Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:When Ethics Survives Where People Do Not: A Story From DarfurGhaiath HusseinI was not new to Darfur. I had been here before, although I wore a different hat as I literally walked under the burning April sun along the wide, dusty, unpaved streets of Nyala, South Darfur, to “headquarters.” It was to be another interesting, but normal, peaceful, and safe day as I led the Sudanese household survey in South Darfur, then the largest of all Darfur states. That was in 2006, a few years after I joined the Federal Ministry of Health. My office overlooked the Nile, but getting out of the capital city of Khartoum was always the best part of working there. I had the opportunity to meet real people in their real places, where they are home and at ease.Overall, the data collection team’s work went according to plan. Most of the randomly selected villages were visited as planned or replaced according to protocol. But this morning was anything but normal. A few days earlier, while visiting a village in a nearby town, Kass, my team was able to make a single phone call to us, the leadership [End Page 162] team, composed of two colleagues from Darfur and myself, indicating the team had no reception—the nearest signal was an hour’s drive away. The team leader assured me that they had started collecting data and promised to call every day or every other day. They were a team of six young men and women (I called them boys and girls because they were so young and innocent) between the ages of 20 and 25, all from Darfur. Two of them were in love and participated in the survey collection to save the per diem for their wedding.The time I was expecting their call came, but the call did not come. Then another day, then another, then another.One of the management team was in charge of the security update, and that morning he asked me in a shaky voice if we could have a private meeting as soon as I entered the room. He informed me that the village where my team was located had been attacked by the Janjaweed, the notorious militia known for its ruthless, brutal attacks that leave nothing behind, but men killed indiscriminately, houses and children on fire, and women raped. I recalled my experience in Darfur the year before when I mechanically asked a woman if she had lost a family member in the last six months and what the cause of death was. She burst into tears. I tried to calm her down. Finally, she told me that her few-month-old baby had been burned alive in front of her own eyes. Before I could even imagine the fate of the boys and girls on the team, a call came in. It was not from the team, but from a crying mother who asked me to “bring her daughter back.” She told me she did not want her daughter killed or raped. I cannot remember what I said because I was in shock and did not want anyone to see this, especially the other teams. The last thing I needed was to see the panic for which I was not trained to manage.I had no time to waste. I had no exit or contingency plan in the 224-page survey guide that explained how to collect the data, how to ask the questions, how to sort and safely store the paper questionnaires, how to enter the data. It seemed to provide extensive guidance on everything except for the only instruction I needed at the time—How to keep my teams safe under fire. I took the first flight to the survey’s national headquarters in Khartoum seeking help. I was promised to be put in contact with the intelligence and army in the region through the government agency responsible for organizing humanitarian work in the country. In fact, none of them were in the attacked village. My colleagues on the management team seemed more hardened to the conflict than I was. For me it was something I followed on the news...