Life in Darfur

Beyond the vast camps across the endless scrub and sand, out of sight, there are countless families struggling to survive in the deserts of Darfur.   Life is indescribably hard, endless toil, from the moment the sun gets up to when night descends.  There is no help in the villages for families, who are struggling to feed their children as subsistence farmers, surviving on millet, the staple crop, which, if it grows to maturity, also provides the means to build their huts and fences.   There is virtually no health care in any village, no veterinary care for the livestock on which they rely, and water can be many miles away.  Clean water is a luxury, most survive on the water from hand dug wells, until they dry up.  If you have crouched beside such a hole, as the water seeps slowly in, every drop to be scooped out, full of sand, you will have an idea of the hardship of life in Darfur. 

But something can be done to change people’s lives, as KIDS FOR KIDS is showing. By providing a number of different projects we are quite literally transforming whole villages. Our help is direct, enabling mothers to make decisions for their families, often for the first time in their lives.

Fatima Daoud Jumaa lives in Lawabid,  has six children and is a widow.  Until two years ago she had one small hut for her family and couldn’t afford a fence.  She had nothing to rely on and only a small patch of land.  Two years later her children are all at school, milk and yoghurt have become a guaranteed part of the family diet and her children look healthier.  Last month, she was able to buy notebooks and pencils for the first time, for them all.  She herself does not read or write, but she has been able to budget, and has also saved enough for a second small hut, and a surrounding fence. 

Lawabid became a Kids for Kids village in 2006.  Fatima is a Kids for Kids beneficiary, receiving six goats as part of a loans scheme run by villagers who have been trained to form an Animal Loans Committee.   There is veterinary care from the Kids for Kids paravet and Fatima now has a flock of 26 breeding goats, and has passed on six of their offspring to another family.  An unexpected advantage she says, is that before 2006 she often had to be away from her children to try to find work, or to scavenge for firewood to sell.  Now she is at home with her family, because she has an income from her animals.   She says “Thank you Kids for Kids for the valuable assistance provided to the poor people and I hope for the expansion of the assistance to include more poor people so they can educate their children”.

Where families like Fatima's live there are no roads, no electricity, no telephones and little access to health care or education. When the rains fail so does this fragile economy, forcing children to walk miles for water. KIDS FOR KIDS is working with the community to prevent this. Our aims are to support projects which are long lasting, self sustaining and community led.   Houses (tulkuls) are small round huts made out of wood and the stalks of millet. Often whole families live in just one small tukul. Journalists describe them as made of "wood and sticks" but it is the food crop which provides the building materials. Millet is the staple diet which grows to 6 ft in good years, but can fail completely when the rains fail. The huts have a millet fence around them to provide some protection from the winds that race across the desert. When an haboob blows you cannot see in front of you. It is like walking into a solid wall of sand. When the crops fail you have no way to mend your hut. Many are at risk collapse.

A village is a small group of tulkuls with even smaller satellite villages – one community is approximately 5,000 people in all.  Many are much smaller. A family, often with six children (the mortality rate is high), live in each little tukul. “I asked Fatima, the “richest women” in Um Shireiga, what her family of 8 owned.

She now also has 6 goats and a donkey from KIDS FOR KIDS to help her family.

Countless families are so poor they have no bedding at all, or mat on the sand floor. It is cold in the desert at night, and in January, can be very cold indeed.

When the sun goes down the goats are brought back to the village to take shelter. There is no light in the villages so that children have told us their problem with homework is that they cannot see to do it. We are now providing 2 SOLAR LANTERNS for each village – one for the children and one for literacy classes for the women. The latter lantern will also be used for emergency deliveries at night for our VILLAGE MIDWIVES.

WATER – we seek help to provide HAND PUMPS near each village. After an electro magnetic geophysical survey carried out by the water authorities from El Fasher (the regional capital) a drilling rig has to be used to dig down, sometimes deep down, to reach the water. Without these pumps, people survive on hand dug wells which dry up in the heat of summer when temperatures soar to over 50%C. This is when crops and animals die. And the little goat comes into its own.