A Cry for Respect in a Sudan Camp

When a counselor recently asked her what she wanted to do after peace came to Darfur, Nazira said she wanted to be a pilot.

"That way I can fire back at those who will be attacking us," she said in a sweet voice. "I want to defend my family against killers. I still dream that people are killing me."

Duty and Defiance

On the day the hostages were taken, Hawa Issan Baker, 9, was at home tending to her mother, Kadja Adam Ibrahim, who was suffering from dysentery. The little girl wiped a moist rag over her mother's perspiring forehead, gave her a charcoal tablet to chew and cleaned her bedpan.

Hawa's friends, energized with anger, came by and urged her to take part in the uprising. Ikiram Musa Fudul, 11, remembered telling her, "You have to come. Today is our day to take power."

But Hawa declined, saying she could not abandon her duties. For most of the day, she stayed by her mother's side. She kindled a fire, swept the shelter, picked flies out of the water pot and forced her mother to take sips.

But as the hours went on, she said, more friends pressured her to join their rebellion.

Finally, swept up in the defiant mood, she left her mother under an adult's care. Meeting Ikiram at the entrance of the camp, Hawa told her friend she didn't want to see the hostages, but she suggested the two could slip away from camp and spend a few hours in the nearby town of Nyala.

"If the other children could do the kidnapping, then I could run away and do something bad, too," she recalled telling Ikiram. "Let's disappear."

The girls never made it all the way to town, instead ending up sitting in a field and talking into the evening. Hawa told Ikiram she was tired of nursing her mother and just wanted to have fun and play soccer. They fantasized about running away, maybe working as housekeepers or saving up enough money to sneak off to Khartoum, the capital.

"There we could live off the trash of the rich people," Hawa said. "It might be a better life then this. I hate Kalma."

In the end, she said, she felt scared and guilty and went home late that night. Her mother, afraid Hawa had been killed, asked her to stay close to home.

Hawa told her mother she felt frustrated. Two years ago, when they first came to Kalma, she had been malnourished and sick with malaria, and her mother had nursed her.

"You used to cook for me and braid my hair and buy me clothes and give me sugar canes," she said she told her mother. "Now I am the one caring for you."

On a recent day, while her mother napped, Hawa rode her donkey out to graze in a field.

"I won't run away yet," she said. "But I will take my small breaks."