Hell is…Life as an Aid Worker in Sudan, Part 1

We’ve just got back from a three-week mission to Sudan in which we were intending to travel to Darfur to find out if people displaced by the conflict were getting adequate food, health care, shelter and protection from violence. We never made it to Darfur as the government denied us travel permits. But we glimpsed the surreality and the deep frustrations of life as an aid worker in Sudan.

When entering the Government of Sudan’s Humanitarian Aid Commission (HAC) to apply for our permits it felt like we had fallen into a strange combination of the movies “1984” and “Alice in Wonderland”. This may be unsurprising in a country whose Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Mr. Ahmad Muhammad Harun, has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

So we asked for the form we needed to fill in to apply for travel permits to Darfur, and were given one copy. We asked for another copy, since there were two of us, but were told that no more forms were available. We headed off to a find photocopy the form, but were then told that we needed four copies of each form. After another trip to the photocopy shop we tried again to submit our forms, but were now told that we needed four copies of several other documents. Owning a photocopy shop near the HAC must be very lucrative!

We duly came back with all of the correct documents, but the person we had to submit them to was now out, so we waited four hours for him, before managing to give him our forms. He refused to accept the forms, since our organization was not registered in Sudan, but he said that he would phone us to let us know how we could proceed. For the next week we tried to contact him every day. Finally he told us that he was prepared to accept our travel permit applications, and to come back the next day for a decision. When we came back we were told that they were still waiting for advice from national security and military intelligence officers in Darfur. In all, we ended up visiting the HAC offices more than ten times over a period of nearly three weeks before we finally received a decision from them. Of course, it was a negative decision, but it felt like an achievement to finally get one.

Our experience of applying for travel permits is just one tiny example of the endless bureaucratic nightmare that aid workers in Sudan have to deal with on a daily basis. The Government of Sudan is not at all appreciative of the essential humanitarian assistance that aid workers are providing in war-torn Darfur. They don’t like having these international witnesses to the ongoing abuses around, so they make their lives as difficult as possible. One aid worker from another African country told us that he had worked in many humanitarian crises in several different countries and that he had experienced hardships and difficult conditions, but that Sudan is the first country he had worked in where the government had made him feel unwelcome. Another experienced aid worker told us that in 25 years of humanitarian work in nearly as many countries, he had never come across another government that cared so little about the humanitarian operation that was keeping its people alive. We applaud the efforts of these NGO workers who continue to provide assistance to people in Darfur despite the obstructions imposed by the Sudanese government and the day-to-day difficulties they have to endure.

--Melanie Teff

Visit our website for more information about our latest mission to Sudan