The Sahel was laced with wadis, gullies that filled up during and after the rainy season with fresh streams of muddy water. They flowed like arteries through the desert landscape. We were tempted to drink from the wadis, but they were brown and viscous, sure to induce an immediate case of diarrhea. When we arrived at the edge of the first mini river, chest high and muddy, our improvised guides formed a human chain and passed our things from one side to the other. I stripped off my shoes, sunk my toes into the clay-colored muck, and made my way, holding my passport and cameras high above my head.
Once we reached the other side, a few miles into Sudan’s rebel territory, we met the SLA rebels—a collection of lithe, sinewy young men, most wearing brightly colored turbans and old American basketball jerseys and T-shirts they could have picked up from a Goodwill in Minnesota. The “vehicle” we were promised in Chad turned out to be a pickup stripped of almost everything but the wheels and the frame and sagging with the weight of seventeen rebel fighters. Their clothes, sleeping gear, pots and pans, giant jugs of water, gasoline, and Kalashnikovs formed a mini mountain five feet high above the bed of the truck, and it was all held together by crisscrossing ropes tethered to the sides. They motioned for us to climb on. I wondered how long we could endure the ride, clinging for our dear lives to the shoddy ropes as we plowed through the sand toward emptiness.
I used the pidgin Arabic I’d learned in Iraq to talk with the Sudanese rebels, and Somini tried her French, but we mostly communicated through incoherent attempts at sign language. At night we slept wherever the rebels slept, hoping to find refuge under a beautiful, beefy African tree—rare in the landscape we were traversing. Somini was generous enough to let me share her tent with her; in Chad insects had spit acid on my skin, leaving long, watery blisters up and down my arms by morning. Jahi had brought a single-man tent and set up alongside us. Poor Jehad slept upright in the passenger seat of the truck and was devoured by the mosquitoes.
On our second day we were low on water, and there was no well in sight. We had assumed there would be someplace to buy bottled water in Darfur. We were stupid. There were no proper stores in the villages we passed, and the air was hot and dry like a blow-dryer on our faces and throats. Somini, Jehad, Jahi, and I shared a “food bag,” in which we pooled what we had brought from Chad: pasta, cans of tuna, protein bars, biscuits, and sugary pineapple-and orange-flavored drink mixes. It wasn’t enough food, and we were always hungry and always thirsty. I was convinced we would dehydrate and meet our fate in the middle of the desert, trying to ascertain whether Darfur was a genocide or a civil war.
Every couple of miles the truck would sink into the sand, its wheels spinning, digging deeper into the abyss. Or the truck would simply break down, because it was old and overworked. We then sat for hours as one or two guys fiddled with the motor with a screwdriver or a tool from 1965 while the others splayed out, happy in the sand. They ate out of communal bowls full of asida, a grain-based dish that looked like a ball of plain oatmeal. Some would hunt for gazelles—a gourmet lunch—while the others would nap. Miraculously the truck always restarted, but it took us almost three days to travel just twenty miles into northwestern Darfur.
At every water source the rebels would stop and fill their bottles with brown mud mixed with water, but we knew that this would make a khawaja, foreign white person, deathly ill. We rationed the few bottles of water we had brought and wondered what we could do as the signs of dehydration—exhaustion, lethargy, headaches—plagued us. I became obsessed with finding water. I had never been in a situation where there were no taps, no wells, no clean streams—no sources at all, really. The sun seared our light skin, and liquid evaporated from our bodies faster than we could sweat. The rebels were so busy drinking pure mud from streams, they barely noticed our desperation for anything remotely resembling water. They just kept pilfering our empty water bottles as we tore through them. In Darfur plastic was like gold, and money was almost worthless.
Finally, on the third day, we arrived at a rebel base in Shigekaro, a tiny village of more sand and emptiness, interrupted by a few thatched huts and one tiny shop that sold flavored drink mix, salt and sugar, pasta, and little else. A dried-out wadi rimmed the village, its trees providing fundamental cover for what had become a natural toilet. No water.
The SLA had a mini training camp in Shigekaro, and we camped out and photographed the soldiers in formation doing training at dawn and dusk. Our fighters regrouped and rested. I walked around the village in search of water as a vampire hunts for blood; I might have pounced on a child if she had water. Then I saw words I never thought I would be so happy to see in Darfur: SAVE THE CHILDREN.
It was a well! I couldn’t believe my eyes. I leaned over the edge to see if there was actually water in the well, and indeed the rust-colored, stagnant water looked leaps and bounds cleaner than the muddy stream. Save the Children, an aid group headquartered in my little hometown of Westport, Connecticut, would save us from dehydration.