TEXT BY SHANE SMITH PHOTOS BY JAMIE-JAMES MEDINA

Before I went to Sudan, I didn’t know much about the conflict in Darfur beyond everyone saying, “It’s the worst genocide of our time,” and watching footage on CNN of the Janjaweed militia wiping out whole villages. Really, we only decided to go there because one of our favorite photographers in the UK, Jamie-James Medina, had been chatting with an old friend of his who is now a UN press officer in Khartoum. She offered to pull some strings and get us visas and organize flights around the country, so we said, “Fuck it,” and got on a plane.

On the flight over I went through this huge binder of research about the situation. It really messed me up. The scale of the devastation was difficult to comprehend: 400,000 people killed and over 2 million displaced in less than four years. This comes right on the heels of another civil war in the south of Sudan that killed more than 2 million people and displaced a further 5 million over the course of the conflict. As the plane landed in Khartoum I had the biggest “Ummmm, what the fuck am I doing here?” moment of my life. From the minute we got off the plane to the minute we flew out again, I was shit-scared. And as it turned out I was totally right to be.

To see more, check out the Inside Sudan Series on VBS.tv

This is one of the “Lost Boys” who live in the marketplace. Sometimes they come to the shelter to get a meal, but mostly they just survive off garbage and whatever else they can steal. This kid was totally wasted on glue. He told me that he hadn’t been huffing, but when he coughed it smelled like a model airplane was about to fly out of his mouth. He reeked of it. They’re all addicted to huffing. It’s really sad. They were playing soccer, high as kites.

This is Rasheed in front of his house, which he built out of mud, manure, and straw. He’s from Darfur. He was trying to escape with his two-month-old brother when the Janjaweed ripped the baby off his back and threw him into a fire. He showed us around and was very nice to us. When we left him we found out that the secret police had been following us the whole time. We were really worried that we might have gotten him in trouble. This kid was using a stick with a string and some popcorn tied to it to fish in a creek near the village. He was standing on a sewage pipe. When we asked him why he’d picked that spot, he said it was because the fish come there to eat the shit. As we were talking to him we saw people with donkey carts filling oil drums with the untreated sewage-water to sell as drinking water in the village.

We spotted this graffiti on the way out of Khartoum. It was odd because Sudan is so alien and anti-American that you never really see anything familiar. I thought, “I wonder if 50 Cent or Green Day or whoever know that when they record music it will affect people all the way out here in the middle of Africa.” These are kids at a madrasah outside Khartoum. Their parents were murdered in Darfur and they are now refugees in their own country. A sheik took them in and feeds them and clothes them, and in return they have to read the Koran. They sit there all day and all night memorizing prayers from these little tablets. Once they master one passage, they wipe down the tablets with water and write another on there to memorize. They’re all just sitting in the sand, rocking back and forth and chanting. They have nothing else.