A Learned Man Searches for Relevance While Languishing in a Chadian Camp

For Ali, the biggest struggle is not external but internal, to maintain a sense of relevance in a place that feels increasingly tangential as the weeks, months and years wear on.

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Fighting between the government, rebels and various militias plaguing eastern Chad has taken place fairly far from this isolated maze of huts and twig fences, two hours from any sizable town. The Darfur rebels, who have come recruiting in other camps, rarely come here.

People are generally healthy, according to the International Medical Corps, a nonprofit organization that runs an orderly, if crowded, clinic. As is the case across eastern Chad, the camp population is growing not because of new refugees, but births, which numbered 70 last month.

Convoys of relief workers arrive every day, as they did about noon one recent Thursday, their Land Cruisers wheeling through in a cloud of dust.

A flock of kids waved frantically, like marooned residents of a remote island, then went back to gathering firewood, hauling water or playing, building facsimiles of their lost homes out of wet sand. It was food distribution day, and women carried huge sacks of flour and beans from the backs of trucks. A few Chadian soldiers were asleep at their post.

Ali, who speaks near-perfect English and has gotten work at the clinic, was under the hot shade of a tarp teaching a class on preventing HIV. Then he attended a meeting about an upcoming vaccination campaign.

When he was finished, another long afternoon sprawled out in front of him.

He is a tall man with bright eyes and a graying beard, and in his dark trousers and slightly wrinkled lilac oxford shirt, he casts a shadow of sophistication. Ali does not come across as a sad person; he has a full, rolling laugh that comes easily, even after he says things that aren't particularly funny, such as, "You feel sometimes you're losing your knowledge here."

"Living here in the camps, there are no reference books," he said, with the laugh. "There are no persons to talk to about theories, to consult, to do research. . . . But you must find out also how to keep learning."

Ali's parents were small traders and farmers, but their son was a student at heart. He attended secondary school in El Fasher, a trading town in Darfur, then got a job with a cement company that eventually took him to Turkey for a training course, then Libya for work.

He saved up his money and was able to attend a university in India -- preferring to avoid Sudanese universities, where courses were often politicized to favor the government. "I went to school and showed I was not subject to any laws," Ali said.

He received master's degrees in economics and political science and stayed abroad, conducting feasibility studies for various companies in Ethiopia. He returned to Darfur in 2002 and, just as the fighting between rebels and government-backed militias was beginning, started working as a private adviser to university students.