Refugee Children

We travelled from Abeche in Eastern Chad, about 8 hours by four-wheel-drive north along the Chad-Sudan border until we reached the area near Bahai. There we found families of refugees who had fled Darfur on foot and ended up camping in the wadi just across the frontier, almost all women and kids. During the day it was above 40 degrees C and into the Sahara proper- sand dunes and all. Whole families were living under bare thorn bushes like this one, with nothing more than a few bits of cloth or plastic thrown among the branches to give some shade.It was several k's walk to the well in the village of Bahai, where people would then have to queue for 6, 8, even 12 hours to get water, then come back to their shelters under the thorn-trees. Officials estimated there were between sixteen and twenty thousand refugees in a 5km strip of land. I've seen some rough places, but never have I seen people living in this level of destitution, before or since.The war in Darfur started in 2003 when rebels in the western Sudanese region rose up against the government in Khartoum. Since that time somewhere between 70,000 and 300,000 people have died, 200,000 have fled the country across the border to Chad, more than 2 million have been forced from their homes and a further 2 million are now dependent on foreign assistance for survival, out of a population of 6 million. The war continues today, although it has largely dropped from the international media.