I wouldn’t call myself a coffee connoisseur, but I do enjoy a good cup. And I thought that, through my travels, I’d sampled some of the best brewed coffees around – until I arrived at the camp in Adre, to meet refugees from Sudan.
Dark, thick, with a little extra sugar. Spiced with ginger and cardamon. Served in a fancy tiny cup with an even fancier saucer. It didn’t matter that it was 40 degrees outside…that Sudanese coffee was exceptional – Marek Polaszewski , my camera operator, who’s a self-proclaimed coffee expert, declared it the most delicious he had ever had.
Every day, for more than a week, we made the two-hour journey from the town of Farchana, where we were staying, to Adre on the border of Chad and Sudan. It was A torturous journey. The terrain was unforgiving. I sat beside our Arabic-speaking driver in the front of our hired Landcruiser; my job was to protect the camera kit which had been put between us. Anytime we hit a pothole – which we did a lot – I clung onto our expensive equipment as if my life depended on it. Well, in a way it did, because how else could we document the stories we’d come to hear without the camera?
In the back sat the cameraman Marek, producer Peter and the fixer, Mahammat. There was no air conditioning in the vehicle; by the time we got to Adre their shirts were clinging to their skin.
That spiced coffee was served to us by Sheikh Mohammed, who was the first refugee we spoke to/visited in Adre. He is one of almost a million people who are living here, after fleeing Darfur across the border in Sudan.
Fighting there between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces has taken an ethnic turn – once again? pitting black African people from Sheikh Mohammed’s Masalit community against Arab groups. And on this assignment, we wanted to hear the personal stories of people from Darfur.
These were told over those cups of coffee. Grim accounts of people being butchered and torched, of women and girls raped, of babies born on the roads as their mothers fled. Stories of families who had lost everything, of women having to leave the unburied bodies of their children behind, of separated families, of children who cannot sleep at night and who just scream and scream – and who now often show a lot of anger. There’s a lot of traumas.
After we had downed the coffee, we made our way to the main encampment in Adre and the local hospital. Nothing had prepared me for what we found there.
There were hundreds of patients, with gunshot wounds, burns, and multiple fractures. And hundreds more kept streaming through the border – so many that new tents had been set up around the hospital? to accommodate them. In one tent there was a group of women and babies. All with gunshot wounds. Who shoots a child? A 9-month-old baby?
Most of them were waiting for surgery. But there was a shortage of surgeons, and medical equipment. Many wounds were turning septic. People were crying in pain. The children especially. One of the young women in the tent was called Mamou. She was lying on her stomach, a bullet lodged in her lower back. As we debated where to put the microphone and the right angle to place the camera, a nurse called me aside. She said quietly that the young lady was paralyzed from the waist down and the doctors had not yet told her this. That she may never be able to use the lower part of her body again. My heart broke.
Before we left, we went back to the Sheikh’s house/tent. This time, a tray of food was placed in front of us – some cooked maize and millet, and vegetable gravy in a large bowl. The food wasn’t a lot, he said – but he insisted we must join the family in the meal. He wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer.
We took a coffee with him as well, one last time.
At the end of the week, as we headed back to Chad’s capital N’djamena – with eleven people crammed into a low-flying aircraft- all I could think about was the generosity shown to us by the refugees we had met. At the camp, many of them seeing how hot we were, had offered us water. The Sheikh, with the food and coffee. They had barely enough to get by, yet – unreservedly and with no expectation of anything in return – they had offered these to us, complete strangers.
Why, do those who have less, give more?
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