Aiding Darfur: A nurse's story VIII

Trauma nurse Roberta Gately, who works for the International Rescue Committee (IRC) aid agency, tells the BBC News website about trying to help some of the 1.5 million people who have fled their homes in Sudan's war-torn region of Darfur.

Some camps are functional but more help is needed, Roberta says

Late last winter, long before the name Darfur was known to the world, I was sent to this desolate region by the International Rescue Committee, as part of a two-member emergency team.

Our role was to assess the situation and to evaluate the needs of the more than one million Darfurians who had been displaced by the conflict.

We were dispatched to north Darfur where tens of thousands had gathered in the town of Al Fasher.

New homes

A makeshift camp had sprung up in the town but there was not nearly enough space, enough water, enough shelter, enough latrines, enough food to go around.

A new camp was planned and IRC was involved in the early plans.

Q&A: Darfur conflict

We were responsible for setting up health services in the new site and our emergency field co-ordinator was busy designing shelters made from plastic sheeting.

He erected and tested shelter after shelter until he finally settled on one design that seemed sturdy.

Other aid agencies dug latrines and drilled for water.

We were creating homes or at least trying to.

When all was ready, the displaced were moved to Abu Shok in small groups.

'Showcase camp'

I was there for the initial move and then completed my assignment with IRC and returned home.

Over the next few months, I heard that Abu Shok had become a "show camp", a place where international leaders were taken to see the displaced of Darfur.

I remembered it as a vast desert wasteland where small shelters dotted the bleak landscape and where our little clinic stood alone as the only line against disease and death.

Each time I heard it mentioned, I hoped to see it again.

In August of this year, I returned to Darfur, to the south, to help start up IRC's health programmes there.

Surprise

It was not until just recently that I was able to return to Abu Shok.

I was stunned as we drove up and I gazed upon a veritable village of some 60,000 people.

So orderly and well organised is the camp today that it even boasts a bustling little marketplace.

Sturdy shelters have sprouted up everywhere and this once bleak place is now filled with life and hope.

Toxic seeds

But Abu Shok is an oasis amid misery.

There is still much to do here in Darfur.

She says people have terrible choices to make

Babies are still dying needlessly of malnutrition and preventable disease.

Starvation is an everyday occurrence for pockets of people trapped and hidden in Darfur's darkest corners.

Insecurity makes them inaccessible; our aid and food programs cannot reach them and they cannot escape.

There are reliable reports that thousands in scattered villages in the north are trying to survive on toxic seeds.

Once these seeds are ingested, paralysis and death may follow.

To prevent this deadly outcome, these desperate people are washing the seeds in a final attempt to survive. But many will not.

That unimaginable choice, slow death from starvation or an uncertain chance at life from eating poison seeds, faces thousands here.

What choice would any of us make? Where is the world's outrage, horror and demand for action?

Babies are dying throughout Darfur. Hope is dying as well.

Abu Shok houses only 60,000 of the more than 1.5 million displaced, desperate and dying Darfurians.

More Abu Shoks are needed. More concern, more anger, more resources. Darfur needs it all.

Roberta's previous articles