Heartbreaking. That’s how Nicholas Kristof, an award-winning journalist and author, described his last trip to Sudan. From the country’s border with Chad, Kristof met a young mother who had been raped. A teenager raising her siblings in a refugee camp. And a woman who had witnessed a mass execution in her village — with every male above the age of 10 shot dead in front of her.
“Things are desperate,” said Kristof, who has been documenting what he saw through a series of harrowing op-eds in The New York Times. “And they may well get quite a bit worse.”
It’s something Sudan — and its people — cannot afford. For 18 months, the country’s civil war has forced 10 million from their homes, making Sudan the fastest-growing displacement crisis on earth. Half of the country’s population is nearing starvation, and famine has been declared in Sudan’s largest refugee camp.