Eyewitness

A small dirt airstrip appeared out of nowhere in the dusty savannah. I wondered how our pilot could land on that small slash of rutted ground. The plane dropped down, bounced hard on the dirt strip and came to a halting stop at the end of the runway. I hoisted my camera bag over my shoulder and stepped outside, greeted by a blast of heat and dust.

I had come here to the southern corner of Sudan with Christian Solidarity International (CSI), a humanitarian relief organization. They'd had a long association with the people in this area, the Dinkas, providing them with medicine and food. But we were coming to address a particularly urgent problem of Sudan: slavery.

Most of the media attention on Sudan has focused on Darfur, in the western part of the country—plagued by ethnic cleansing, mass murder, looting, rape. More than two million desperate refugees have been created by the conflict; 400,000 have died. But southern Sudan, which is largely Christian, had been caught in a civil war with the predominantly Muslim north for the past two decades. Amidst the carnage, a shocking human tragedy has unfolded: The widows and children have been forced into slavery. We were here to buy their freedom. "How much will it cost?" I asked.

"Thirty-five dollars per person," I was told. Thirty-five dollars for a human life. I was stunned. In our small group there were translators and human-rights workers who could handle the delicate negotiations. There were people who had bundles of money to redeem the slaves and others who knew the customs of these devastated people. "What can I do?" I asked.

"Take pictures."

As a photographer I had been on previous trips to Africa. I had seen firsthand the results of the genocide in Rwanda and the way the refugees from that conflict struggled to remake their lives. There I had asked myself the heartbreaking question: Why didn't the world stop this? Now I feared I'd arrived at another hauntingly beautiful African place to ask the same and more personal question: What can I do?

I'd had to leave on such short notice that I didn't pack a bedroll. That first night the temperatures plummeted to the low 40s. I covered myself with my jacket and used my photographer's vest as a pillow. In the morning we flew to another dusty spot in the savannah and walked to a place where slaves had been gathering, waiting for their freedom.

There was a huge group sitting under a tree, 292 of them. For days they had been living in the open, with little to protect them from the elements. Their only food was gruel made up of ground corn and water. I saw horrible scars on many women, inflicted by their captors. Many suffered from malnutrition.