Hell on earth

Source: Oxfam

Date: 27 Sep 2005

Kalma Camp in Sudan is home to 120,000 people who have lived through some of the most hellish experiences imaginable. Annette Salkeld tells of the daily challenges they face and how Oxfam is helping them to get on with their lives.

From a few kilometres away, you can tell you are coming up to Kalma camp in South Darfur, Sudan, as the scattered baobab trees and acacias of the desert plains give way to a stark, sandy expanse, with little more than tree stumps dotted over land.

This harsh environment has felt the impact of the influx of more than 120,000 people from the surrounding region, who have fled their homes in the face of some of the worst conflict seen in recent years. This is a very brutal conflict, which has seen the civilian population directly targeted. The suffering is immense and on a scale hard to imagine.

Oxfam International is currently working in 17 locations across the three states that make up Darfur — North, South and West Darfur. Oxfam is reaching approximately 700,000 of the nearly two million people who have been made homeless by this crisis, by providing water, sanitation, and public health education.

Kalma camp is the largest in Darfur. It stretches for seven kilometres along the wadi, the dry river bed, and spans up to two kilometres in width. As I arrive at the outskirts of the camp, all I can see for miles in every direction is a sea of makeshift shelters — white plastic sheeting stretched over basic frames made out of sticks and any other material available. Many families have made small fences around their shelters out of the local shrubs, in order to define their little patch of land.

I arrived in Kalma camp on a searing hot day with four other Oxfam staff. Getting out of our vehicles, we were quickly surrounded by dozens of children, most of them waving to us and trying to shake our hands, shouting “okay, okay”, the only English phrase most of them know. Some of the shyer youngsters quietly get beside me and try to hold my hands as I walk along. I feel like the Pied Piper — everywhere I go I am surrounded by millions of children, many contentedly playing with hoops made from old metal wheels or toy cars fashioned out of empty tin cans and bits of rubber.

Kalma camp’s marketplace, which has sprung up in the centre of the camp, is the lifeblood for many residents who have very few options of making a living. Here, people sell meat, clothes, vegetables, dates, fruit, peanuts and basic items such as sugar, salt and soap. At one stall I see, there is a huge pile of thongs, the standard footwear at the camp.

Sheltering from the midday sun under a thatched roof shelter, Kaltaman and her neighbour sit on the ground in front of a bucket of peanuts, shelling them for cooking. Kaltaman’s daughter plays nearby. She is one of Kaltaman’s three children and wants to be a teacher when she grows up.

“We walk about an hour to the nearby town to buy the raw peanuts,” Kaltaman tells me. “We shell them and boil them and then sell them in the market.” The small amount of money she earns enables her to buy food to supplement the rations and basic necessities she can access in the camp.

I was fortunate enough to be able to sit in on part of a two-day public health workshop, held in the Oxfam compound. There were two workshops being held one for women and one for men. These workshops form a central component of the public health promotion that Oxfam undertakes in all of the areas it works in, in an effort to reduce illness and death from disease and infections that can spread so easily among such a crowded population.

The focus of the workshop was basic hygiene. The importance of basic practices, such as washing hands with soap and keeping water containers clean, cannot be under-estimated. The highest cause of death and illness in children under five here is diarrhoea.

Other health issues include where people defecate, keeping animals away from water sources, and reducing the risk of malaria. Positive public health messaging is important, as residents of the camps are living in conditions that they have never encountered before.

The overcrowding, use of western style latrines, inadequate space for the donkeys, which are the main form of transport in this region, and lack of facilities means that in order to stay healthy, some traditional practices have to be changed.

As part of this workshop, the women were divided into groups and given 10 drawings of hygiene actions, and were asked to put them in order from the worst practice to the best. This caused lively debate among the women, although all groups came to a consensus in the end.

During a meal break, I sat down with some of the women to ask why they had participated in this workshop. “We are here for the food,” I was told as the women eagerly awaited the arrival of the meal being provided for them by Oxfam. A good feed of meat, salad and bread is a rarity for most camp residents, as fresh food and meat is unaffordable for most.

But as I probed further to ask if they had enjoyed the workshop or learnt any new practices, there was a general positive consensus, with a few women explaining what they thought were the biggest threats to their health. “Animals near the water sources”, “people defecating around the camp” and “dirty water containers” were among the comments.

After the two-day workshop, these women will become part of the “community mobiliser” network in Kalma camp. They will be able to talk to their neighbours about what they have learnt and hopefully influence the hygiene practices within their communities.

This will complement the work done by Oxfam’s public health promotion teams, which visit each “house” in the camp about every six weeks to see how people are going and reinforce the public health messages, particularly with the women who have the main responsibility of caring for their families.

As I leave these women to their meal, I come away with a feeling of admiration for the courage, tenacity and generosity they show — every single one of them has endured terror, hardship and hellish experiences beyond my comprehension, but they still maintain a sense of positiveness; they’re getting on with their lives.

But I also have a heavy heart as I wonder about their future and whether they will ever be able to go back to their homes and resume the lives they enjoyed before the conflict.

Annette Salkeld is Emergencies Program Officer at Oxfam Australia and visited Darfur as part of an Oxfam International monitoring trip.