My first visit to Sudan’s Darfur region during the genocide there changed me. It’s an arid landscape with few sources of water, so the Janjaweed militia would wait by wells. If male villagers arrived to get water, the Janjaweed would shoot them. If women showed up, the Janjaweed would rape them. But sometimes, they would let the children fetch water.
So I would wait with families as they hid and sent their 10- or 11-year-old children miles across the desert with donkeys to fetch water from the wells, not knowing if they would ever see their children again. It was an agonizing wait, and terrifying.
After reporting on the genocide, I returned home and hugged my wife and three young children. But how do you adjust to American supermarkets and cinemas after you’ve reported from burned-out villages on mass rape and killings? You can’t. My physical fear of being shot faded when I left Darfur, but every time I looked at my children, I’d wonder what I would do if I were in Darfur. Would I send them with a donkey across the desert to fetch water? I became obsessed with the Darfur genocide, and I ended up going again and again to Darfur, doing what I could to bear witness and force a response.
But I owed something different to my children. They wanted a dad, not a social justice warrior. They wanted games of football, not lectures about distant war crimes. So we returned to Kristof Farms, our family farm in Oregon, to stroll in the forest, to look for bear and deer, to tinker with the tractor, to work in the orchard, “to cultivate the garden,” as Voltaire said. Because to take on the world’s fight, we have to heal first.
Nicholas Kristof is a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for The New York Times and a best-selling author. @nickkristof
