In the five years that I have been on the air, I have never once had to stop the show to compose myself.  Never, that is, until I met Daoud Hari.  Daoud is a Sudanese tribesman and author of The Translator:  A Tribesman’s Memoir of Darfur.  His personal story is harrowing to be sure.  In 2003, his life was shattered when Sudanese government helicopter gunships destroyed his village, killing his brother and sending his family into refugee camps in Chad.  He could have taken up a gun and fought with the resistance, but Daoud says that he decided to fight with his voice instead.  He became a translator and guide for reporters from major news organizations, including the BBC, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, as well as members of the United Nations aid groups.  His work helped bring the tragedy of Darfur into our living rooms.  It also got him into a lot of trouble.  He escaped death on a number of occasions – and spent three months in a Sudanese jail where he was beaten and tortured. 

 

But it was not Daoud’s personal story alone that left me speechless.  It was also the story of the immense suffering of his countrymen.  He wasn’t able to mention them all on the air, but he wrote about them in the book. The woman who was fleeing the country on foot carrying her dead baby;  Another woman who could no longer feed her three children, so she hanged herself in a tree.  He told of a young boy caught in a firefight who stopped his crying long enough to wave at the journalists rushing past in their Jeeps.  And others I can’t even mention.

We’ve all read the headlines about Darfur – 2.5 million people displaced. 250,000 in refugee camps.  Hundreds of thousands murdered by their own government.  But it can be hard to get behind the headlines to hear the real story.  Thanks to Daoud, millions of people can now hear the truth about what’s going on in Sudan.

 

For a man who has had so many brushes with death, and witnessed firsthand the gruesome deaths of many of his countrymen, I found Daoud to be gentle, calm and, most striking of all, hopeful.  When I asked him if he was worried that the Sudanese authorities would seek revenge on his family after the publication of his book, he responded that all the people of Darfur are his family and that he was worried about all of them.  Indeed. 

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