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Dirty Darfur (Deaf Beings)

by Oni Mustapha Abu Bakar  
12/16/2010 / Short Stories

Evil would linger for one reason: man is growing deaf.

In our small-sized church of barely a hundred worshippers, in Wroclaw, southwestern Poland, we groomed a plan to show affection to the less privileged during the Easter period. The elders of the church selected a team of fifteen doctors to travel to the Chad border in Africa, to render free medical services to Darfur refugees camping there. Banking on my two decades of medical practice, the church gave me the opportunity to lead the team.

We left for Chad, heading straight to the Ndjamena Airport.

The next day, Chadian officials drove us across the country, supposedly the third largest African country based on land area, exhausting two days of vague frustration.

Chad was against the quirk of calamities befalling the Darfur people: she was harbouring endangered Darfurians in her country. It was a palliative measure not definitive. As we had journeyed the length of the country, the Chadian security officials updated us on their challenges; the situation was worsening daily, they confessed. Peace keeping soldiers were dying, the refugee camp was swelling daily, food and water supplies were satisfying only a twentieth of immigrants and most challenging was the sporadic influx of children soldiers trained by the Janjaweed rebels to slay these helpless people, these were the bottlenecks that had resisted all resolves. We were on course, to see hell on earth.

The officials introduced to us an African Union soldier, a Nigerian. Tribal marks lined the soldier's face as if crevices on a dead wood. He was huge, intimidating, and warm at the same time. He had a long name, very difficult to pronounce so we nicknamed him, Ayo.

General Ayo led us to the camp the next morning.

The camp was like a transition site to death. We saw countless Darfurians struggling to shelter themselves in any of the two hundred tents. Mothers held their children close, widows cried out their miseries, orphans roamed around for food, the old questioned where it all went wrong; fear ruled them. One woman was picking leftover breadcrumbs, her malnourished child sleeping on her back. Four of our doctors rushed to assist a woman in labour.

For a country not buoyant, Chad had tried, offering a refugee camp and some sort of security to these foreigners who were dying for sins they had no control over, their God-given identities.

Ayo told me this was the situation everyday; scores took abode at the camp everyday and hundreds died in return, he said.

That night, I saw deaf men, the ones that had lost their gifts to converse, the ones that smeared our world.

In one tent, Bartholomew Kerensky, our paediatrician, and I were attending to another woman who had delivered at the camp. Suddenly, five children soldiers, all armed, dashed into the tent; they were turbaned, their weak voices concluded they were programmed juveniles. They spoke Arabic; we didn't understand. We spoke Polish and English; they didn't care. We knew one thing: they wanted to kill the woman and her child. They were teenagers but not different from the cruellest assassins in the world. Evil would linger.

Kerensky dropped to his knees and begged for the life of the woman. My lips trembled, very dry as well. These boys were pointing their guns at us, threatening to kill. Ayo was nowhere close, no soldier was. The other doctors were asleep. The camp was silent. The night was thick.

After more than an hour of listening to the cries of Kerensky and our grave persuasions, the leader of the gang spat on us and vanished with his crew. We thought we had succeeded. Swiftly, we called the attention of the soldiers.

When dawn broke, it broke with more cries. The boys had returned with Janjaweed militias, slaughtered the woman and her baby.

Before midday, the corpse of the killer boy laid in front of the camp, the rebels had killed him: a message to other children soldiers to remain deaf at all times. For the fact that he postponed the death of the woman to daybreak, the rebels had punished him with his own death.

In our two-week stay, more deaf boys came to kill; some escaped, some died from the hands of Ayo's men.

Man is growing deaf. Evil lingers.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: In Sudan, there are 8,000 child soldiers. Out of this figure, 6,000 of these children are in Darfur, threatening the lives of innocent civilians.

Oni Mustapha Abu Bakar is a final year pharmacy student in Nigeria. He writes short stories to depict realism. His short stories have been published in major Nigerian dailies. Currently working on a contracted short story collection.

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