Hadjé Simine was even more unlucky. “I tried to gather all of my children when the Janjaweed attacked our village. All of the houses where burning. Even the clothes I had on were burning,” she says. The flames burned the skin on her back.

“Three of my children disappeared. I have no idea if they are dead or alive,” Simine says of her lost sons, Abdel Karim, age 10, Abdel Madjid, age 8, and Nouradin, age 5.

“The militia even threw up to 20 dead bodies into each well. And those who tried to drink of the water to avoid dying of thirst died of poisoning,” she says.

Today Ateib and Simine live in Mile and Iridimi refugee camps, respectively, in Chad. These are two of the three camps where *ACT (Action by Churches Together) is supplying refugees from Darfur with water and latrines. There are 180,000 refugees in Chad, 100,000 of whom reached the camps, with 80,000 still on the move from the dangerous border areas toward the camps.

While the refugees manage to survive in the camps, it has become common to see donkeys and goats dying in the camp because of lack of food – tragic for the refugees, since animals are often the only savings for people from Darfur.

Accommodating thousands of refugees in camps with more arriving regularly is a huge logistical challenge for non-governmental organizations. Supplying up to 180,000 people with clean water in a remote area, which is either an extremely dry desert or a big mud hole during the rainy season, is one monumental task. Add to that roads that are bad in the dry season and useless in the wet season, even for the former military trucks used for water and refugee transportation. On top of that, there are not enough relief workers in the field, and the ones there work long hours, sometimes 15 hours a day seven days a week.

ACT member Norwegian Church Aid (NCA) is drilling for water in the desert for 40,000 refugees. In one of the camps, Touloum, the borehole in June supplied the refugees with only 15 percent of the water they needed. The rest had to be transported on trucks from Iriba, an hour’s drive away. This is, however, only a temporary solution, which can’t be applied in the rainy season beginning in July.

“When the trucks can’t drive in the mud, we can use alternative methods like rinsing the water from the waddies [rivers formed in the rainy season] in filters made of sand,” says NCA project coordinator Tor Valla.

Even if there is not food enough in stock for the rainy season in all of the nine refugee camps in Chad, the risk of refugees dying of hunger or thirst is limited. But the lack of supplies and latrines and clean water can raise the risk of epidemic diseases spreading in the camps.

Despite the physical difficulties, ACT members in Chad and Sudan are working with displaced people who remain in Darfur are pressing on to overcome the challenges. Their task is not only to ensure hospitable living conditions, but to help save lives.

Presbyterian Disaster Assistance has provided $200,000 from One Great Hour of Sharing and designated funds to aid in these relief efforts.