For the past month, Halima Ali's home has been a patch of sand under the shady branches of an acacia tree. Before that, it was a twig and grass hut in a makeshift camp eight miles north. Before that, it was a bush draped with a charred blanket.
Five times in the past 14 months, this slight girl of 10 has stuffed her belongings -- frilly pink dress, teapot, straw prayer mat -- into a burlap sack and fled, along with her family, to temporary refuge. Repeatedly, they have put down roots, only to hurriedly yank them up and flee just ahead of marauding militiamen and rebels.
"She's small, she doesn't know anything yet," said Halima's mother, pausing to comfort the despondent girl as the family set up camp in this sandy field.
"I do know," Halima said quietly, and began to tell their tale.
Into the unknown
More than any other hardship, more than hunger and sickness and violence, the 22-month conflict in Sudan's Darfur region has been a crisis of people in flight. Since the early spring of 2003, more than 1.5 million people have been driven from their farmland by conflict, forced to abandon the millet and wheat and watermelon patches tilled by their forefathers and head into the unknown.
The forced exodus is part of a wider, government-backed effort to remove Africans from their land and give nomadic Arabs, who are allied with the Arab-dominated Khartoum government, more room to graze their cattle, according to the United Nations and human rights advocates. A drought has dried the Arabs' land, and they are pushing farther south, into traditional African territory.
As the Arab Janjaweed militias ravage the region, African rebel groups have fought back in an increasingly aggressive campaign to defend their lands and challenge Arab political dominance. Darfur's villagers are caught in the crossfire.
African farmers and Arab herders have engaged in sporadic violence for years, but no one can remember a time when so many people were driven from their homes. In less than two years, the new conflict has virtually eradicated African village life in Darfur, a rugged region the size of France, and there are growing fears that it may never be restored.
Until spring 2003, Darfur was a labyrinth of straw-roofed, igloo-shaped structures known as tukuls and markets where women hunched over stools preparing tiny cups of inky coffee and selling pyramids of tomatoes and onions. Now, the terrain has become a wasteland of decapitated huts, bomb craters, vacant markets and charred children's flip-flops abandoned in the sand.
Many homeless families have taken up extended residence in dozens of camps scattered across Darfur, but others have been forced to move repeatedly.
Halima's family reached the acacia tree after a year-long odyssey of repeated escapes from mayhem. They arrived Oct. 11, fleeing with a dozen others from a refugee camp after an attack there by Janjaweed fighters left nine people dead and the health clinic looted.
Now, on a hot stretch of scrubby field, the refugees are trying to reknit the shattered rhythms of their daily life: a farmer grieving over his brother's murder, a little girl missing the taste of cow's milk, and a century-old blind man longing for the land his family had tilled for 17 generations.
Sept. 9, 2003
Ta'asha to Bashom
Mohamed Adam Mohamed and his family had just finished taking their customary 10:30 a.m. breakfast of sweet tea and millet porridge with okra sauce, a dish known as asida, when they heard shots. Mohamed looked out of his hut and saw men on horses and camels stampeding through their village, Ta'asha. There were huts on fire and voices shouting, "Slaves, get off the land!"
"We had heard this was happening in other places," recalled Mohamed, his round face somber beneath a gray turban. "We grabbed some blankets, water jugs and cooking pots and ran into the bush."
By 6 p.m., 22 villages in the area were aflame. The family hid behind thorns and high grass, hunkered in the hot sand.
"We had to be silent," Mohamed recalled. "I just kept praying for the children not to cry. The most important thing was to save my family. The rest we could grow again."
When the marauders withdrew, the men ventured back. Halima, Mohamed's young cousin, tugged on his long white robe. She wanted to go, too. Her father was missing, and her mother was crying hysterically.
Mohamed gently held her back, and later he was grateful for his decision. The sight awaiting him was worse than he had imagined.
All five family huts were burned, and 30 men were dead. Among them Mohamed found the bodies of his brother and his uncle Hamis -- Halima's father.
Hamis was 40 and the father of seven. His body was slumped under the ruins of his burned mud and straw hut. He had two bullet wounds, one in the chest and one in the head. In an abandoned hut nearby, five girls huddled motionless, smeared with dirt and blood. They had been raped by the attackers, Mohamed said.
"I was feeling so angry," he said. "I was praying to God for the first time in my life that I too could have a weapon. But I had nothing."
That day, in the smoldering village, Mohamed buried two men with whom he had grown up, shared wedding ceremonies and farmed in the thorn fields nearly every day of his adult life. There was no time to wrap the bodies in white sheets and bury them in wood coffins, as Muslim tradition requires.
Instead, the survivors gathered around two dirt mounds and recited the Islamic prayer for the dead: "God bless them. Take their souls to paradise. Keep them among good people."
With her little brother strapped to her back, Halima left Ta'asha and walked for three hours in the darkness until the family reached Bashom, a market village near the regional capital, Nyala.
Sept. 29, 2003
Bashom to Ta'asha
For the next 20 days, they camped under a cluster of trees. The village elder in Bashom, a blind man named Abakar Yusuf who estimated his age at 119, instructed the villagers to collect grains and donate them to the newcomers.
"We are all from the same tribe, the Dago, and many of us are even relatives," Yusuf said in a raspy voice. He held court from his sagging bed, his frail and useless legs poking out like toothpicks from beneath his robe. Not much shocked him anymore, he said, but he never could have imagined what was taking place now in Darfur.
"People forcing others off their land? This is the biggest sin in our culture," he said. "We have seen conflict, but this? Never. My family has lived on this land for 17 generations. I will never leave it."
One afternoon, some government officials arrived from Nyala. "Halas," they said. Enough. There was peace now; the refugees should return home.
Halima couldn't wait.
"I was so hungry for milk," she recalled. "I loved the cows. That's what I missed."
For the return trip, Halima took off her torn brown dress and put on her frilly pink dress, the one she had grabbed and stuffed in a sack when Ta'asha was attacked. She said she was hoping to see her friends, her teacher, her school.
A girl's life in many African villages is a variety of chores: making tea, hauling firewood, fetching water, scrubbing clothes. School is an escape, a place where games are played, songs are taught, words jump magically from the page and into thoughts.
"The first time I wrote words, I was surprised," she said.
Halima's father had been an illiterate farmer, but he wanted her to learn to read and write. She had been in school for one month when the attack came. Now she was eager to resume her studies.
But no one was there. The school had burned to the ground, the teacher had left for Nyala. There was no milk either; the 12 cattle Mohamed's family owned were gone. Halima, her mother recounted, sank down in her ruined hut and wept.
April 20, 2004
Ta'asha to Kabesha
Halima was in a millet field, working beside her great-aunt, when she heard the gunfire. It was half a year later, the family's hut had been rebuilt, and everyone was busy planting new crops.
She looked up and saw smoke rising from her hut. The straw was on fire, and there was no time to salvage the plastic roof sheeting the family had been given by UNICEF. Halima's mother grabbed the pink dress, the cooking pots and two sacks of newly gathered millet.
There was no time for Halima to retrieve her writing pad and pencil, also from UNICEF. She usually carried them in a small satchel, hanging from her neck, but she had taken it off to work in the fields. She ran to the same spot where she had hidden during the first attack.
"It was strange, because that day I was very sad about my father," she said later. "Then the men on camels with guns came."
Once again, Ta'asha was burned by Janjaweed militiamen in police uniforms. This time, Halima and her relatives said, the attackers who rode in on camels were followed by commanders in Land Cruisers with the government eagle symbol on the windshield.
Once again, Halima's cousin Mohamed hid in the bush, clutching his five children.
"I saw my rebuilt home destroyed before me," Mohamed recounted. "I had never felt so angry."
May 24, 2004
Kabesha to Bashom
This time, the families found shelter in Kabesha, a remote village in the Darfur hills.
They had been there for about one month when they heard on the radio that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was visiting Darfur to press for an end to the conflict. Later they heard that Kofi Annan, the U.N. secretary general, would also be visiting. There was news of possible U.N. sanctions that would stop the government from arming the Janjaweed.
But the news meant little to these exhausted refugees. There was little to eat and no one to help them. Mohamed, sick with malaria, was worried and depressed.
"For the first time in my life, my wife had to work on the farms of others. We didn't have any food," he recalled. During one especially bad week, he said, "we really thought we would die."
Delirious with fever at one point, he awoke and did not know where he was. He also dreamed that his brother and uncle were home in Ta'asha, warning him to run away. In his nightmare, he left them behind.
"I felt it was my fault that they were dead," he said.
One day, people in the village thought they heard fighting nearby. The shots turned out to be part of a feud between two neighbors, but the instinct to run took over. The families decided to head back to Bashom, 10 miles south.
Mohamed packed up his water jugs and teapots. Halima, who was wearing her brown dress, jammed the pink one over it.
"I was feeling tired," she recalled. "I didn't want to move again."
Oct. 9, 2004
Bashom to Nera
Abakar Yusuf, blind and crippled, was sleeping off the afternoon heat on his sagging mattress. The sound of shots jerked him awake. The militiamen were back.
Soon Yusuf was being lifted up and carried by a relative to a donkey cart, screaming that he wanted to stay and die on his land.
"They are lucky I couldn't see," the old man recalled later. "I would have killed the Janjaweed with my hands."
Yusuf's nephew, Fadullah Khrief, struggling to carry him to safety, was shot twice in one leg. Halima and the other children ran to their side.
"Abakar Yusuf is a walking history book for our people," said Khrief, 55. "We weren't going to let him die, even if he wanted to."
Khrief watched from the bushes, his leg bleeding, while the family's five huts were burned to the ground.
That night they left, traveling eight miles south to Nera, where Yusuf was placed in a straw-roofed schoolhouse.
Most of the time the old man snoozed in the shade, but whenever he woke up, he began ranting again about the land, about how not even drought or locusts were worse than being away from his land.
"I have always been a farmer," he said. A single brown tooth dangled from his gums. "If you lose your land, you lose your life. I am glad I can't see this happening."
One recent afternoon, Halima and the other children came to visit. They listened quietly as Yusuf spoke about how good life was in Darfur before the war. A tray of scorching sweet tea was passed around, and a plate of gooey asida. Everyone joked about how old Yusuf was, and about how they were glad he had not died in Ta'asha.
For now the families would stay here, camped under the acacias, ready to run again. Halima had unpacked her teapot and her pink dress. She had trudged into the bush with her mother to find water and collect wood.
On long, hot afternoons, when the chores were finished, the little girl made tea, sat under a tree and stared off into the distance.
