“Welcome to Farchana,” reads the sign at the entrance.

I visited this remote and desolate desert camp in July 2007 to get a first-hand look at the challenges faced by Darfur refugees in Eastern Chad who have spent more than four years living in limbo.

Here, children face a life that spins between boredom and danger.  They make handheld radios and action figures by adding water to the red clay dirt, hunt imaginary lizards with wooden bows and avoid local Chadians who may beat them - or worse for girls- if they venture too far from the camp to collect firewood.

They also struggle to come to terms with what they witnessed in Darfur.

One day I gave crayons and paper to a class of twenty students in one of three small schools located throughout the camp.  I asked the class to draw whatever they wanted- life here, in Darfur, anything.  Nearly all drew the attack on their village that brought them here.  While an international border provides some distance from the place of trauma, they have no escape from memories of a childhood violated. 

Their drawings, equally harsh and beautiful, describe in painful detail their lives in Darfur and the instant everything changed.

Playing a favorite game with friends outside the market each week.  Working with their father in the early morning tilling the soil and planting peanuts.  Helping their mother make the evening meal over a cooking fire.

The whir of helicopter rotors and the whistling of a bomb that signals the beginning of an attack.  A mother frantically telling the children to run and hide in the bush outside town.  The sight of an uncle shot in the back, of friends and relatives lying still in the dusty road under the hooves of Janjaweed camels.

Despite these traumatic events that forced them from their villages, the students kept asking me when they could go back home.  I never had an answer for them that I quite believed.  “Maybe when the peacekeepers arrive in Darfur,” I might say, or “when a peace deal is signed.” The latter is by far the more difficult prospect.  And if other camps for Sudanese refugees are any indication (Kakuma camp for South Sudanese refugees in Kenya has been open for 17 years), some of these young students may one day take the place of their own teachers here in Farchana.

Visit the website of UNICEF to learn more about what children face in Sudan and Chad.

Compare these drawings with others collected by Human Rights Watch researchers in 2005 and see children’s drawings of war in Chechnya.

Posted By: Michael Graham | May 16, 2008 | Comments (2)