After I graduate I am considering the possibility of becoming a developmental/aid worker. Last semester I read a haunting book, "Emma's War", about a young British aid worker who worked for an international organization, moved to Sudan, and became so disillusioned that she married a warlord. Her idealism was sacrificed when she became part of the cause. This book haunted me for many months, until early January when I talked to a close friend about the book. This friend is involved and knows many people in international organizations. I was shocked when she told me that she, too, had heard of Emma and actually had met her. It seems that among international organizations Emma has become a legend. It became personal to me. Emma was no longer just a character in a book.
I re-read the book a few days ago, and found a part that I thought would interest the Western reader. The book generally is about southern Sudan, not about Darfur, but there is one part of the book that briefly discusses Darfur, the current "popular" genocide among the West.
In the early 1990s, the journalist who wrote the book, Deborah Scroggins was in Khartoum and southern Sudan. She couldn't find the famine she had heard about in various countries, such as Somalia or Ethiopia. She consulted a friend, Alastair, who worked at Oxfam who told her to go west.
This is the journalist's recollections on how she found out about Darfur:
"What do I remember about that night? An apartment a little less empty than most...the smell of curry, a couple of British aid workers sprawled on the couch...How Alastair later took me aside to say that the famine I was looking for wasn't in Ethiopia but more than two thousand miles in the other direction, in the far western province of Darfur, on the Bahr al-Arab River in the land of the Baggara Arabs--and that was a famine the United States wasn't talking about...
I read quickly. A large influx of destitute southerners has been moving into south Darfur since December. Their arrival is connected with the collapse of security in and around Wau...Confidential: Two thirds of the children in the feeding center have MUAC ratio of 60 percent or less...MUAC means 'muscle upper arm circumference'...I knew from my reading that MUAC ratios of 60 percent was aidspeak for saying that two-thirds of the children had lost almost half their body weight...How do you say that again--Safaha? 'Yes, said Alastair, There it is, he said, pointing to a tiny strip of letters in the empty lower left of the map next to the crooked line of a river. Safaha lies above the northern boundary, he said. Technically it's outside the war zone...
Patta called everyone to dinner."
(Emma's War, pgs 90-91)
The situation in Darfur has been going on since the early 1990s. But sadly no one cared then. And I sometimes wonder if people really care now.
