In the Goz Amer Refugee Camp in Darfur, every day is marked by a single, haunting question for each person living there: Will I have enough food and water to survive?
Two decades ago, the world was intensely focused on the humanitarian crisis in Sudan. And even though the situation there is even worse today, the world has turned its eyes to new crises — Ukraine, Gaza, Iran and beyond — and even these strain our attention.
In 2004, during my first visit to the refugee camps in eastern Chad, I met Adam Musa in the Kounongo camp. He had fled his village in West Darfur after the Sudanese government unleashed horrific violence aimed at erasing his people. Over several visits, I came to know this kind, soft-spoken man whose compassion and boundless energy lifted the spirits of everyone around him. Watching him help fellow camp residents and collaborate with humanitarian workers became an enduring lesson in human dignity.
What do Adam and I share? At our core, the same longings — to be safe, to protect our families, to have food and water, to receive medical care and to live in peace. I have all these things and more. Adam is fortunate, on any given day, to have even a small portion of them. As he once said, “We want to see our children healthy. We want to see that there’s a future that would be better than living in a refugee camp.”
Dostoevsky once wrote, “The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.” I’ve often wondered whether that insight is reserved for those who have the privilege of not worrying each day about survival. For Adam — and millions like him — life truly is about staying alive. Most of us cannot imagine the daily reality of the displaced, the persecuted, the forgotten.
Since 2003, when the Sudanese Arab government turned its fury on non-Arab populations in the south — especially in Darfur — tens of millions have been displaced, hundreds of thousands killed, thousands of women raped and countless children left without parents.
Adam, orphaned as a boy in Darfur, somehow survived. He became a teacher in his village, convinced that learning is essential to human survival and the hope of ending the horror of armed conflict. After years in Kounongo, he returned to Darfur, only to be uprooted again by renewed violence. He now lives in the Goz Amer camp. Still, he teaches. Still, he believes.
Two decades ago, the Save Darfur Coalition captured the conscience of many in the United States. The coalition was an alliance of faith-based and human rights groups, founded and shaped by leaders of the Jewish community. Their rallies filled city squares. Activists demanded that the world pay attention. For a time, it did. But that movement faded — and with it much of the world’s concern. Today, the killing continues, and our silence is deafening.
Adam is still hoping for a different future.
He has simple, human dreams: He wants his children to live with hope and without the constant threat of starvation. He wants them to dream beyond survival.
Adam’s own challenge is to survive, protect his family and hold on to hope. Ours, in our comfort of safety, is to let his story unsettle us and find a way to respond amid the noise, distractions and moral fatigue of our age.
The great religious thinker Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once wrote, “There is immense silent agony in the world, and the task of a human being is to be a voice for the plundered and disenfranchised.”
Adam’s task is to survive and hold on to his dreams.
Our task is to listen, to care and to dream with him — and then to turn those dreams into compassionate action. As another new year has begun taking shape, maybe the world needs fewer resolutions and more dreams — dreams rooted in responsibility, summoned by conscience and sustained by the stubborn insistence that suffering must never be ignored.
Although the voices of Darfur’s activists have grown faint, perhaps 2026 will finally rouse a world long deaf to people’s cries, turning silence itself into a clarion call to save the millions enduring the ongoing tragedy in Sudan.