"Is there a war in Sudan?"

I was asked yesterday. 

The person who asked me was absolutely sincere about this. He went on, "I thought there was a bit of trouble there, but nothing too serious." 

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. We were waiting for a meeting to start and I did not want an argument. He was obviously sincere in his belief.

"Yes, it can't be too serious," someone else chimed in, "If it was Cat would be doing some work..."

"Actually there is a war," another person said. She looked at me and then said, "Here's K... We can get started." 

She ran through the agenda and then said, "And at the end of it I am going to ask Cat to say something because it is clear some of you have not been watching the news recently."

I looked at her wondering what she wanted me to talk about. She mouth "Sudan" and I guessed what she wanted me to say. There was another item on the agenda that related to it.

This woman runs excellent meetings. They do not get out of hand even when the topics are highly contentious. As we went through the items I wondered what I could say that would be useful. It is not a situation I know a lot about. How can I when we do not have the sort of aid workers I work with going in at present?

In the end I kept it simple. I said yes there was a war. I explained about the two main warring parties. I explained about the coups, about the demands for democracy, about the famine and the genocide. I kept it basic because I suspected the person who had asked the first question knew nothing and that several others might know very little. I also know that two of the people there have attended "pro-Palestinian" marches on more than one occasion. Given their backgrounds this is not surprising. 

At the end I told them how more people were killed in Darfur on a single day this last week than had been killed in the entire Gaza war. I told them, "This is why the people I know are not going in to help. It is why aid agencies are struggling to try and do anything at all. The three aid workers who were killed recently were colleagues of someone who works with someone I know. That might sound as if it is nothing more than a very distant relationship to me but it still upsets and disturbs me. They were real people with families and they were there to try and provide the basic human rights to shelter and food. You all know I have no time for feel-good protest marches but, if you must go, protest about the situation in somewhere like Darfur."

They won't do that of course but I left them to think about it. The news media has a lot  for which to answer.