Photo Credit: Refugees International/ Michelle Brown
03/15/2005

Small numbers of new arrivals trickle into the refugee camps each week. They wait on the outskirts of the refugee camps, without assistance, until UNHCR registers them, a process that can take as long as three months. Most have been living in villages in Chad near the Sudan border for over a year. Now that assistance has improved in the camps, they come to the camps in search of food, water and health care. RI interviewed a family in Oure Cassoni who had arrived two weeks earlier in Chad. This woman explained, “We left our village when the Janjaweed attacked. Many from our village went into the mountains. The situation in the mountains was bad. There was no food or water. My husband is still in the mountains with our animals. I decided to come here because the security is better and we had no more food.”