Relief agencies returned last night to two camps housing tens of thousands of Sudanese refugees in eastern Chad after security fears and a dispute with local authorities stopped vital aid work for several days.
After travelling for hours over bumpy single track roads past camels, goats and donkeys, aid workers told leaders of the camps that they were ready to resume operations after assurances from Chadian officials that it was safe to do so.
"We came here today to say we are here for you and we are here to stay," Mr Mathijs Le Rutte, a senior official from the UN refugee agency UNHCR, told a gathering of men dressed in white robes and turbans in a makeshift schoolroom at Farchana camp.
Aid groups stopped some operations at the camps more than a week ago and work ceased completely on Tuesday with the suspension of medical care at Bredjing, the largest camp sheltering mainly black African refugees fleeing Arab Janjaweed militias in Sudan's Darfur region.
The halt to aid work at the neighbouring camps about 50 km (30 miles) from the Sudanese border was a blow to efforts to tackle what the United Nations calls the world's worst humanitarian crisis.
Some agencies stopped their work after a stoning attack on aid workers by a group of refugees in each camp last week. Medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres tried to continue health work but was ordered to stop by Chadian authorities.
Chadian troops went into both camps on Thursday in what authorities termed an operation to restore order. The army shot dead two people, including an alleged ringleader of last week's violence, in Farchana.
The community leaders in both camps, which house more than 40,000 refugees, pledged there would be no more trouble following the intervention of a Darfur tribal chief who is also a refugee at a nearby camp and offered to act as a mediator.
"I asked them to calm the situation and they accepted," the chief, Abdallah Hassan Zambour, said.