Translator » (Reprint)

Daoud Hari was born in the Darfur region of Sudan. After escaping an attack on his village, he entered the refugee camps in Chad and began serving as a translator for major news organizations including The New York Times, NBC, and the BBC, as well as the United Nations and other aid groups. He now lives in the United States and was part of SaveDarfur.org's Voices from Darfur tour.

The young life of Daoud Hari–his friends call him David–has been one of bravery and mesmerizing adventure. The Translator is a suspenseful, harrowing, and deeply moving memoir of how one person has made a difference in the world, an on-the-ground account of one of the biggest stories of our time: the brutal genocide under way in Darfur.

In 2003, Daoud Hari, a Zaghawa tribesman, was among the hundreds of thousands of villagers attacked and driven from their homes by Sudanese-government-backed militia groups. Though Hari’s village was burned to the ground, his family decimated and dispersed, he himself escaped, eventually finding safety across the border. With his high school knowledge of languages, Hari offered his services as a translator and guide. In doing so, however, he had to return to the heart of darkness–and he has risked his life again and again to help ensure that the story of his people is told while there is still time to save them.

The Washington Post - David Chanoff

The Translator, by Daoud Hari, a native Darfurian, may be the biggest small book of this year, or any year. In roughly 200 pages of simple, lucid prose, it lays open the Darfur genocide more intimately and powerfully than do a dozen books by journalists or academic experts. Hari and his co-writers achieve this in a voice that is restrained, generous, gentle and—astonishingly—humorous. He is not an Elie Wiesel or a Simon Wiesenthal speaking the unspeakable in words so searing as to be practically unbearable. I, for one, am grateful for that. In these times, when news of carnage and atrocity comes at us so insistently, Hari's tone allows the vastness of Darfur's suffering to seep into the reader's consciousness in a way that a raw, more emotional telling might not.

Introduction     ix
A Call from the Road     3
We Are Here     11
The Dead Nile     21
A Bad Time to Go Home     28
My Sister's Village     38
The End of the World     43
Homecoming     48
The Seven of Us     62
The Translator     68
Sticks for Shade     71
Two and a Half Million Stories     77
Connections     86
Nicholas Kristof and Ann Curry Reporting     92
Once More Home     99
Waking Up in N'Djamena     106
A Strange Forest     111
The Sixth Trip     114
What Can Change in Twenty-four Hours?     120
Some Boys Up Ahead with a Kalashnikov     125
Our Bad Situation Gets a Little Worse     131
Blindfolds, Please     136
We Came to Rescue You Guys     142
We Can't Think of Anything to Say     146
The Rules of Hospitality     151
Open House at the Torture Center     161
The Hawalya     168
My One Percent Chance     176
Acknowledgments     183
A Darfur Primer     185
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights     195