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The Catholic New World


Abdirahman Mohamed: “What CRS bases its interventions on is trying to make sure we don’t destroy the coping mechanisms of people as we provide them with assistance.”

Catholic New World photo/ Sandy Bertog

A regular feature of The Catholic New World, The InterVIEW is an in-depth conversation with a person whose words, actions or ideas affect today’s Catholic. It may be affirming of faith or confrontational. But it will always be stimulating.

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Displaced people of Darfur need aid, attention

Abdirahman Mohamed has been the West Darfur station chief for Catholic Relief Services since July 2004, serving in an area of Western Sudan where more than 2.7 million are homeless and an estimate 300,000 have been killed. Most of those displaced are black Africans who have been systematically burned out of their homes, raped and killed by Arab Sudanese militias—often with air cover from the Sudanese government. The conflict has its roots in a 45-year civil war that raged in southern Sudan until a peace agreement was signed early this year. Mohamed, a Kenyan, has worked in southern Sudan for CRS after spending 5 1/2 years with the Lutheran World Federation serving Sudanese refugees in Kenya.

He visited the Chicago area Nov. 1 as part of a U.S. tour aimed at raising awareness of the work of CRS in the war-torn Sudan region. He was interviewed by Catholic New World staff writer Michelle Martin.



The Catholic New World: When did you move from Kenya to Darfur?

Abdirahman Mohamed: I moved into Darfur in July 2004, with two people from CRS, to do an assessment.



TCNW: What did you find?

AM: Most of what happened in Darfur had already happened. Villages were already burned, displaced camps … we did not get there in good time. We were a little bit late. We didn’t see any of the atrocities taking place. We were there after they happened. Some agencies were there during some of these things.

We carried out an assessment: what the needs were, what CRS could do, based on our areas of expertise.



TCNW: A lot of our readers might not be familiar about what did happen in Darfur. Can you explain a little bit about the conflict?

AM: I tend to prefer talking about what CRS does to alleviate the suffering in Darfur to talking about the political issues and all that in Darfur, particularly when it’s being recorded. I hope you understand that. For the background of what happened in Darfur, you could get that from our Web site (www.crs.org).



TCNW: What were the needs that you found?

AM: There were really great needs in all aspects of life. These are people who have been displaced by the hundreds of thousands, into so many camps in and around Darfur. There are three states: northern Darfur, South Darfur and West Darfur, and each has a state city. Most of the camps are in or around the capital cities, or smaller towns out of the city where there are police forces or security forces. But the populations don’t have any confidence in the security organizations, because they feel they are the ones who have perpetrated the atrocities. CRS concentrated on an integrated emergency program in West Darfur.



TCNW: What does that mean?

AM: There are five program sectors. We have a food program, water and sanitation, shelter and non-food items, agriculture and education.

Under the food program, we work closely with the United Nations World Food Programme, which gets about 70 percent of its resources from the United States government. We are serving about 120,000, and we distribute 1,800 to 2,000 metric tons of food per month, in 28 villages.

About water and sanitation, we are involved in sinking new boreholes (for water). We are also involved in repairing either neglected old pumps or damaged ones—many pumps got damaged during the crisis. We are involved in promotional health and hygiene campaigns, educational to the community, latrine construction for both family and communal latrines. We also train community hand-pump mechanics, so that when CRS is long gone, they can continue maintaining their own water pumps. To date, we’ve been able to reach about 20,000 beneficiaries.

On shelter, we provide the internally displaced with materials to be able to construct some sort of shelter for themselves. These are shelters constructed out of local materials, for instance grass. These are grass-thatched huts—poles, sticks. They pretty much construct what they used to construct. We are not providing anything new that requires any new technology. It takes them like two days to set up one complete hut where they can stay.

We would have provided things like tents, but the temperatures in Darfur are too high for tents. The huts are mobile kinds of structures—they can tear them down and use them again elsewhere. They are not long lasting, however. The grass may require changing every year. We’ve been able to construct 500 shelters for 500 families, and the plan is to construct 2,500 more by the end of this year—I’m sure most of it must have been done by now.



TCNW: How big are the families?

AM: An average size of six. Some have the wife or mother and the children, only. Some of the fathers are taking up arms, some are dead, and others may have fled into Chad.

For non-food items, we have helped about 20,000 families, which would be 120,000 individuals. We provide them with a family shelter kit, which has 10 items: mosquito net, water cans, blankets, some tablets of salt, etc. It’s not adequate, but it’s enough to start.



TCNW: What food do people get?

AM: We receive mostly cereals. This could be sorghum or whole wheat. We receive lentils or green peas, and we have vegetable oil. Those are the three main things. We have in the baskets sometimes corn syrup blend, salt and some sugar sometimes. The first three are pretty much consistent.



TCNW: What sort of agricultural assistance do you give?

AM: In an emergency situation, what CRS does is blends in some components of rehabilitation and development. Education and agriculture in most cases don’t fall directly under emergencies. What CRS bases its interventions on is trying to make sure we don’t destroy the coping mechanisms of people as we provide them with assistance.

Darfur is a very dry area, more or less a desert. It rains only three months in a year, July August and September, and most of the land is barren.

Despite all that, before this crisis in Darfur, people were able to sustain themselves. They were very independent. Having all these people displaced and in camps, receiving all these handouts from the international community, kind of destroys their independence. They can no longer feed themselves and support themselves.



TCNW: How are you able to help the people grow food?

AM: We tend to have a completely different approach from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. We have an approach that we call a seed fair.

The CRS approach is based on the fact that the problem is not actually a lack of seeds. It is a lack of access. What we do is we give the ability to access the seeds.

We create a market where seed sellers come and displaced persons who need the seeds are given coupons to buy the seeds. We monitor the entire process.



TCNW: What do you do with education?

AM: We construct temporary schools in the villages where they never existed before. When I was leaving, we had constructed 109 temporary classrooms in 14 different schools. We also had rehabilitated three permanent schools and expanded some, and we are planning to construct or rehabilitate four more permanent schools. We provide assistance to 109 volunteer teachers with training, jointly with UNICEF, and we provide them with allowances—some sort of an incentive—and a food package, since they spend their time teaching children in schools so they are not growing anything.



TCNW: What do you want Catholics in the United States to do?

AM: The message that (CRS) is trying to get across is that there is still ongoing violence in Darfur now, and it’s not a good environment for any agency to be able to provide for or reach the people who are suffering in Darfur.

If there is no security, agencies cannot reach the people. CRS is asking the U.S. Catholic community to pressure the government to be engaged in the process to stop the violence in Darfur, putting pressure on all parties, whether government or rebel groups. When the emergency ends, the people will go back home, and resources will still be needed to help them start their lives again.







Resources are needed to carry peace talks forward. We are talking about the African Union in terms of being able to provide peacekeeping forces in Darfur. The African governments don’t have the resources to take their soldiers there. They don’t have the equipment to move them there. They don’t have the logistical capabilities to move the equipment. Western governments today say they don’t want to have their own soldiers involved in these crises in Africa, and that’s way why they came up with idea that Africans should come up with their own peacekeeping forces. Fine—that’s a good idea, building capacities of Africa to provide its own forces is a good idea, but they need the resources to be able to do it.

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