In honor of Darfur’s aid workers

The New York Times recently featured an insightful piece on aid workers working in Darfur. It is only because of their committed collective efforts that the Fuel-Efficient Stoves project can even be implemented.

From the article:

Here in Deribat, a rebel-held town in the Jebel Marra mountains, help can arrive only by helicopter because government officials have closed off the road.

“They are strangling us,” said Ali Adam, a medical assistant who runs a clinic in Deribat, adding that 21 children have died here in the past three weeks of pneumonia because they have no antibiotics. “We are under siege.”

In other places, like Gereida, a vast camp of 130,000 people in a rebel-controlled area, violence has forced almost all aid workers to retreat. In December, armed men raided an aid organization compound, raping two women and stealing cars, satellite phones and computers.

Even in the areas supposedly within reach of relief organizations, like Kassab, bureaucratic stonewalling by the government keeps aid workers out much of the time. Aid agencies say their operations are tied in endless ribbons of red tape. Rather than being chased from the country by violence they are more likely to lose heart from the endless bureaucracy — a slow death by a thousand paper cuts.

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