Read The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur for Free Online

forty-five miles up the border and a good place to cross into Darfur without notice.
    In the Tine marketplace, men were cleaning their guns—mostly old rifles and Kalashnikovs—and talking about where they might be most useful. They were buying and trading ammunition and supplies. Others, without guns, were also organizing to go back into Darfur to find relatives and friends. That, of course, was my situation, and I was soon on the road.
    As we traveled, we could look to our right across the great valley separating Chad from Sudan and see the white bombers and helicopters in the distance. These aircraftwere bombing villages. We saw funnels of smoke against the horizon. We saw Janjaweed militia units moving down in the wadi, not far from us.
    Bahai, my last stop in Chad, was finally in view. It is a small town of scattered huts and mud-brick stores on the flats near a river crossing. Because it is a different Zaghawa kingdom than Tine, there is a different sultan in the area. I paid my respects to him. Like the sultan in Tine, this one was also surrounded by many people who had crowded over the river. And as in Tine, the town was filled with families seeking their lost members, with wounded men, women, and children seeking care. Vacant-eyed people, shocked by the sudden loss of their homes and families, were walking everywhere. Groups of armed defenders were organizing everywhere.
    I paid a driver and pulled myself up into the back of the next truck heading deep into Darfur.
    We crossed the river against a current of people escaping. All along the muddy roads and along the flats where every vehicle makes its own road, we passed refugees walking toward Chad. We encouraged them as we passed, telling them that safety was only a mile farther, then only two miles farther, only a half day farther, and soon we would only say that they were walking the right way. We gave much of our water to mothers and children.
    The white Antonov bombers were visible from time to time, and smoke was often seen rising behind the hills. Village defenders and other resistance fighters sometimes stopped us on the road. Our trucks were white, as are any civilian Land Cruisers or other trucks that might otherwisebe mistaken for military vehicles. Even so, the resistance fighters reminded us that the helicopters and bombers would not care about such things. So every turn of our journey was carefully traveled, our eyes watching the sky and the distant hills and wadis. We would lean out and look at the tire tracks beside the road to know who had come this way and that. Fresh tracks from big tires would mean government trucks and death. Fresh horse tracks in great numbers would mean Janjaweed and death. This constant observation was a good travel activity to help pass the hours, as our situation was truly in God’s hands, not our own.
    When, in the trance and bounce of the long journey, I would think of the whole situation, it did seem like a bad dream. This part of the world, our world, was changing so quickly every day, falling deeper into the fires of cruelty. I wanted to wake up from it. Imagine if all the systems and rules that held your country together fell apart suddenly and your family members were all—every one of them—in a dangerous situation. It was like that. You cannot be thinking of yourself at such a time; you are making calculations of where your friends and family members might be, and where they might go. You are recalculating this constantly, deciding what you might do to help them.

5.
My Sister’s Village
    I had decided even before leaving Egypt that I would go first to my older sister’s village, so I would then have some news about her to give my mother and father in our own village.
    After some rough mountains, the approach into her village was along a dry river. Wells and small pools—the water points of the village—were pocked with bomb craters. The normal rush of village children toward a visiting vehicle was absent. The