The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur by Daoud Hari Read Free Book Online

doubt everyone had rushed to help put out the fire here, since the sheikh’s house is everyone’s house. There was a busy coming and going of people now. Burials were being arranged and some of the wounded were being tended to. I was told who was dying over in that family and who over in this family, so that I could visit them before they died. There are no doctors or medicines in these villages, so you will die if you are seriously wounded. You bear your pain as bravely as possible and pray for death to come. Your people come to be with you. I knew everyone except the children in this village, so I visited the seventeen badly wounded people who were dying. Some had lost arms or legs in the explosions or had great wounds loosely held together with stitches of wool thread or animal hair. The only medicine or pain relief was a cup of tea.
    These were people I had grown up with and played games with under the moon—we played games at night becausewe were busy with chores in the day, and the daytime heat was too much.
    I visited a young woman whom I had always admired when we played together. She had been so strong and joyful. It was not proper for me to hold her hand, though I longed to do so now. Maybe you can think of who this would be if this happened in your hometown, and you may know how I was feeling.
    Two days before my arrival the seven water points of the village had been hit with large bombs, and this had set some of the huts afire. It had not been the first attack. Each day now, the children were sent away from the village. The animals were brought to the few usable water points late at night for watering. In the daytime, anything moving in the village would invite bombs or helicopter attacks. Still, no ground attack had come.
    Every cousin I met told me often or more deaths in his part of the family. All the villages to the east were under attack, and the men in this village were preparing for what might come next. The women were tending the wounded and were preparing food and supplies to hide in the wadis and pack on the donkeys.
    While some men were organized to wait in place and defend the villages, others joined resistance groups that roamed in vehicles to be wherever they could be of most use. The government was attacking so many villages at once that these men were stretched thin and exhausted. The five kingdoms of North Darfur—Dar Kobe, Dar Gala, Dar Artaj, Dar Sueni, and our own Dar Tuar—were all under attack at the same time. Kingdoms in West andSouth Darfur were also being hit. The resistance fighters— some barely fourteen years old—would come into the villages in pieced-together Land Rovers for water and food, then would speed away to the next emergency, leaving their wounded with the women of the village. While the kingdom’s system of sultans, omdas, and sheikhs was until recently a superbly efficient form of military organization, no one was giving orders now; the facts of each new day overwhelmed all plans.
    I was told by the sheikh that my own smaller village had been bombed once but was not badly damaged, and that my immediate family was not harmed. Knowing this, I stayed in the larger village a few days to help where I could. There was a great movement of refugees through this town and people needed every kind of assistance.
    Many men were joining resistance groups; you would see very young teenage boys jumping into the backs of trucks with a family weapon and that was it for them. No one in the boys’ families would try to stop them. It was as if everybody had accepted that we were all going to die, and it was for each to decide how they wanted to go. It was like that. The end of the world was upon us.
    “We are leaving now to try to get to Chad,” was the anthem of many families as they moved through the sheikh’s compound to say their goodbyes. They received advice as to the best ways through the mountains and wide deserts. Chad was far away. Even if they were not attacked by