Translator of Nightmares

It was especially trying when Hari spoke of his older brother, who died in 2003 during Hari's last visit to his family's village.

Hari spoke not only of death, but of tender family bonds, familiar customs and an essentially Darfurian way of a life for which he still yearns.

One of only a handful of Darfur refugees in the United States as part of a special resettlement program run by the State Department, Hari lives in Baltimore. The survivors in his family remain in Darfur. He is studying English to go to college and would like to spend a year or so here before returning to help translate the continuing Darfur story, "to give a little bit of life to my people and my land."

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They hung him upside down from a tree. "Well, this is not so bad," he thought at first, until his eyes felt as if they were popping out and his head began to throb.

He was acting as a guide and translator for an American journalist, Paul Salopek, on assignment for National Geographic, when rebels captured them both. He knew the rebels, who were Zaghawa like him but were fighting with Sudanese government troops. This was the hardest pill Hari had to swallow, he says: the betrayal of his own people.

When his captors prepared to kill him, he repeatedly demanded that they bring him a blindfold because he could not look them in the eye as they aimed to shoot him with the same guns used to menace and displace their own relatives. Hari had met the rebels' dispersed families in refugee camps, where whole villages from Darfur formed a maze of misery that had migrated to Chad.

The rebels did not execute Hari. Three times, they offered him the chance to escape. But he refused to leave Salopek and his driver behind. Hari took pride in always getting his khawajas safely back to Chad, across the Sudanese border, where they started.

He spent 56 days in captivity that included brutal interrogations and beatings.

Salvation came when New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson traveled to Sudan to intervene on their behalf with Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir. Salopek was from New Mexico, and Richardson intended to gain his freedom. But just as Hari had refused to abandon his companions, so, too, did Salopek. Their seal of solidarity was unbreakable.

Last month, Hari and Richardson appeared together during a book event for "The Translator" at the Finnish Embassy in the District and told how Hari's captivity ended.

"I could see the bond between the three. None was going to leave without the other," Richardson told the embassy gathering. Of Hari, he said: "This guy has a lot of dignity, he has a presence. He walks tall."