A photo caption with an April 30 article about genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan contained an incorrect first name for a Sudanese teacher. She is Armani Tinjay, not Amina Tinjay.
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A Loss of Hope Inside Darfur Refugee Camps
Girls recite Arabic alphabet in refugee camp three miles outside the South Darfur town of Nyala.
(By Jahi Chikwendiu -- The Washington Post)
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I made trips with a parade of officials and celebrities -- I once traveled with American actress Mia Farrow and her son Seamus. And I knew that back in the United States, their trip brought more attention to the issue than any newspaper story did.
The second time I saw Tinjany was in July 2004, in the crowded Oure Cassoni refugee camp near where I had met her months earlier. She was no longer writing letters.
She was now living in a tent provided by the United Nations. She nervously swept her new home, trying to keep it tidy in the fetid and muddy labyrinth of camp life.
She had lost a lot of weight, and her collarbones poked through the same orange
polka-dotted dress. She said she had suffered from malaria and stomach worms.
She was depressed and had lost hope, but nonetheless was trying to open a school for the children in the camp.
"The Sudanese children will want to know why they are living in Chad," she said.
Some of her friends had left for Khartoum or Kenya, leaving behind the often-humiliating and hardscrabble life of refugees. But she stayed behind.
She cried in front of me, and she told me I reminded her of just how long she had been away from her home.
"Will we ever get our lives back?" she asked me.
In an audiotape broadcast last week, Osama bin Laden urged Muslims to rise up in protest of any U.N. or NATO intervention.
My e-mail in-box immediately was filled with outraged messages from Darfurians who had kept in touch and lived in cities around Sudan.
"I believe -- as many of my fellow Darfurians do -- bin Laden is very mistaken by calling for Jihad in Darfur," Ahmad Shugar, a Darfur leader, wrote in an e-mail. ". . . We are all Muslims here. It is really humiliating when a fellow Muslim looks down on you and calls for jihad against you."
And just as with Tinjany, I could do nothing but ask to use his comments in a story.
Emily Wax is the Nairobi bureau chief for The Washington Post. She has traveled to Sudan more than 12 times since the Darfur conflict began.
