“Everything is fine, until the moment when it is not. And when that moment comes it can be very quick and very bad.” — Aiméry Mbounkap, a site planner for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
The New Yorker has a lengthy feature revealing just how difficult it is to be a humanitarian aid worker in eastern Chad. The conditions on the ground would be bad to begin with, exacerbated, indeed largely created, by the deluge of refugees coming from Darfur. Geopolitics are exacerbated by a fraught domestic and local political situation. Poverty is endemic. The geography is hostile, the weather no less so, the infrastructure nonexistent.