Jane Beesley's Darfur Diary
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DAY 2: KEBKABIYA
Jane Beesley, a communications officer for Oxfam Great Britain, took a reporting trip to Darfur, Sudan, in the end of April and the early part of May. She visited camps and towns where tens of thousands of displaced people are now living. Here is her diary of that expedition.
We are flying down to the town of Kebkabiya, west of El Fasher. What used to be a six-hour drive by car is forty-five minutes by helicopter. The roads are now too unsafe to travel. Hijackings are almost a daily occurrence. Visibility from the air is difficult. It seems like the haboub—the wind with dust—has arrived. As we get closer to Kebkabiya, the visibility improves.
First we drop off our bags at the Oxfam house, where we coincide with the water delivery. Because there’s no running water supply, water is being delivered by donkey cart.
The situation in Kebkabiya is quite different from El Fasher. Here, Oxfam is working in the town as well as in the rural areas. It’s good to get out of the town and visit some of the villages. With two million people having fled to towns and camps, the needs of people who have remained in their villages are often overlooked.
We meet women at the hand pumps collecting water. Before the pumps were installed, they had to go quite a distance to a wadi ( a river bed that is seasonally dry) to collect their water. Other women are cleaning up the village.
Security continues to be the main challenge here. Though things on the surface seem calm we are all aware of how fragile and volatile the situation is. Oxfam is regularly unable to get to villages like this because it is too dangerous.
One of the women, Kaltom, has recently returned to the village from a temporary stay in Kebkabiya.
“When this conflict happened I went to the town. I was very happy to return home,” she said. Unfortunately for most of the two million others who fled their homes, going back is still an impossible dream.
