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

no help for his wife and child.
    After one last glance at these kindly but doomed people we were running for the Land Cruiser, zigzagging and calling to the cameraman and the woman assistant to jump in the open doors, hearing the gunfire now in the open as we sped faster and faster from the meadow. A child sitting in the grass stopped crying and waved goodbye to us.
    We pushed through very deep sand, sometimes with the wheels spinning. “Drive perfectly,” I said to the driver. There was no room now for one wrong downshift. We got stuck for several seconds but he calmed down and drove usout. He was too nervous to be driving, but he was in the driver’s seat.
    We cut through a thick jungle where the Janjaweed lived with their families. This would not be where they would fight if they could help it. Yet here we got stuck very deeply. The young Arab children, maybe one or two years too young to fight, started running over to us.
    Like Mr. Thoreau said, when a dog runs at you, whistle. I jumped out of the vehicle and yelled for the boys to come faster, faster, and help! I am your uncle. Help us push this vehicle! They came in a mob and helped us. I knew their brothers and fathers could be moments away. Chug, chug, chug, and we were free and moving very fast toward Chad.
    We made it back to Adre, all very tense and tired. Ann and Nick shared their stories. I brought out some Johnnie Walker, which is part of what is done after such a day. I looked at them a lot as they talked. Unlike us, these people did not have to be here.
Cheers to these people
, I said to myself as I washed out my heart for the day, thinking of the child who waved to us from the grass.

14.
Once More Home
    You have met broadcast news filmmaker Philip Cox, who saved my dear head from being shot by calling a commander on the phone. Philip had been in Darfur before and knew the dangers well.
    He knew exactly what he wanted: this kind of vehicle, this kind of driver, these kinds of foods to take and bottles of whiskey—some for us and some for the soldiers he would interview.
    Philip wanted to see where I had grown up and where my village had been destroyed and where Ahmed was buried. So we went there despite the dangers.
    After he saved me from being shot, we went to a place inside Darfur where I told him I needed to stop. It was one of the ruined villages of my dreams, the village where the man had been tied to the tree, and his little girl had been killed by the Janjaweed with his bayonet. I found what I thought must have been the tree, the place. It was justsomething I wanted to do, to say a prayer there for her; after so many dreams, I felt I knew her a little and needed to pay my respects. I wanted to make sure there were not small bones there needing burial, but there were not. I would come to visit this place other times whenever I was near it.
    Then we went north through Chad and crossed back into the far north of Darfur. It was a long way to my village. We watched the sky all day, hoping not to see a helicopter or a plume of smoke that would mean a village attack or a battle. When we saw dust from some trucks in the distance, we stopped and let them disappear into a mirage. I made some calls to rebel groups and was told to keep our eyes open because there could be trouble in the area.
    We went through the once-beautiful town of Furawiya. Some thirteen thousand people had lived here and in the surrounding villages before everything was attacked and destroyed. This was the picture-book town of North Darfur, with huge trees along its river, and mountains on each side of the sandy bottom that held the town. The destruction had been most cruel. Villagers escaping up a hillside were machine-gunned from helicopters. Philip and I saw the hill still littered with at least thirty-five bodies—many of them children.
    We slowed down while driving in the sand along the wadi that had once held the larger market town near my home village. Forgive me for not using