Given that her culture is one where women rarely speak to men who are not relatives, the woman's aggressiveness was startling.

"Look at me," she demanded of a foreign journalist visiting the Farchana refugee camp in northeastern Chad. "I am a dead person."

Her name was Djimie Omar Moussa, and she gave her age as 55. She came to Farchana in January after a Sudanese government aircraft dropped a bomb on her home in the country's western Darfur region, killing her two daughters and four grandchildren.

The early morning blast threw her from her home; shrapnel wounds were scattered across her body. She walks with a limp, grimacing with most steps. The injuries have left her in a great deal of pain, she said.

"When you live, it is because you have someone on whom you can rely. But because my children are dead, my grandchildren are dead, and I am wounded, this is why I am a dead person," she said.

Foreign journalists find that interviewing Sudanese refugee women is a difficult task that requires a great deal of patience; men usually will answer all questions directed at women. But Moussa sought the journalist and demanded that he listen to her story.

She said that several months before the bombing her husband was killed by the Janjaweed, the Arab militiamen backed by the Sudanese government who have terrorized most of the population of Darfur for the past year. The United Nations estimates 30,000 to 50,000 black Africans have been killed in the campaign of ethnic violence.

"For me, I am dead. The fact that I am alive is only a miracle from God," Moussa said.

She said she was a trained nurse in Darfur and has offered her services to the medical nongovernmental organizations that work in the camps, but has not received an answer.

"I don't want to stay like this. I want to help; I want to do something. I worked as a nurse for many years. I can help here. They say they don't have enough people to work, so why won't they let me?" she asked.

---CNS