Diplomatic Visit to Darfur Camp Ends in Shouting Match

KALMA CAMP, Sudan, Nov. 10, 2005— -- At Darfur's largest refugee camp, I met a remarkable 76-year-old woman who is blind.

She was walking through the camp with one hand steadying a bowl full of mud on her head, her other hand holding the end of a stick. At the other end of the stick a young girl led her to the tattered tent she calls home.

After she dumped the mud in front of her tent she explained to me that she is building mud walls to protect herself from the gunfire she hears at night.

The Kalma camp, which didn't even exist two years ago, is now a bleak slum of tents and mud huts where 85,000 people who have been burned or beaten out of their homes live. The situation has been made more desperate in recent months because the local government authorities have enforced an economic embargo of Kalma. People here are not free to come and go.

But even so, there is an astonishing spirit among these people. They are some of the poorest people in the world. They have lost almost everything they ever had. Many of them are angry. But they have not given up. Even with the embargo, little shops have sprouted up in the camp. People have little to sell and even less money to buy, but they are trying.

I saw one woman selling little fried corn meal cakes. She was mixing the dough in one bowl, frying them in another bowl over a small fire and placing them on a plate for sale. While she was doing all this, she was also nursing her baby.

While I spent the day at the Kalma camp with ABC News photographer Hank Disselkamp, my producer Richard Coolidge helicoptered to the South Darfur town of Sheria with Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick and witnessed some remarkable diplomacy.

Zoellick was trying to talk to people about recent fighting between anti-government rebels and pro-government militias that had killed 81 people. But the local government leader insisted on going with Zoellick wherever he went, prompting the kind of shouting match you rarely see in the diplomatic world: