The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur by Daoud Hari

probably nearly all gone. He was also about fourteen.These were Janjaweed Arab boys. We talked to the boy who had been beaten. I translated.
    “Why did you attack this village?”
    “We are from a village just over there. We have always been friends with the people of this village.”
    “So why, then?”
    “We were told by the government soldiers that these people were going to attack our village and kill our families if we did not attack them first. They would give us money if we did this.” The money was equal to about two hundred dollars, which was a lot of money—if anyone were ever really paid it.
    “Our families need this money, and we had to protect them.”
    So that is how it was with them. We left the beaten boy with the villagers. They would probably not be kind to him. He was fourteen, as I said.
    From here we cut deep into Darfur. The fighting here was heavy and we passed thousands of fleeing women and children as we drove toward the fighting.
    “You are crazy!” people yelled at us. “The Janjaweed are everywhere over there. You must turn around!” I should have told Nick what they were saying, but I think he understood; their frightened faces and gestures needed no translation. Somehow, I had no fear myself. Whatever it was that makes a rebel or a government soldier or a Janjaweed feel like he is already dead anyway and might as well just do his job—it was like that. But I worried for Nick and the cameraman, for Nick’s woman assistant, and for ourdriver. For them I had to be as clever as I could not to get them killed.
    We reached an abandoned NGO health clinic. Beyond it lay a grassy flat over which people now ran toward us. A village just through the trees was under attack and they were running in panic past us, stopping, remarkably, to urge us to escape with them. Next to the clinic, under plastic shade tarps, were wounded people from a prior attack who had been left behind when the clinic was abandoned moments earlier. Some of those fleeing were wounded, or held their wounded children in their arms. They screamed for medical help that was no longer there. The most seriously injured just sat or lay down around the clinic, some crying or moaning from pain or despair, waiting to die from their injuries or be killed by the approaching Janjaweed. Yet they looked at us and felt concern for us and told us to run while we could.
    Nick Kristof, of course, got out his notepad and started calmly interviewing these people. Madness is the business and the method of a war reporter. I breathed deeply and knelt to translate.
This man was shot by his longtime friend and neighbor, an Arab man who had been instructed to collect the gun of this man. When he refused, his friend shot him
.
    The gunshots and shouting were getting closer every few seconds. “Nick, we should leave now,” I said between every few phrases of translation.
    “Just a few more questions,” he replied, bouncing from one wounded person to another. I could see some Janjaweed assembling among the trees, waiting for their other men to catch up before rushing the field.
    “A very good time to leave,” I said again.
    “One more quick one,” Nick said, flipping the page of his small notebook to make space for the next interview.
    Okay
, I said to myself,
this is my work
. I translated as the birds in the trees around us now flew away.
    The last man interviewed was not wounded, but was huddled there with two small children. He said he was waiting there, hoping that his wife and his other child were alive. She had fallen up ahead. Another man had run to help her, but he had fallen, too.
    “Let’s go up there,” Nick said to me.
    Okay. This is my job
. We crawled in the grass to the woman. She was dead. The man who went to help her was dead. It was hard to look at them so close.
    Nick said that maybe we should get going. He was such a worrier.
    As we moved low and quickly past the poor waiting husband, I told him to leave now, that there was