Last update - 00:00 25/04/2007
American-Jewish group treats trauma in Chad refugee camp : Trying to ensure 'Never again'
By Assaf Uni
Goz Amir/Goz Beida, CHAD - When Mohammad Yihya Ahmad, 15, draws the moment the Janjaweed raided his village he cannot help giving the attack a different, better ending. He shows two figures - a boy holding a large dog, and an elderly handicapped man - against the backdrop of the Janjaweed as black shadows, shooting in all directions.
"Just when the Janjaweed arrive," the boy says, "the boy lets his dog go and manages to find an old man and save him."
"Did you have a dog?" we ask him.
"Yes," he says.
"Was your father paralyzed?"
"Yes."
"Did someone manage to save him?"
"No," the Janjaweed killed him."
The dozens of children sitting and drawing last Friday in a straw hut in the Goz Amir refugee camp are taking part in activities sponsored by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), an American-Jewish organization helping to treat the psychological and social problems of the refugees in Darfur.
HIAS, a non-governmental agency founded 125 years ago to help refugees and immigrants from Europe, is prominent in eastern Chad. Not coincidentally, it has chosen to focus on the common element of victims of genocide and violence everywhere - survivors' trauma.
Such trauma is not lacking in the camp. Over the last month, according to Vundla Sikhumbuzo, who directs HIAS activities from the town of Abeche, his people visited two women who were raped when they went to gather wood.
They also visited children who say they cannot sleep and break out in sudden tears, and a young women who went out of her mind after her cousin was murdered - she does not stop running. "In that case," Sikhumbuzo says, "we persuaded her husband to stop tying her up and we began individual therapy." The main difficulties, HIAS says, are stress, insomnia and behavioral problems. The use of home-made alcohol and marijuana is common in the camp.
The empty pages in the straw hut fill with scenes of Darfur. Babies shot in their mothers' arms, burning huts and planes dropping bombs. Children do not lie; the drawings reveal the collaboration between the Sudanese army, with its Antonov aircraft, and the Arab Janjaweed militias in vehicles and riding horses and camels.
In another part of the camp the children are in drama therapy. The dialogues deal with the issues haunting them: an orphan girl neglected by her stepmother and sent to bring water and care for babies; boys who steal from each other out of hunger; a young man who wants to stop his studies to hunt for food.
"The first thing I tell the refugees when I meet them is about the organization," said Jonas Nkwemfo, in charge of HIAS activities in the camp. "The leaders are most impressed when I tell them that some of the funding comes from the sons of Jewish immigrants helped by HIAS in the past."
Speaking on the phone from New York, HIAS president Gideon Aronoff said that when the Jewish people vowed "Never again" after the Holocaust, it meant exactly what is happening in Darfur.
In the center of Goz Amir, two groups of men and women are sitting on mats in the shade. The men's group is smaller; many were killed in Darfur. They are discussing problems in the camp in a weekly meeting organized by HIAS. The counselors explain that participants should air their painful memories to reduce their anger. "We don't have enough to eat, we have no possessions and not enough water," a woman answered. "That's what makes me angry."
HIAS gets most of its funding from the U.S. government, the UN and Jewish organizations, as well as the Israeli organization IsrAid. It employs 26 former Sudanese refugees in the camps as counselors and directors. Among other things, they distribute kits to build huts for women whose husbands have divorced them, a birth kit including a blanket, a mat, two kilos of sugar and a water container, and a death kit with a shroud, a kilo of tea and two kilos of sugar. "We have too many of both events here in the camp," an organization worker said.