IN THE CRUCIBLE OF DARFUR, A DAY AT SCHOOL CAN BE A VERY SMALL BALM.

Story: Chris Herlinger/CWS

Nyala, Sudan - For the past year and a half, carnage has been underway in the Darfur region of western Sudan, where bands of government-backed militia have burned villages, and raped and slaughtered civilians - and millions of people have been uprooted from their homes. Darfur is a hotbed of violence, dread, and very little hope.

If the worst of what has yet happened in Darfur occurred some months ago, Darfur is still a place where war is experienced with unforgiving immediacy in areas within minutes from population centers that otherwise appear calm.

Darfur is also a place where the displaced - between 1.5 million and 2 million, by some estimates - now feel trapped in camps they fear to leave. "We and our families are in prison here," says one resident of the Hassa Hissa Camp on the edge of the city of Zalingei. "Before we were in villages and could work and move freely. Now we are just like hens in cages."

Camp residents continue to feel they are not yet secure from outside attacks and that their sole protection comes from the presence of already overstretched international humanitarian groups.

Protection issues are most keenly felt by women who, by all accounts, are fully justified in living in fear of sexual assaults and violence as they leave the camps to collect firewood needed for fuel.

If women feel the most immediate threat, men in the camps - subsistence farmers and villagers, in the main, accustomed to an active life marked by the seasonal rhythms of tending land, planting crops, and raising cattle - are now virtual prisoners of boredom. They have literally nothing to do.

"The people in the camps are stuck between a past they don't want to remember and a future they cannot see or even glimpse," says Anne Lise Fossland, country director for Norwegian Church Aid, one of the implementing partners of the CWS-supported program in Darfur.

While hope is in very short supply here, what little sense of encouragement that can be eked out is the continued commitment of Sudanese of all ages to education.

At the Hassa Hissa Camp - a tough, blighted, almost irredeemably harsh place - it is possible to see a group of disarmingly enthusiastic students learning English at a school run by the Sudan Council of Churches (SCC), a Church World Service partner.

"The children are very interested in going to school and they are much, much happier now," says Mohammed Ahmed Hajam, the headmaster of the school for 1,600 students, ages 13 to 16.

The SCC's commitment to education in the current humanitarian crisis in Darfur is no accident, says Joseph Akwoc, an SCC program manager. At the very least, students in class are out of harm's way and can rebuild a little semblance of normality - many have lost family members and friends in the last year of violence.

A day at school can be a very small balm - both for a traumatized child and a traumatized society. "Our presence," says Akwoc, "must have an impact."

Church World Service-supported work has made a marked inpact in Darfur in the last seven months, reports CWS Emergency Response staffer Chris Herlinger, who recently returned from Sudan. CWS is helping to provide shelter, medicines, water and sanitation, agriculture inputs, and tools for 500,000 of the most vulnerable people, as well as supplemental food for 50,000 children.

CWS is urgently seeking additional support to help provide food and other emergency supplies to vulnerable families. Make your gift to Church World Service today online, or phone us at 1-800-297-1516.

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