Stop Genocide Now
Busy N’Djamena day for the team. Busy and good. The streets of this capital city look so different from earlier trips. On my first trip in 2005, NDJ had somewhat of a feeling of the wild wild west, African style. Very few streets were paved, and you saw armed men everywhere. It was also dark […]
Drop off the dog. Pick up the last of our food. Get a coffee. I am running the last of our errands for the trip, my sixth and Gabriel’s ninth. An American music teacher is speaking on NPR about his students at the Kabul Music Academy in Afghanistan. The reporter asks what kinds of students […]
During our visits to the camps, we are surrounded by children saying “HALLO,” reaching for our hands, and hoping we will take a photo of them. Many have given us drawings and asked us to share their story with the world. They truly believe that if people see their pictures and hear their stories, that […]
Droopy-lidded, hand fitted with my daily oolong tea, I stare at the whirlwind of text swirling on my computer screen, perplexed and confused. Before me are the images of faces I know too well. Stories I have heard time and time again. Flashes of desert beige streaked with red…blood red. As always, I sit perplexed, […]
I like bagels. Whole-wheat sesame bagels are what I usually go for, accompanied by a very refillable diet soda. Those two things plus my MacBook, and I’m ready to engage in all-out, rough-and-tumble Sudan advocacy. While I sip on my diet, Sudan is walking on the edge, with the most innocent and disadvantaged risking the […]
I am feeling a bit down today. We were up early in Guereda this morning, even though we had a little extra time to sleep in. We packed our bags, worked in the field office a bit and headed to the air strip. We didn’t have a security escort so we took big empty cargo […]
Today is Father’s Day. Around the world families will come together to celebrate the men who have given so much to their children. Looking out across yesterday’s World Refugee Day celebration, I didn’t see many men, it was mostly the colorful scarves of women and children. The men who did survive the violent attacks on […]
This environment is unforgiving. I have been in Chad during various seasons, and in June twice. This trip is one of the hottest I have experienced. An almost humid, but also dry heat that you just cannot escape or cool down from. When there is a breeze, you almost always miss it for one reason […]
We arrived at camp Djabal at about 2:30pm, which is pretty late to be starting work at a refugee camp. Djabal is a very convenient camp, though, because it is only about a 10 minute drive away from town. The camp looked empty, since people get away from the heat and out of sight during […]
During this flight I have been trying to imagine what it will be like for us in the camps and I’m coming up blank. I feel like we are about to be dropped into the pages of a history book… into a section that should have never been started, a section that is running on […]