October 11 - It was as far as I could go

Richard’s mouth moved, forming words as the dust floated past his lips, but I couldn’t hear over the roar of the jeep.

“What?” I shouted back, leaning forward.

“The village is just up ahead!” he said, louder this time, and I nodded my understanding and tried to settle back against the seat again, my bottom coming half off the cushion with each rotation of the wheels. The knuckles were white where my hand gripped one black bar of the jeep, afraid I might be flung onto the sand at any moment if I relaxed my hold. The landscape outside the car was alien to me, like nothing I had seen in real life, or pictures, or TV shows, or movies. It was brown, all brown – light brown, dark brown, ecru, sienna, chocolate; the browns bleeding into one another until I would have given anything for a flash of color, a red flower, a green leaf, a woman’s embroidered dress. Even the cast to the sky was hazy, brown leeching into the blue, and the white clouds stained with soot. And it was hot, more suited to baking cookies than to allowing human life forms to thrive.

But then, humanity was not thriving here in the Sudan.

“Have you been before?” asked James in his British accent next to me. James was a medic with Doctors Without Borders, but he didn’t look the part, his brown hair swept back at a jaunty angle from his forehead, his features open and young, with his small dainty nose and his pixie smile. James didn’t talk much about the kinds of patients he had treated in the region, but when he did, his ready grin faded and his bright blue eyes clouded over like a passing dust storm. “Sometimes, as a doctor, you don’t save life. You do the best you can to ease death.” I nodded solemnly because I had been reading the newspaper reports from back in the States, and I knew of the atrocities being committed in the name of religion or color, or in no name at all, here in Darfur.

“No,” I responded to James’ query now. “Never. This will be my first trip in the field.” He nodded solemnly, the impish impulse to jest gone from his face again. I had never seen James look this bleak back at headquarters. I resumed my study of the landscape and reassured myself that all would be fine. I had come a long way from home for this opportunity, working towards my anthropology dissertation. It had taken a long time to convince my thesis advisor that the trip to Darfur was necessary, to speak to the women who bore the brunt of conflict, whose bodies became the symbols of war and nature and country. It was one thing to analyze and sift through the material on war and gender-based violence in the cold, removed halls of a Morningside Heights’ campus, but I knew I needed these women’s voices to make things complete. I had come a long way for this, I reminded myself, and I wasn’t going to chicken out now.

“Prepare yourself,” James sighed, and I wasn’t sure if he meant the words for me or for himself. “It will be horrific.”

I didn’t even realize what I was seeing at first, the cluster of low, humped objects looking like so many more sand dunes among the sand and the dirt we had been passing for four hours. I blinked and wiped grit from the corner of my eye and then gave a low cry.

“We’re there!” I shouted with relief. Richard looked back over his shoulder in concern. There was no relief on his expression to match my own.

“We’re there. It looks like they’ve been here before us.” He meant the janjaweed

I blinked again and more realities opened up. Not just a low cluster of tents, or wooden pens with a bleating, skeletal goat, but piles of soot still hot and steaming, more smoke rising from somewhere further back. The jeep had slowed so the engine let out only a gurgle now instead of a roar, and a group of women fanning back the last of what must have been a bonfire not long passed watched the vehicle pass with dead, uninterested eyes.

The jeep shuddered to a halt, and almost before the wheels stopped their motion, James was leaping over the open-sided door, his medical kit in one hand, and already shouting orders to his assistant, who had ridden squished in the front between the driver and Richard. Richard, an envoy from the Refugee Committee for Women and Children had exited already as well, more slowly. He knew this village and its people intimately, he had told me, returning to this spot constantly. They had been lucky so far, the last attack nearly five months in their past, some of the young boys from a few months ago nearly big enough to be deemed men now , and it was hard to find places with full-grown men these days. The women’s wounds were healing into puckered scars, and if the memories still terrified, well, they were memories, the women said to one another, and they would do as they had always done. Pick up and rebuild. The village had been lucky, Richard had said…

I looked around. Had been lucky. The attack couldn’t have been more than three hours in the past. Richard had his head bent low, talking to a young woman who looked no more than seventeen, balancing a baby at her breast. The woman glanced at me, lowered her head, nodded towards a tent. The baby was eerily silent as she ducked inside, where other babies in happier places normally wailed and howled.

“Go with Halima,” Richard told me. “I’ll help James out here. I’ve told her who you are and why you’re here. She wants you to see something.”

I nodded uncertainly, and ducked carefully within the low enclosure of the tent, one of the few structures to stand with no discernable damage. My eyes adjusted to the dim light and I saw that it had quickly become a refuge. Five women were spread out on the ground, while other women huddled over them, talking rapidly but quietly. All eyes looked at me when I entered, fear for a moment quickly flashing to relief and a return to the business at hand.

“She wants you to hear her story,” the girl – Halima – said to me. I nodded again, my Hausa just enough to make out the gist of what she said. I knelt by the side of another young girl – this one probably only fifteen. She looked at me and tried to wet cracked lips with her tongue, but the thin flecks of saliva she left behind had little result.

“Suad,” Halima told me.

“Hello, Suad,” I said gently.

Suad’s face was hideously burned, and a wave of nausea hit me at the sight; the flesh around her eyes and cheeks was mere tatters of black, but somehow her full pink lips had remained. She lifted a charred hand, only four fingers left – an old wound, I saw with relief, long since turned to a wrinkled stub – lifted the hand and gestured feebly. I rushed to her side and took hold of the maimed hand without thinking.

“They burned my husband, you understand?” Her words were soft, too soft for my rudimentary Hausa. Halima translated and I nodded my comprehension.

“When they rode over the hill, five hours ago, they said to my husband, ‘we want you to watch.’ They held a rifle to his chest while they raped me, each in his turn...” So coldly, she said it, so coldly, so I knew it was not the first time. The woman heaved a rasping sigh.

“And when they were done –“ Done. Like she was a meal that had been finished. “- they killed him anyway. Not with the rifle to his chest. With flames. I tried to smother the flames but I couldn’t. That is how…” She reached with her good hand, her five-fingered hand, up to her ruined cheeks. I nodded, salty tears scraping against the sunburn on my own.

“Tell my story,” Saud commanded. She closed her eyes, and for a moment I thought she had passed, then saw the even rise and fall of her chest. She would only sleep. I would call James in here in a moment to see to her burns.

I gently squeezed Suad’s hand, felt her fingers give a feeble pulse back. My eyes clouded over.

“Excuse me a moment,” I begged the women, who all looked up in more surprise at my exit than at my entrance.

I made it outside the tent, and around the corner. I saw James kneeling over the body of a burned, bloody woman, a pool of red at her feet. They would have cut her open, after they raped her; I understood this now too, in a way that I hadn’t when I only read the op-eds about it in the paper. I dashed to the other side of the tent, fell to my knees there and vomited.

It was as far as I could go.