Aid worker's blog: Children left behind

Darfur: Children left behind

With a digital camera, notebook, pen and photographing permit in hand, I set out in the scorching heat for Otash camp for Internally Displaced People in South Darfur.

At the camp, dozens of displaced children mobbed our team with squeals of delight.

“OK! OK! OK!” they shrieked as they followed us around the camp.

Born into displacement

World Vision has been providing life-saving humanitarian aid to thousands of people at Otash camp since 2004. The majority of children who excitedly milled around us were born into displacement and have no understanding of life outside a camp.

Children who were only a few weeks or months old when I first set foot at Otash camp more than four years ago are now of school age. Unfortunately, most of them have yet to get the chance to attend school.

Otash and other camps in Darfur are teeming with out-of-school children due to the scarcity of schools and learning centres. During all my visits to the camps, I am always met by many school-age children left behind because the few temporary schools at the camps are stretched to the limit.

Thirst for education

World Vision seeks to slake the overwhelming thirst for education among displaced children by offering informal education at its Child Friendly Spaces (CFS). But for every child at a CFS, there are still thousands roaming the camps without education opportunities.

My colleague Prince Tucker from Sierra Leone, who has worked with World Vision in Darfur since 2004, estimates that Otash and the other camps around Nyala, the capital of South Darfur state, host more than 30,000 out-of-school children.

Child labour

A lack of schools is pushing many children at Otash and other camps into child labour. As more permanent structures have sprung up in the camps, I’ve seen many children – boys and girls – working as casual labourers, lugging bricks and water for construction work.

World Vision’s child care specialist in Darfur, Joyce Kago, says some of the boys working at the construction sites in the camps are school drop-outs who have to work to fend for their displaced families.

Girls have an equally tough time because they are often disadvantaged whenever a family has to make a decision between taking a boy or a girl to school. Boys receive precedence all the time, hence there are more girls out of school.

Future

On my way back to Nyala, I pondered over the future lives of the children I had just met. I asked myself what the children’s future would look like, having been born displaced and dispossessed of any inheritance following their parents’ displacement, and with no opportunity to access education.

Then I remembered that in war-torn Darfur, there are no easy answers.

Dan Teng’o is Communications Coordinator for World Vision in Northern Sudan