We spent the afternoon trying to devise a water-purification scheme: Jahi and Jehad found a villager with a bucket and another with a cooking pot—there was actually only one woman with a pot in the entire village—and we spent about five hours each day, with the help of villagers, fetching water, boiling the water, and pouring the water into the plastic bottles that kept mysteriously disappearing from our stash and reappearing among the heap of the rebels’ belongings tethered to the back of our truck.
Most of the rebels had never received a formal education past grade school, but they listened to the BBC on shortwave radios and could rattle off the names of every single international figure involved in the Darfur conflict, from the UN to U.S. government officials to Sudanese bit players. They were eager to show us the toll of the war, including scenes of devastation that hadn’t yet been accessible to many international journalists: burned-out villages, abandoned and looted. In one a charred pot sat upright amid the charcoaled remains of the town, and I could imagine the scenes of panic and fear as the villagers were chased out of their homes by the janjaweed, many women raped as they tried to flee. Skeletons were scattered across the ground, some still fresh, with leathery skin in varying states of decay stretched across the bones; some had clothes, some didn’t, but most of the dead’s shoes had been removed and stolen. Good shoes were always valuable in war.
Every so often we’d come across civilians en route to the safety of the camps in Chad. It was a long, difficult walk under the intense summer sun, and people spent the hottest part of the day cowering under scrawny trees. Everyone was terrified of the janjaweed. But the trees provided only psychological cover from them at best.
One day we stopped in a village, and when I got off the back of the truck to shoot, a little girl about three years old took one look at me and started screaming in terror. She tore off, running for the horizon. I was confused.
“What happened?” I asked Mohammed, the interpreter who was accompanying us.
Her female relatives were laughing, which was doubly surprising to me.
“Is she scared of the camera?” I asked.
“No,” Mohammed explained. “Your skin is dark for a khawaja. She thinks you are an Arab.”
My Italian American, olive-hued skin had never been a liability before. I watched with horror as the little girl continued running, wondering what atrocities she must have witnessed at the hands of Arab militias.
For the next five years I returned to Darfur for about a month a year, for the New York Times, for the New York Times Magazine, and later with a grant from Getty Images. As the situation in Sudan worsened, the Sudanese government became more stringent about issuing visas to journalists. Visas weren’t the only obstacle to covering the conflict in Darfur; the bureaucracy of permits, useless papers, stamps, and photocopies was nearly insurmountable. But I was persistent and patient with my visa applications and paperwork and became one of the very few photographers to consistently cover the conflict there from 2004 to 2009.
In Darfur, I understood the conflict intimately, understood how the players operated and how to maneuver within the system to get my work done. Over the years I photographed the plight of refugees, villages on fire, ransacked homes, victims of rape. As my images appeared in the Times and the Times Magazine, the combination of photographs and beautifully reported articles by my colleagues elicited significant reactions from readers, from UN and aid workers, and from policy makers. It was one of the few times I actually witnessed the correlation between persistent coverage and the response to that coverage by the international community.
Kahindo, twenty, sits in her home with her two children born out of rape in the village of Kanyabayonga, North Kivu, in eastern Congo, April 12, 2008. Kahindo was kidnapped and held for almost three years in the bush by six interhamwe, who she claims were Rwandan soldiers. They each raped her repeatedly. She had one child in the forest and was pregnant with the second by the time she escaped.