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All About Africa
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Wad El-Bashir IDP Camp. - Niamh. Sudan is wonderful. It has been a real eye-opener. Of all the countries on our route, we were most nervous about Sudan. But as travelers here, we will have a wonderful time sipping sweet teas, milling around the souq (market) and lazing about in Wadi Halfa, Dongola, Atbara. But the fact remains that a thirty year civil war has just ended in the South, war is raging in Darfur, trouble is brewing in the East and there is discontent in the North and in the West. We visited Wad El-Bashir, an IDP (internally displaced peoples) camp during the week. Thirty eight thousand IDPs live in a five kilometer square area in mud huts that may well collapse in the rains and in make-shift camps of wood and bags. A few years ago, the government sent a team of bulldozers to knock the camp - the land did not belong to the displaced. What was most striking about our visit was the biographies of the NGO officers themselves. Both were born in exile. Both have spent a lifetime escaping conflict, travelling from country to country in search of peace. Neither one has seen his family in over nineteen years now. Imagine. Every one of those thirty eight thousand will have a similar story to tell. That's just one camp. There are four hundred thousand displaced persons in Khartoum. We have been invited to visit a leper colony and to do some teaching for a local NGO here. If we can arrange the permits we will be delighted to do so. |
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