 Who do I have to vomit blood on for some aid relief? by Aini Ismael Abdullah, Darfur Refugee
In Arabic, my name means "source" or "water spring." My father gave it to me because, when I was born, I cried nonstop for hours. Later on, my name came to mark me as a source of joy in his life. Today, as I sit here mourning my dead family in a sweltering refugee camp on the Chad-Sudan border, I'm a source of something else entirely: a stream of blood that globs from out my mouth. Tell me ? who do I have to vomit blood on to get some goddamn aid relief around here?
No, seriously. I really, really fucking need some relief aid. I don't know if you can tell from the geyser that keeps spurting from my fly-caked lips, or from the fact that I keep moaning, "Please, Allah, deliver me relief," but I really do need some help over here. Do I have to spell it out for you on the desert sand with my blood? I probably can, too; there certainly seems to be no stopping this hemorrhaging ulcer I've had since my family was slaughtered by a government-backed Arab militia.
Which brings up another thing: maybe I'm just being needy, but I really could have used a hand when my village was getting destroyed by the Janjaweed jet fighters sent to exterminate every black-skinned person in Darfur. And — again, let me know if I'm being presumptuous — you could have spoken up when they were lodging shrapnel into the bodies of my children, raping my sisters and me and reducing my village to debris and charred human flesh.
Did it look like we were doing just fine on our own? I'm sorry, that's probably my fault. Sometimes, when I'm screaming for my life and clawing at my eyes so as not to see my youngest-born rent to pieces by genocidal machetes, I fail to enunciate properly.
What little food we receive at the camp — most of which is sent from neighboring countries rather than from the West — has become indigestible to our declining bodies. And the medical supplies don't suit our needs, either. My pink-eye seems to spread no matter how many antidiarrheal drugs I take, and the asthma inhalers do nothing to close the open sores on my back. Hey, at least Libya is trying.
Maybe I'm being unfair. The aid workers tell me that the U.S. has given more than $250 million in aid to me and the 500,000 of my people who have made the long march from central Darfur to East Chad. As I sit here, starving for a basic corn meal, afraid to gather firewood because of roving bands of rapists, that fact really means a lot to me. No, really. It does. I'm fucking exhilarated.
You just can't tell because I've lost the musculature needed to smile. |
