Dear friends, colleagues, and donors to our project in Zamzam IDP camp (North Darfur)
Eric Reeves, June 28, 2024:
An overview from the widely respected Clingendael Institute (The Netherlands) was released a month ago (“From Catastrophe to Famine: Immediate action needed in Sudan to contain mass starvation“). For Darfur, the implications of the assessment are all too clear: perhaps more than 1 million people will starve to death by the end of September 2024—primarily children (especially those under five years of age), pregnant women, and the infirm.
Our project in Zamzam camp for internally displaced persons—now the largest in all of Darfur by a considerable amount—is presently the only major source of humanitarian food assistance for camp residents, even as we can serve only a small portion of the most needy. For the period May 15 – June 15 of this year, Team Zamzam counselors and their assistants provided food assistance to 600 families (very roughly 3,000 people), but only by cutting in half the amounts of food received by 300 families in the preceding month.
Food is available to a limited degree—but at obscene prices. Traders come from Libya, Chad, and South Sudan, driven by a desire for profit and a knowledge that there is hard currency payment in Zamzam.
We want to do more—we want to do more to extend a project that is mitigating death by starvation, perhaps the most brutal means of death humans can experience. But our resources are simply too limited to do more than we are.
Contributions, from a great many people, have been exceedingly generous, but I am compelled to plead for more assistance. We are currently working with a monthly budget of $20,000—which pays the salaries of the indispensable counselors, buys food—and medicine, when it is available—and continues with our project of rehabilitating wells (until the heavy seasonal rains come, water remains in critically short supply). Fistula surgeries for women in critical need are no longer possible because of the destruction of the El Fasher hospital system by artillery fire from the Rapid Support Forces.
There seems to be little chance that international humanitarian organizations providing food aid will arrive anytime soon: the brutal Rapid Support Forces have laid siege to El Fasher, creating intolerable insecurity. Here I encourage a reading of Gaffar’s remarkably well-informed and up-to-date history of this barbaric siege since the fall of Nyala. Until the region stabilizes and the siege is ended, insecurity will be too great for the convoys of trucks from Port Sudan (1,000 miles to the east of Darfur) required to address food needs.
We can do more in Zamzam and its more than 500,000 residents, but only with significant new resources. This is my plea…
Salaam
Eric
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PLEASE NOTE: It is now possible to make a tax-deductible contribution to our project, using a portal on the website of a 501/c/3 organization operating in Sudan. Operation Broken Silence, working primarily on health and education issues in the Nuba Mountains of South Kordofan, has created a special site for tax-deductible contributions to our project, and we hope this makes contributing to the health and well-being of girls and women in Zamzam as well as to others in desperate need.
We also hope that all will keep in mind our project as a whole operates with truly extraordinary efficiency, in ways matched by no humanitarian organization operating in Darfur that I am aware of, a region I have been researching for two decades. There is absolutely no overhead expense for this project.
Those wishing to assist in funding the work of Team Zamzam may also send a check directly to Eric (Eric Reeves, 31 Franklin St., Northampton, MA 01060).
OR
Purchase one of his woodturnings: https://www.ericreeves-woodturner.com/collections/all
