Sudan's cruel and slow starvation

By Hilary Andersson
BBC correspondent in Darfur

I'm sitting in the dark on the edge of a camp for displaced people in Darfur. I can hear the loud, persistent crying of one child rising above the murmur of the camp as the people settle down for the night.

Tonight the stars are out - that means no rain. Last night was not like this at all.

You can see it coming in the afternoons. The sky begins to darken and the horizon goes an ominous, brown shade of yellow.

Then the wind starts and the dust of the Sahara desert whips up, blasting whirling sands in all directions. The people start to run in their long rags, heads bowed against the wind.

Lack of shelter

Then, the heavens simply open, the wind ferociously hurls drenching curtains of water at everything around.

Mothers with their children, whose faces are twisted up in misery, squat grasping the sides of their makeshift shelters - which do almost nothing to keep them dry.

The torn plastic bags that make up the walls of their twig shelters flap madly in the wind. The ground turns into a mire of mud.

My TV crew and I run for our shelter 15m (50ft) away. All night, the rain pounds against our ceiling. I wake up at 0300 - it is still going on.

The people on the other side of our wall are still sitting, bracing themselves against the wind and rain, where they were at dusk. This is what it is like most nights for them.