Life in Darfur

Where these children live there are no roads, no electricity, no telephones and little access to health care or education. When the rains fail so does this fragile economy, forcing children to walk miles for water. KIDS FOR KIDS is working with the community to prevent this. Our aims are to support projects which are long lasting, self sustaining and community led.   Houses (tulkuls) are small round huts made out of wood and the stalks of millet. Journalists describe them as made of "wood and sticks". Millet is the staple diet which grows to 6 ft in good years, but can fail completely when the rains fail. The huts have a millet fence around them to provide some protection from the winds that race across the desert. When an haboob blows you cannot see in front of you. It is like walking into a solid wall of sand. When the crops fail you have no way to mend your hut. Many are at risk collapse.

A village is a small group of tulkuls with even smaller satellite villages – one community is approximately 5,000 people in all.  A family, often with six children (the mortality rate is high), live in each little tukul. “I asked Fatima, the “richest women” in Um Shireiga, what her family of 8 owned.

2 beds	3 mattresses	4 pillows	4 blankets
3 cups	5 dishes	1 knife	3 spoons
1 tea pot	2 metal pots	1 small water pot	1 mat

She now also has 6 goats and a donkey from KIDS FOR KIDS to help her family.

Countless families are so poor they have no bedding at all, or mat on the sand floor. It is cold in the desert at night, and in January, can be very cold indeed.

When the sun goes down the goats are brought back to the village to take shelter. There is no light in the villages so that children have told us their problem with homework is that they cannot see to do it. We are now providing 2 SOLAR LANTERNS for each village – one for the children and one for literacy classes for the women. The latter lantern will also be used for emergency deliveries at night for our VILLAGE MIDWIVES.

WATER – we seek help to provide HAND PUMPS near each village. After an electro magnetic geophysical survey carried out by the water authorities from El Fasher (the regional capital) a drilling rig has to be used to dig down, sometimes deep down, to reach the water. Without these pumps, people survive on hand dug wells which dry up in the heat of summer when temperatures soar to over 50%C. This is when crops and animals die. And the little goat comes into its own.