I volunteered at camp for the displaced from el-Fasher. Here is what I saw

I volunteered at camp for the displaced from el-Fasher. Here is what I saw I met displaced people who had experienced unimaginable horrors - horrors that the world failed to stop. I was about 13 years old when the conflict in Darfur began in 2003. As a teenager reading and listening to the news before the dawn of social media, I didn’t fully understand the historical or political context, but I understood there was a need to act. A need to put an end to a humanitarian crisis. It is one of the events that ultimately led me to become a physician and work in areas of conflict and natural disasters. In the first two weeks of December, I volunteered with an NGO providing medical care in a camp for internally displaced persons (IDP) in al-Dabba, in Sudan’s Northern State. In some ways, I have circled back to the beginning, back to the place that first incited me to action. Over the course of the two weeks in which we were in al-Dabba, the population of the camp grew from 2,000 to more than 10,000. It felt at times like there would never be enough resources to accommodate all the newcomers. Not enough food and water. Not enough medication. Not enough latrines. Instead, what I witnessed over and over again was the courage, generosity, and selflessness of the Sudanese people: From the IDPs themselves to the local staff of the NGO I was volunteering with. These are the stories of some of those whom I met during the course of a day in the camp. People like 15-year-old Fatima*. It had taken her 21 days to get to al-Dabba. She fled from el-Fasher as the Rapid Support Forces, a militia that is currently fighting the Sudanese army, advanced upon her hometown. She was 10 weeks pregnant with her first child. She needed to be transferred to hospital for a fetal ultrasound. I asked her gently if the father of the child would be accompanying her to the hospital. She looked away. Her mother whispered to me that she had been raped. I took Fatima’s hand in mine and sat with her in silence, her tears falling onto my sleeves. Then I met Aisha, a mother of five. She had lost her husband on the long and harrowing journey from el-Fasher to al-Dabba. Her haemoglobin was extremely low and I told her I would need to transfer her to the nearest hospital for a blood transfusion. She couldn’t bear to leave her children as they were having recurrent nightmares and not sleeping well at night after losing their father. We spent the better part of an hour trying to problem-solve with her and settled on having the children stay with their grandma while Aisha was transferred to the hospital. Then there was Khadija. It had taken her four weeks to get to al-Dabba. In the chaos of fleeing el-Fasher, she watched her husband get shot in the back. As heart-wrenching as...

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