Translator of Nightmares

Hari beamed and told Richardson, "You have saved my life. Maybe, I would have died." His father, who had stopped eating while Hari was in captivity, died soon after his son's release.

* * *

He had traveled far and longed for the comfort of family life. He missed those carefree days of escaping the desert heat in the cool grottoes of home, and those days when he would ride Kelgi, his camel, to the town of Kutum with his father to stock up on staples and cloth. His father had 100 camels, but Kelgi was Hari's favorite. He took him grazing with other village boys. When he got lost, he often fell asleep against Kelgi's big, warm hump. "Kelgi knew the way home and I would wake up to find myself inside the house already," Hari says.

As a teen, Hari wanted to see the world beyond his small village. So after high school, he took off for points north -- Libya and Egypt -- where he earned his keep as a waiter for several years. In search of higher wages, he crossed into Israel illegally, where he landed in jail.

Finally deported, he spent several months in a Cairo prison. He feared he would be turned over to Sudanese authorities, but was instead put on a plane headed to Chad.

It was 2003, the start of the worst chapter in the Sudanese government's violence against Darfurians, and refugees had begun streaming across the border into Chad. The first thing Hari did was to travel home to check on his family.

But when he reached his village, it was bracing for an attack, and his parents, sisters and brothers had separated. His mother went in one direction with her grandchildren, and his father headed elsewhere with his livestock. His older brother remained and prepared for battle with rebels who slung their guns and swords over the backs of their camels, both man and beast bristling to fight.

On camelback, Hari and other young men helped villagers in their frenzied flight from the violence. "I found we had a lot of refugees, women, children, entire families moving into or close to Chad. They needed food and shelter and I wanted to help warn the international community about what was happening. We had a war and villages were being attacked. Huts were getting burnt," he says.

"I felt I did not have any other choices. I had to do this. I knew I would be captured or shot, but this was, this is the right thing. I knew the bad days would come, women raped and children killed. And those who are still alive are not with their families anymore, or happy like they used to be. I cannot keep silent," he says.

Back in Chad, he obtained false papers as a Chadian and went to a hotel in N'Djamena looking for reporters. He spotted a white man. The foreigner, it turned out, was looking for someone to translate Zaghawa. He was part of a team of investigators from the State Department and the United Nations trying to determine whether the Darfurian violence could be legally defined as genocide.

Thus began Hari's career as a translator -- helping to gather the stories of survivors in the refugee camps and helping U.S. researchers in their travels through Darfur.

* * *