Histoires des enfants du Darfour [1]
MANSUR
Ten-year-old Mansur (center) likes to draw. On the wall of his room there is a drawing of the destruction of his village, his last memory of Darfur. After fleeing their village, Mansur and his family walked across the desert to make it to a camp in Eastern Chad, where they now live as refugees. They have one tent and the small mud room that is Mansur’s home. Mansur wants to be a doctor when he grows up, and he loves to play soccer, when he and friends can find a good ball.
Aljafis (9) is a serious looking boy, but he smiled after seeing himself in a picture. He lives in the refugee camp with his mother and siblings. Militiamen killed his father when they destroyed his village. Aljafis goes to school, where he is crammed in to small rooms and sits on sand floors. He makes his own racecars out of plastic bottles. Aljafis and his friends also make their own soccer balls out of rags and anything else they can bunch up together.
Ahmat (16) loves to study. He also likes to ride a bicycle, play football, and listen to music. He could do all of that, until his village in Darfur was destroyed. In the camp where he and his family fled, there is no secondary education, so Ahmat had nothing to do after finishing primary school. He decided to risk his life by going back in to Darfur to one of the few towns that is still standing and has schools. He is still in Darfur, where a young man his age is the primary target to be killed by the Janjaweed and the Sudanese army.
AHMED
Ahmed (pictured far right) is in the second grade. When he was just five years old, his uncle was killed in an attack on their village. The one thing he remembers about that day is the fear he saw in his elders and his parents, a fear that he did not expect from his protectors. Over eight people were killed that day. Luckily, after the attacks, him and his family were able to escape to Jabal Mastaria. For three weeks they stayed on that mountain until they were finally able to make their way to the Mastaria valley where many other villages had gathered.
Hawa,12, (pictured far right) saw her village get burned to the ground and the women in it raped. Her older sister was among those women. Hawa doesn't like to talk about the war anymore. Instead, she is working hard to do well in school with the hope of becoming a lawyer someday.
ADAM HASSAN AND ABDU-SALAM
Adam Hassan and his son, Abdu-Salam (4), fled Darfur in November, the end of the rainy season, in 2003 and arrived in Yagatom, a village in Chad. After about a month there, a non-governmental organization took them to a refugee camp to live.
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Fifteen-year-old Farha (in the middle) and her sisters were able to escape when their village in Darfur was destroyed. Their father was not as lucky. They don’t know what happened to a brother either, since he was separated from them at the time of the attack. The mother and the daughters walked twenty-five days across the desert to make it to a refugee camp. Farha's mother went back in to Darfur looking for her son, and the daughters have not seen her in weeks. Farha likes to get together with friends to tell stories about how life used to be in Darfur. She also likes to play volleyball, which is the sport of preference for all the girls in the camps.
Sixteen-year-old Saleh (not pictured) is like many other teenagers, he likes futbol (soccer), attends school, and was proud to show off his pets. But for the past 4 years he has lived in a refugee camp. He is one of the few teenagers still working on his education in the camp. Many children don’t attend the higher grades because there is no chance for more education. Saleh knows the names of the top professional futbol players from Brazil and Europe, and he wishes he could watch them play.
Athletes: Ready to join Team Darfur? Click here [2]!