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ground are home to each family. There is a basic wooden dwelling covered with a tarpaulin, next to which some of the families set up a small shelter to welcome visitors. Others take advantage of their land to grow sorghum, whose bright green leaves stand out against the camp ' s dull monochrome.
Hastily created in June 2023 in the middle of nowhere, this agglomeration, which would not exist if the war had not broken out, is home to more than 55,000 refugees. The camp is subdivided into numbered districts: Block 1, Block 2, Block 3, etc. It ' s impossible not to be struck by the large number of children who live here, playing on the paths under the distant gazes of their mothers.
In HI ' s rehabilitation area, people are working hard to care for as many patients as possible in the short time that the curfew imposes on the teams. Demand is high, with around forty people waiting silently to receive a physiotherapy session to recover from injuries whose after-effects they are still suffering several months after their arrival. Inside, Eric Ndiramiye puts a plaster cast on a woman ' s leg.
" She had suffered a compound fracture of the tibia while fleeing Sudan. Her injury was almost repaired, but the day before yesterday she tripped and her bone broke again. So we ' re going to have to put her in plaster for a month and a half ", he explains, with an X-ray of the patient in front of him.
While the majority of the camp ' s inhabitants are women and children, a large number of men come here for treatment for the traumas they have suffered. One of them, Moussa, a 40-year-old father of two, is from the Sudanese town of El-Geneina, the capital of West Darfur. He arrived in Chad in June 2023 and spent a month and a half at the heart of the conflict.
" When the war started, explosives started falling everywhere. My family and I moved to a place where there wasn ' t yet any violence. I looked after my children and the elderly while continuing to go back and forth to the town and our old house until the day I was wounded."
Five warriors attacked him. One of them wanted to execute him. While they were arguing, the latter took his gun and shot him in the left arm. Once his assailants had left, Moussa lay on the ground and smeared the blood from his wound over his body to pass himself off as dead.
" Other warriors then passed in front of me and kicked me. I didn ' t move and, thinking I was dead, they finally left. I stayed like that until nightfall."
When he finally returned home, his mother improvised
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