I'm back in Eastern Chad for my 6 time. We are in refugee camp Oure Cassoni.  It is a camp that is in the middle of the desert, and where life is very much on the edge.  The refugees we are visiting have been living there for approximately five years, and there are still no prospects of them returning home.

As the world focuses on the Olympics, we must remember that the children of Darfur would also like to play.  They would like to live in peace in their own homeland. 

You can see our webcasts at http://www.stopgenocidenow.org

We returned from Chad, after more than three weeks in the troubled region that includes Darfur and Central African Republic.  We visited our Darfuri friends in some of the refugee camps that are located in Eastern Chad.  They have been living there for five years, and they are barely hanging on to hope, feeling forgotten by the international community. 

Chad has been also going through internal troubles, which cannot be cleanly separated from what is happening in Darfur.  On our way out of the country, we saw and heard about heavy military movement in the East and in the capital, as the government forces prepared for a possible attack by rebel forces.  We did not get out in time to avoid the fighting.  Stuck in a hotel very close to the Presidential Palace, we became witnesses to the coup attempt, which included all out fighting with heavy weaponry from both sides.

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13 January 2008

We just landed in Europe, after the first big jump, with a few more jumps ahead of us before we get to the refugee camps in Eastern Chad.  Everything is so expensive here at the Paris airport!  My diet-soda, one of my last ones before being diet-soda-less for three weeks in Chad, was about five dollars!  Well worth it, though.

I was telling KTJ that, when planning and even executing i-ACT1 back in 2005, we were not looking beyond that one trip to the camps.  I could never have imagined that more than two years later I’d be at this same airport, on my way for i-ACT4.  ...