KOUFROUN: There used to be one family in Fanna Hamit’s compound; 11 families struggled to get by selling roasted crickets after she took in relatives fleeing the conflict in Sudan.
According to Arab News, they are among 90,000 people who have escaped to Chad since fighting broke out in Sudan in mid-April — a significant extra burden on one of the globe’s poorest countries.
Before this emergency, Chad hosted 600,000 refugees from its war-torn neighbours and grappled with the fourth consecutive year of acute food shortages. Overall, around 2.3 million people urgently need food aid, the World Food Programme (WFP) warned earlier in May.
The United Nations aid agency OCHA said, “The extraordinary hospitality of the Chadian government and its citizens has been demonstrated yet again … but the scale of this issue requires more funding to save lives.”
Hamit, a 58-year-old widow with six children of her own, has had to make careful economies to provide for those sheltering in her compound, most of whom arrived in this border village of Koufron with nothing.
Squeezed into the open-air compound, the women cook together over small braziers in the sand as children play around them.
“They share everything with us: their food, their toilet, their clothes and all the rest,” said 78-year-old Kaltouma Yaya Abderahmane, who pitched up at Hamit’s door in the middle of the night in late April.
The sudden arrival of several people has also distorted the market for goods and squeezed water supplies in Chad’s remote and arid borderlands.
“Let’s not even negotiation about sugar … it’s doubled in price,” Hamit said, lamenting the higher cost of grains and peanuts.
Tensions have risen over water use traditionally sourced from communal wells. Refugees at the Goungour refugee camp, south of Koufroun, said they had been barred by locals from drawing water in a nearby village and had to dig their wells in dry riverbeds.
Hamit said she tried to help “even the refugees who have set up shelters nearby …. they come to us for water”.
“The situation is tough for everyone.”
