It seems that the world I live in, despite the recent bomb blasts, is a beautifully safe place compared to the horrors that others in Africa go through. I confess I lived in a blissfully ignorant state about what was happening in Darfur. Rwanda, I was aware of through two brilliant movies, Hotel Rwanda, and Beyond the Gates. Through the chaos that I foolishly imagined my life to be, Darfur escaped attention. So, Daoud Hari's The Translator was a shock. To confess again, I cried through the book. Twice. It didn't seem possible that a human being could live through the immense hell that Darfur was/is and still say "Everyday, we need to find a reason to laugh."
Hari, through this slim volume of186 pages, provides an eyewitness account of the madness in Darfur in 2003. Trying to avoid both the lethal Janjaweed, and Sudanese-government backed troops, Hari works as a translator in the camp at Chad, often risking his life to provide journalists with the information that a shocked world can barely comprehend. And indeed, the stories he tells seem incredible. He describes how his fellow villages were: "surrounded, burned alive, massacred from helicopters above and Janjaweed below, with only a few escaping, or few coming from other villages to find everyone dead and the bodies burned in heartbreaking positions; mothers died trying to protect their children and husbands died trying to protect their wives. Hundreds of thousands were dead. Millions were homeless."
There is a humanity that marks The Translator, an overwhelming sense of resilience, and the underlying echo of hope that maybe, just maybe, the world may not be as unkind as it appears to those in Darfur.
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I bring the stories to you because I know most people want others to have good lives, and, when they understand the situation, they will do what they can to steer the world back toward kindness - Daoud Hari.
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Verdict: Classic. Moving.
Rating: 5/5
that's way too cool.
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