Chad - No Longer a Refuge |
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January 26th, 2007 - 01:38PM |
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Young refugees from Darfur. Photo: Melissa Winkler/The IRC IRC emergency communications coordinator Melissa Winkler is blogging from Chad. She recaps her visit last week to IRC programs that are assisting refugees from Darfur: We left Chad’s capital, N’djamena, early in the morning. It would be a 14 hour drive to Abeche, our first stop en route to Bahai where the IRC makes life livable for some 26,000 Darfur refugees as they wait for the violence at home to end. It was shockingly bright, even at 6:30am, as our convoy left the city. In the next hours, we passed small villages with clusters of mud brick huts and women draped in brightly colored cloth – hunched over cooking pots or washing clothes in plastic bins. We passed herds of goat and camel, tended to by boys so covered with dust that you could hardly see their skin. We drove through several market places, with small stalls selling meat, car parts and rubber shoes. Mostly we traveled through vast sandy desert dotted with prickly scrub. On this day, the road was calm. My traveling party included Joseph Aguettant, who oversees our humanitarian relief operations in Chad, Dr. Ashis Brahma who helps manage medical services at the refugee camp we manage, and Alphan Massaquoi, who has launched the only secondary education program that exists for refugee teens and young adults in Chad. For my part, I'm with the IRC’s Emergency Response Team – in Chad for a brief stay to lend support to our staff here at a particularly challenging time. I was last here last April, about a week after rebels tore through the country at lighting speed and attacked the capital in a failed attempt to overthrow the government. I wish I could say things have calmed since then, but they have only gone from bad to worse for Chadians, for Sudanese refugees and for aid workers. As our convoy approached the town of Mongo, I recalled that it was the place from where Chadian rebels launched their final push to take N’Djamena last year. For us, it was a place to refuel and meet up with colleagues who had just returned from Chad’s south east where communal violence, exacerbated by the Darfur conflict, is wreaking havoc on the population. Sylvie Boivin, a nurse practitioner, was part of the team looking at needs in the south. What she described to us sounded like a Darfur all over again: Small hamlets in the Am Timan area, burned to the ground, thousands of people fleeing for their lives to villages too destitute to absorb them and displacement camps with very limited services. Sylvie said sick people sometimes have to walk 25 kilometers to find health care. And it’s no wonder. The team found one abandoned clinic after another—empty shells with no doctors, midwives to deliver babies or medicines. They found people drinking water so contaminated that they could see little white worms in it. Sylvie met a group of widowed women who were brutally attacked but had yet to find help. She talked to a displaced family whose baby had just died of an easily treatable infection. Part of our team in Chad is now working to get rapid emergency aid to the violence-torn Am Timan area. For starters, we’ll be reviving a health post, running mobile medical services and improving water supply for more than 5,000 displaced people and 15,000 others who live there. The rest of the team will continue to provide critical assistance for Sudanese refugees at the IRC-managed Oure Cassoni Camp, just five kilometers from the volatile Darfur border. That’s where our convoy is heading. Posted By: Kathleen Sands | Children & Youth, Diaries & Journals, Health, Sudan & the Darfur Crisis, _Melissa Winkler in Chad Permalink |
