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The heat is relentless in the middle of a December day in eastern Sudan. It is difficult to find shade in this arid landscape. It is mostly dust and rocks and, for now at least, it is the temporary home to tens of thousands of Ethiopian refugees who have crossed the border to flee the fighting in their country.
There is not much to build a home. The nearest city, Al Qadarif, is two hours away. There is no source of water in the camps, so the water is trucked from miles away over rough roads. Refugees sleep in makeshift tents and in abandoned buildings. Some even sleep outside without shelter.
Last month, the Ethiopian government launched a military offensive against a rogue regional government. The resulting conflict has killed hundreds and nearly 50,000 Ethiopians have crossed the country’s northwestern border into Sudan. It is a refugee crisis that is overloading the country’s humanitarian infrastructure. The United Nations refugee agency has asked for $ 150 million to help cope with the situation.
At Camp Village 8, Measho Fishale, 34, is trying to make a stew from the sorghum that humanitarian groups have been handing out. It really isn’t working. All you can do is stand on the stove in the sun, holding your little one.
He has seven children, but when the fighting began in the city of Mai-Kadra in early November, his two eldest were not at home.
“[Militias] they massacred people with knives and machetes, ”he says.
Many other refugees describe the same scene: they say that members of Fano, a youth militia loyal to the government, razed Mai-Kadra, killing ethnic Tigraya people. The government has repeatedly challenged that narrative, saying it was a youth militia affiliated with the Tigrayan rebels that killed the Amharas ethnic group, Ethiopia’s second largest ethnic group.
NPR could not independently corroborate the refugees’ claims, but dozens of them told the same story.
Measho says he had no choice but to run right away. She has searched for the two children she left behind in Ethiopia, hoping they had found their way to the camp, but has not been able to find them.
Joining Measho is Kidan Berhe, 55. He wanted to stay home, despite the war, and he didn’t think he could make the arduous road through the bush to Sudan. But then armed men roamed the town and she thought her children would have to come back to look for her. He was worried they would get killed too, so he dropped everything and walked for hours. towards Sudan.
“This is all I have,” he says, pointing to his clothes. Tears come to her eyes and her hands clench her face.
“My gold. My clothes. I’ve lost everything,” he tells NPR.
She says she now feels safe in Sudan, but worries about her future and the bleak living conditions in the camps. Humanitarian workers are struggling to keep up with the influx of refugees and build an infrastructure to accommodate them.
Nadir Ibrahim, a local humanitarian worker, says that the refugees “need water; there are no latrines; they are defecating in the open. “If this continues, he warns, diseases will spread rampant in these camps.
The refugees are doing what they can with everything they can. They are building a shelter out of grass. They are trying to do injera – the traditional Ethiopian bread that is usually made from a grain called teff – from sorghum distributed by aid agencies.
In Ethiopia, the situation seems more dire. The United Nations has said that refugees in the Tigray region have not received aid since the conflict began. The more than 96,000 Eritrean refugees in Tigray, who have fled war and repression in the past two decades, the UN says, have run out of food rations. The UN has received reports that refugees are leaving camps due to violence.
Ethiopia and the UN had reached an agreement granting aid groups access to the Tigray region, but last week the Ethiopian army fired on a UN convoy and the government warned that it did not need a “nanny”. On Friday, the International Rescue Committee said one of his staff members had been killed at a camp in Tigray.
Ethiopia has said that the military operation in the country has ended, because it has taken control of the capital of the Tigray region, Mekelle. But the Tigray People’s Liberation Front says it will not give in to what it sees as an invading army, and the fighting has continued on many fronts.
The war is a power struggle between the new Ethiopian government and the old one; it is about what the Ethiopian political system will look like in the future. But in interviews with refugees, war is about losses. Everyone, no matter which side they are on, is in mourning. Some have lost loved ones; many others have lost their homes. And every inch of the refugee camps in Sudan has turned into something like what they had before the war.
At Um Rakuba camp, 25-year-old Fitsum Kidanemariam says she left her parents in Ethiopia. He has not been able to call them, so he does not know his destination.
He is a thin young man and his voice breaks when he explains his situation. At home, his love was art, but he had to work in construction because, like anywhere in the world, “there is no money in art,” he says.
He passes a huge tent full of sacks of sorghum, passes a small hut where the women sell coffee. Enter what looked like an abandoned school. Now it’s just a shell, most of the windows are broken; there are no doors; paint is peeling. His friends play cards on the floor. On the windowsill just behind them, he has lined up seven sculptures he made from rocks he found at camp.
In one of them, he carved the face of a woman on one side and the face of a lion on the other.
“The woman is forgiving and respectful,” he says. “The lion, like men at war, will attack at the slightest touch.”
Fitsum sculpts every day. For hours, he meticulously carves rocks with a piece of steel he found at the camp. He is trying to forget the violence, hoping his parents are still alive. He says he spent hours sculpting this rock, dreaming of a different life where humans were less like lions.
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