SUDAN: Mariam Hamat will not be going home. She sits with her five children in the meagre shade of a gorse bush with straw matting as the protective wall of a roofless home. The 25-year-old widow collects small piles of the straw and sells them to buy food supplies, writes Marie O'Halloran in El Genaine, western Sudan
She has absolutely nothing, but she is still alive and relatively safe. Mariam fled her home village about 20 km from El Genaine, a large town of the western part of Darfur and about 25 km from the border with Chad.
The village, like hundreds of others, was pillaged and burnt by an Arab militia, the Janjaweed, meaning "armed men on horseback", who have murdered, raped and looted through swathes of this arid part of the largest country in Africa.
This conflict between Arabs and black Africans is ethnic, pitching Muslim against Muslim and it erupted early last year, just as negotiations began to end the separate but connected war between the north and south.
Some 1.2 million black Africans have fled their homes and are now described as internally displaced people or IDPs. An estimated 200,000 more have fled to Chad, resulting in what the UN has called the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.
Mariam and her family are just a few of the expected two million people whom the World Food Programme estimates will have to be fed for the next 12 months because there will be no crops planted and the rainy season has started.
Despite the overwhelming evidence, the Sudanese government has consistently denied that it has armed and funded the Janjaweed, but until the last few weeks had made access to the region virtually impossible. But international pressure has changed that and the agencies are arriving.
As part of the moves to keep the pressure on the Sudanese Government, international delegations have also been coming to the area.
The visit by the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Mr Tom Kitt, to the region is part of that pressure and further international delegations will continue to visit. DCI, the Government's Development Co-operation International, which provides humanitarian and development aid, has been trying to visit the region since February last year.
Yesterday the Minister, accompanied by Ireland's ambassador to Egypt and Sudan, Mr Richard O'Brien and a delegation from DCI and Concern International which has begun its work in El Genaine, met the Governor of the region, Mr Sulaeman Abdullah Adam. The Governor insisted that the Sudanese government opposes the Janjaweed and treats them like outlaws".
He said the militias were targeting government vehicles and using them for military purposes.
At Krinding camp, Mariam told how her husband was murdered by the militia as were many of the men in her village.
With other villagers, mostly women, and children, they fled to El Genaine and have been at the camp, home to some 10,000 people, for the past eight months.
Some 80,000 people who fled their villages in terror, have moved to the camps around the town. This camp is a sea of plastic sheeting, straw matting and gorse bushes.
As Mariam talks quietly to Irish reporters through an interpreter, 30 or more women and children gather around to hear.
Asked would she go back to her village, she says no. "If we go back, we will be killed," she says quietly, as she pulls at straw she is using to make a table mat. An older woman speaks up forcefully. "We have all lost our assets, our homes have been burned and our livestock killed.
"We want to stay here. We never want to return back home."
Mr Dominic McSorley, Concern's emergency co-ordinator in Darfur says "it is going to be one of the biggest emergencies we have ever dealt with".
Funded by DCI, Concern expects to provide shelter, sanitation and water facilities to over 300,000 people near the Sudan border. As the world focused on other things, a slaughter has raged for 16 months.
As the delegation leaves the camp to fly to another town, a sandstorm moves in, quickly followed by the rain. The flight is cancelled and a riverbed, that was almost dry when it was passed an hour earlier, had become a fast flowing torrent.
In the Krinding camp, there would probably be little left of Mariam's home.