed were toilets. The women had nowhere private to go so they had to wait until dark—which exposed them to the risk of violence. We were also very worried that diseases such as cholera would spread quickly in the new, crowded camps without proper sanitation. The conditions in Kalma camp at that time were horrific.
One of my proudest moments in Darfur was in early 2004 when we constructed the first trench latrine in Kalma. It was like a festival, with young children watching bemused and amazed as their mothers joined in and helped dig the pits. Although the latrine was just a simple pit with some plastic slabs, we all knew it was such a big step towards making people safe.
When I left Darfur in mid-2005 people were optimistic that the conflict might end soon. It was a shock to come back 18 months later and find no progress. The conflict has changed, but not improved. There are fewer attacks on civilians now, but there is little left to attack. Many villages have already been burned : They can't be destroyed twice. It is still far too dangerous for people to go home. Meanwhile, security for aid workers is much worse than it was before and it is getting harder and harder for us to operate.
Oxfam's work in Darfur has changed enormously over the five years. At first, we were just trying to keep people alive another day by delivering aid as quickly as possible to people who had lost absolutely everything. But now, as the situation has changed and the conflict goes on, our work has had to change, too. If someone has had no access to their farmland for the last five years, how can they support their family? People do not expect to leave the camps anytime soon, so we are working more to provide them with livelihood opportunities to earn an income.
If there is an end to the conflict soon there will be enormous challenges to overcome. People are still clinging to their last hopes for peacekeepers who can protect them. But they have been hoping for this for the past five years and patience is running out.
Resolving the Darfur conflict will need to incorporate Darfuri traditions, but also look to the future. Traditional mechanisms such as compensation for the people who have had families killed and homes burned and looted, are crucial to any sustainable peace deal, yet are often overlooked and misunderstood by international mediators. But so much has changed now and we can't just go back to how things were in Darfur before the conflict.
There are new challenges. Compared to 20 years ago, there are now far more people and animals competing for dwindling land and resources, and there is far less rainfall. Traditional nomadic lifestyles are under threat from the changing environment and urbanization, as many people now only feel safe near big towns. Darfur needs responsible and representative government to create new policies to deal with these changes. All this needs to be addressed if a solution is to be found."
Hussaam started work with Oxfam in early 2004 and has been part of our Darfur response ever since, working in camps and villages throughout Darfur.
"I began working with Oxfam just as humanitarian organizations started scaling up the response to the enormous needs in the camps here. I had just graduated from university and my first job was drawing pictures for Oxfam to use in campaigns to educate people in camps about staying healthy. The pictures were used in camps all over Darfur, and since then I've worked for Oxfam in six different camps and towns.
One of my proudest achievements over these years was our fight against cholera in Gereida camp—the biggest in Darfur sheltering over 120,000 people. Most of them arrived during just a few months in 2006. The camp grew rapidly, conditions were very basic, and there were very few organizations working there. We worked with the other aid agencies and with the community itself. It was one huge effort, but together we succeeded and nobody died of cholera.
Now the conflict has been going so many years we have to be more innovative in our work. People have heard our health messages many times—we can't just keep visiting homes and telling them the same thing over and over again. We have to find new ways to get our messages across—working with youth groups, teachers and religious leaders to educate people through music, drama, art, and at prayer sessions in the mosques.
The security problems have made things increasingly difficult over the years. It was hugely disappointing that after all our good work in Gereida, we had to close our office there because of attacks on our staff members. We worked there in a very close team and we wanted to expand our work into the rural areas and villages nearby. It was terrible that we had to pull out—but the insecurity made it impossible to continue."
Mahmoud joined Oxfam in North Darfur in early 2004 as a public health worker in Abu Shouk camp, before becoming assistant program manager of Oxfam's work in Kebkabiya. He now works in close liaison with all our field offices throughout the region.
"When we started work in Abu Shouk camp, it was like a desert. There were no water sources, no food, nothing. We dug wells and latrines and set up sanitation systems, but most of the people arriving from the villages didn't know how to use the latrines. We had to teach them. After just a few months they quickly learned and there was a big improvement in the camp.
It has been great to see the community learning and taking responsibility. At first there were lots of Oxfam staffers: The community just didn't know what to do and they needed us to show them. Now we have fewer staff in the camp, as communities participate much more and are now able to manage their own facilities.
Abu Shouk today is totally different from then. It is much more organized, and people have much more water and assistance. As the conflict goes on, people's security is still a huge issue, but many of their other concerns have changed over the five years. Earlier, people were focused on how to get food and water. Their aim was just to survive another day. Now people are thinking longer term—how to give their kids an education, how to build houses, and how to earn an income. We are constantly developing our programs to meet these needs and make sure that our work really benefits people.
There have been so many achievements to be proud of over the past five years. Most of all, I am proud of how Oxfam is perceived by local communities throughout Darfur. They know there is no political agenda to our work, and that we try and work with whichever communities need assistance—no matter what their tribe. My biggest regret is that the great work we have done in remote villages around Kebkabiya has been so limited because of the security situation, which makes it too dangerous for us to leave the town. I hope things improve so we can work in more villages again as well as in the camps."
]]>This is where Asewe stays when she's in Goz Beida, a small town in eastern Chad whose outskirts are now flooded with about 52,000 people forced from their villages by factional fighting. But when it's safe, her home is a tent at Kerfi, one of several sites in the area that the displaced Chadians have temporarily settled.
"That's what my beneficiaries are using," says Asewe about her tent. "It's good to use what my beneficiaries are using."
It's there, at Kerfi, that Asewe likes to be best—in the midst of the people she has come to help. A registered nurse and trained midwife, she is a public health promoter for Oxfam, leading a team of three staffers and a committee of 15. Her job is to work closely with families, showing them how to prevent the spread of waterborne diseases. A musical voice, a warm smile, and an untempered passion are her tools.
Asewe came to this region of Chad in mid-July 2007—at the height of the rainy season—her second posting to the country in a long humanitarian career that has carried her around the world from the tsunami-ravaged coast of Indonesia to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, Ethiopia and back to Chad. It was raining that first time here, too, back in 2004 when refugees from the Darfur region of Sudan were streaming across the border, many of them having walked for days to reach safety.
She was assigned to Bredjing, a camp that now has a population of close to 30,000 people. But back then, it was just beginning to grow, a chaotic sprawl of families, ragged and tired, desperate for food, water, and shelter.
"It was a very difficult situation. Every morning we would come and we would find at least 100 people, towards the wadi, just squatting around," recalls Asewe. "Some would come with small plastic sheets. Some would have traditional mats, but some would have literally nothing. It would be raining the whole night. The children would have literally nothing on top of their heads."
Many of them didn't survive.
"They put in their own graveyard. Every morning organizations like Doctors Without Borders had outreach people just to count how many graves. Yes. So it was very very painful when they first came."
For nine months, Asewe worked with Oxfam, and alongside other organizations, to bring some order to the camp.
"I left happy, though," she says, "because I had seen the beginning and I saw all the changes—everybody putting in a lot of effort." Besides getting water and sanitation services in place, aid groups had even managed to set up activities for children. And the overcrowding was relieved a bit when some of the refugees moved to a new camp—one that was planned for them in advance, so water systems and latrines were already in place.
For the first few weeks of her posting to Kerfi, about 45 kilometers south of Goz Beida, Asewe couldn't even get there. The heavy seasonal rain had swollen the seasonal river, or wadi, swamping parts of the village, and making it impossible for trucks to cross. The short drive from Goz Beida to Kerfi took six or seven hours through the rain, as drivers struggled to negotiate the mud and gushing streams.
Doctors Without Borders was the only aid organization working in Kerfi at the time, said Asewe and it had managed to get there before the rains began to fall. It had parked two of its trucks on the far side of the wadi rushing by the village.
Eventually, workers built a small raft from old drums. An Oxfam driver would deliver Asew to the wadi's edge, and she would float across, her feet dangling in the water, to catch a ride on the other side in a Doctors Without Borders truck.
"We did that until September," Asewe said. "We were not able to get a driver across until October so that delayed all the possibilities."
But once she was able to set foot in Kerfi, Asewe wasted no time in laying the groundwork for her program.
In crowded situations, where there is little room for people and their animals to live as they are accustomed, the spread of waterborne diseases poses a major threat. In December Kerfi was home home to more than 3,000 displaced people—on top of the 4,200 who were already living there.
"The major issue was there was a lot of wadi water, but no clean water," said Asewe, noting that Doctors Without Borders was treating numerous cases of diarrhea. "It was pathetic. The host community, having been completely surrounded, also lost the area they would use for extra space. Their main complaint was they hardly had any place to get their animals to graze." Nor did they have any place left to use as a bathroom.
"Hence the demand for latrines and water," says Asewe.
In convincing people to adopt new ways of doing things, it's important to make them part of the process—so they own it, too. But first, Asewe has to find out what they know, and in this case, it quickly became clear that people were not making the link between the dirty wadi water they were relying on the diarrhea they were suffering from.
"That gives you a key basis where to start," says Asewe.
She organized a development committee of nine women and eight men from Kerfi who would eventually help her with the big task of public education. After some training, together they settled on three main messages they needed to convey to the community.
The messages may sound simple to western ears, but for the residents and displaced people of Kerfi, they could mean the difference between life and death.
Here is what the health promotion committee and Asewe want the people of Kerfi to do:
Part of Asewe's public education program also includes granting families ownership of community latrines—along with cleaning and maintenance duties. About 20 people share each latrine. When a cluster of three or four have been built for people who are under the care of one chief, Asewe arranges for a handover ceremony, with plans made for who's going to keep the latrines clean and how they'll close them down when they're full. And with each latrine, Oxfam provides a latrine kit—a brush and bucket for cleaning.
Some people get the messages very quickly; others are slower to change.
"The best people to target are the children," says Asewe. They learn quickly and adapt readily. "For adults, they may be able to understand, but changing habits may not be so easy."
But whatever the frustrations may be—wadis overflowing with water, insecurity that keeps her tied to Goz Beida, the slow pace of people's adaptation—Asewe says none of that is enough to snuff out the enthusiasm she has for this work.
"I'm still so happy to be the public health promoter who goes to that little house and finds the child and plays around with them and see how you could improve their little lives," says Asewe. "That makes me more happy. It's quite an opportunity and a blessing."
]]>There can be no way forward for Darfur until all parties to the conflict stop fighting and stop attacks on civilians. Yet, at the moment, the violence continues, causing untold misery for millions of people—with thousands more attacked and fleeing their homes every week the conflict goes on. People across the world must let their politicians know that the suffering of so many Darfur citizens will be tolerated no longer. The international community must put greater sustained pressure on all parties to immediately cease hostilities and return to the negotiating table.
For five years the world has promised the people of Darfur that it will protect them from violence—yet there is still no peacekeeping force capable of giving civilians the protection they need and deserve. The new United Nations-African Union force, known as UNAMID, deployed at the start of 2008 but is still woefully under strength, with only a third of its 26,000 personnel on the ground and a lack of equipment, training, and political backing. The force urgently needs more international support. Getting UNAMID on the ground took 18 months of enormous political effort, but this will be wasted unless the force is made strong enough to actually protect people.
The humanitarian response in Darfur is among the largest in the world and has had an enormous impact on people’s lives. Early in the crisis, large numbers of people died of malnutrition and disease, but over time the mortality rates have been cut and people now have greatly improved access to vital services such as water, food, and healthcare. Yet daily targeted attacks on humanitarian workers are making Darfur an increasingly dangerous and difficult place to work. Oxfam’s staffers are still managing to assist over 400,000 people – but it is becoming ever harder to do so. The international community must ensure that all the many parties to the conflict respect international humanitarian law and allow aid to reach those who desperately need it.
Despite the vast humanitarian effort and the need for a stronger protection force, the only sustainable solution to the conflict is a political one. The peace process has stalled again recently and world leaders must provide sustained, coordinated leadership to reinvigorate efforts to unite the countless factions and bring all parties back to negotiations. Greater effort must be made to ensure such talks are truly representative of the people of Darfur, by increasing the involvement of civil society and marginalized groups, and reflecting the needs and concerns of all Darfur’s many ethnic groups.
While soldiers and militia fight, it is the ordinary people of Darfur who suffer. They want nothing more than an end to the conflict and to be able to get back to their normal lives – but they need our help to make this happen. People all over the world can help ensure their political leaders do not allow attention on Darfur to fade after five years. Darfur must not be allowed to become yet another “forgotten crisis.” To do so would condemn millions of its people to years more suffering.
]]>But, he adds proudly, he does know how to wash his hands properly after going to the latrine—something he rarely did just a few weeks ago. And he proceeds to demonstrate to the group of children, who—like Osman—have started attending Oxfam's child-to-child educational programs that aim to equip the children of Kalma camp with knowledge that could save their lives.
Football matches, songs, volleyball tournaments, and playground games are just some of the innovative ways in which the Oxfam Public Health Promotion (PHP) team here is teaching children how to stay healthy.
Kalma is one of the largest camps in Darfur—mile after mile of tightly packed shelters and rapidly constructed sanitation systems currently home to around 89,000 displaced people. As in most camps, the vast majority of residents are women and children. Two years ago there were just 19,000 people here, but rapid growth since then has created an abundance of health risks, to which children are the most vulnerable.
"Children everywhere need to be taught to wash their hands and keep clean," says Khaled Suleiman, one of Oxfam's PHP officers in the camp. "But here especially so, as the consequences can easily be fatal."
To make sure the messages sink in, Khaled and the team try to make them as fun as possible. Oxfam has built a series of community shelters where child-to-child interactive classes and activities are held.
Songs are enthusiastically sung about how to prevent malaria and diarrhea ("Our food should be washed, our water should be covered," the children sing, accompanied by stomping of feet and clapping of hands).
Other songs encourage children to participate in community clean-up campaigns, and explain how to set up mosquito nets and use the latrines properly. Oxfam has installed around 9,000 family latrines and 1,500 communal latrines in Kalma.
The children in Kalma love to make noise. The merest glimpse of a new Oxfam worker elicits a chorus of hundreds of voices shouting in unison, "OK, OK"—the nickname the children of Kalma have given to foreign visitors and the first English word every child in the camp learns. The welcome is followed by mischievous smiles and laughter all round, and the children's enthusiasm for loud, energetic fun extends into the classroom.
"My favorite is the singing and dancing," says Osman of the child-to-child activities, his arms waving frantically about his head as he mimes the actions to a song about swatting away flies. "And I like to learn new things." He has spent most of his short life in the camp after arriving here with just his mother. Nobody is sure what happened to his father and brothers.
Nine-year-old Hawa also likes to sing. "I enjoy the classes as I can make friends with lots of other children and learn at the same time. We sing the songs when we go home as well. I would like to go to school but so far I have not been able to," said Hawa, who has been in the camp for two-and-a-half years since her family fled their village of Shataya, nearly 100 miles to the west.
The PHP team works with community volunteers to come up with new songs that they think the children will find both educational and entertaining. "Kalma is as big as a city, so it is divided into eight 'sectors,'" says Khaled. "Recently we heard children from sectors 7 and 8—the only parts of the camp where Oxfam does not work—singing our songs! The children at our classes had been singing at home and gradually the songs spread around the entire camp."
The programs have proved extremely popular—almost too popular. The teachers—themselves displaced people living in the camp—say they often have 400 children trying to cram into a single room at the community shelter. "Every time we open the door, another dozen or so burst in," says Khadija, who teaches children in Sector 3 of the camp.
"Having such large classes can make it very hard for us to get the message across successfully," she says. "So we have split them into groups. Group 1 comes between 8:30 and 10:30 and Group 2 between 11 and 1 pm. Of course, some children try and come to both!"
"We are trying to ensure that the children are exposed to our messages at every possible opportunity," says Khaled. "The songs are just a part of our activities and it is clear that children's health has improved since the programs began."
Cartoon drawings explaining how food can breed germs, and how failing to clean latrines will spread disease and attract rodents, are pinned to the walls of the community shelters. Football matches and other events are organized for children to attend, where health-related information is disseminated.
The PHP team is also coordinating its efforts with the four primary schools in Kalma camp. A number of children from each class are chosen as supervisors and join teachers for training in hygiene promotion. The skills and facts they learn are then passed on to their classmates and pupils.
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