Dr. Omar Selik wanted to be seen, literally.
At the end of a harrowing, hourlong interview about life in the besieged Sudanese city of El Fasher, where he spoke via a rare satellite internet connection, he asked to switch on his camera. An exhausted, war-weary face appeared, then broke into an enormous grin.
“This is a good day for me,” Dr. Selik said, relief washing across his features. “I feel like a human being again.”
I found myself smiling too.
That simple moment of connection was enough to provide him with fleeting relief after 500 days of horrific siege. Dr. Selik, 43, was one of the last health workers in El Fasher, a city of a quarter-million desperate residents in the western region of Darfur, where death fell from the sky and starvation was a constant companion.
Moments earlier, Dr. Selik had been crying as he described how a pregnant woman had bled to death in his care for want of simple medicines. Now he tilted his camera down, inviting me to look at his lunch. I could hardly believe my eyes.
He held a plate of lumpy brown mush, animal fodder normally fed to camels and cows. It had become the main source of food for most people in El Fasher, he explained — a disturbing sign of how both a doctor and the people he was trying to save had been stripped of their humanity.
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