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Even in hell...

The little girl, maybe 6 years old, was shoeless in the scorching sand.  I looked closely at her feet, struck by how old they appeared, wrinkled and calloused gray, and it occurred to me, she’s probably never worn a pair of shoes. 

I saw her near Nyala, in Sudan’s Darfur region, in a camp for displaced people called al-Salam, Arabic for peace, it is a place surrounded by war.

Now, 700 camps like this one dot Darfur, and the majority of the people in them are children. Glimpsing a brand new baby in one camp, when the wind caught the fabric of her mother’s headdress, I wondered how one keeps a child alive in this hell.

The feet of children -- old and worn by the sands of Darfur.
Photo by NBC News

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Sudan's president speaks

We just finished an unprecedented two-hour, no-holds-barred interview with President al-Bashir. He was emphatic that the world misunderstands what is happening in Darfur. We will air this interview on Nightly News, TODAY and Dateline this week, and will post it as soon as we can here on MSNBC.com.

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a great challenge in sudan

How does one interview a man accused of unleashing genocide?

Flying now to Sudan, in a matter of hours I am to come face to face with President Omar al-Bashir, whom the world lays most of the blame for the atrocities in Darfur.

Ann Curry and Sudan President Omar al-Bashir
Photo by Antoine Sanfuentes, NBC News

It was al-Bashir, international observers say, who armed Arab militias to put down a rebellion among the black African tribes in Sudan's Darfur region, encouraging old racial hatreds to burn out of control across the region.  The toll is estimated at more than a thousand villages burned, more than 200,000 people killed and 2.5 million others displaced.  The violence has bled across Sudan's western border into Chad, and it's southern border into the Central African Republic, theatening an entire region.

It is a war now complicated by rebels on all sides, and even global warming, as the drying of lands in the north drives Arabs south into African tribal territories.

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'Trading Places': Ann Curry

Everything is gray about him now -- his hair, his skin, but not Dad's eyes... full of mischief and sparkling green like a lily pond at sunset, they invite you to jump right in.

I always do, into our intense debates about politics and war and history and inevitably his lessons about life, part of his constant effort to teach me the value of being of some service to others so that at the end of my days I will know it mattered I was here. He started telling me that since before I can remember.

Now 77, as he approaches the end of his days, he has never seemed more alive. A hospital candy striper, health club Tai-Chi teacher, and senior citizens' club ballroom dancer, he is so happily busy that I must check his schedule before I visit.

You would never guess watching his whirling dervish energy that he has both a defibrillator and a pacemaker in his chest, reminders of his nearly fatal heart attack three months after mom died.

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Reporting Katrina: A Boy's Nightmare

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Michael Jackson and his mom, Tangela Miller, with his sisters in front of their FEMA trailer. Photo by Ann Curry.

Tears on his eyelashes, an 8-year-old boy told me today that he fears his life will never be happy again. We were sitting on the steps of the tiny FEMA trailer on his front lawn in New Orleans, and it was clear his trauma ran deep.

"I pray for a miracle," he told me. 

He wants his nightmares to end. He wants his mother to stop crying. He wants more than anything to have his home back the way it was, so his life can "be normal."

Experts believe tens of thousands of children are suffering Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome in the Gulf region, 17 months now since Katrina, most undiagnosed.

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Crisis in Darfur

"Every war is a defeat for all of us... the practice of journalism is a commitment to life."
Jesus Abad Colorado
Photojournalist, winner of the International Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists in Nov. 2006

Journalism is an act of faith in the power of truth. We reporters are sometimes described as calloused, but under even the toughest exteriors lies an idealistic wish that if we tell you the truth about a wrong, you will want to help right it.

We felt this hope when our NBC news team recently reported about the atrocities in Darfur and neighboring Chad, where ethnic Arabs shouting racial epithets are systematically killing and raping black tribes people, driving them from their villages.

Our reports aired on NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, the Today program, MSNBC, and MSNBC.com. Now, so that more people can see what is happening, NBC News has decided to take the unusual step of offering FREE downloads of these reports on iTunes, starting today.

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Return to Darfur's edge

Atrocities are escalating, as our NBC News team has returned to Darfur's edge - this time we carry body armor. Landing in Goz Beida, Chad today, it is immediately clear that it is much more dangerous than 8 months ago when we were last in the region. First came reports that thousands of Sudanese government troops had amassed from Darfur to back the Arab militia called Janjaweed. And with the end of Ramadan and the rainy season there was wide-spread fear that a mass killing campaign was being planned.

Then came hard evidence this fear is justified -- the UNHCR, the U.N. refugee agency, has substantiated at least 10 African villages have been attacked. Most are set on fire. Men are being killed, women are gang raped - the attacks are systematic in most cases by black Arabs against  black Africans. A new crisis is begging to be stopped.

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The true meaning of forgiveness

Today, with tears in his eyes, a minister described to me seeing an Amish mother embalming her 13-year-old daughter Marian, who was shot in the forehead at the school. She was carefully and lovingly dressing her girl in white, even putting the cotton in her nose.

All around the family watched, crying softly, even the little children, who listened as their grandfather told them not to hate the gunman who did this. 

"Forgive," he was instructing them. "Forgive, as God forgives us..."

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An Israeli family's sacrifice

JERUSALEM - "I love being part of the Jewish state. As long as it goes on, we have to continue fighting for it."

In this hard-fought war, Sally Oren's words are hard spoken. Israel has just called her first-born son Yoav back to duty. Next week, he will be in uniform, fighting Hezbollah as a special forces solder in southern Lebanon, where eight Israeli soldiers died last week.

Sitting at a kitchen table drinking coffee with Sally, she tells you her husband Michael could have lost his life in Bint Jbail 23 years ago. That struggle to protect Israel, some say, was this nation's Vietnam. Michael came home with harrowing memories he didn't like to talk about.

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Reporting from a war zone

Photo by Ann Curry, NBC News

Reporting from this war zone has drawn our news team closer. You can see them in the above photo I took in Haret Hreyk, the Hezbollah stronghold in Beirut's southern suburbs that is repeatedly targeted by Israeli warplanes. The smoke still rising from a bombing run just hours before, we were making our way through block after block of multi-storied apartment buildings turned to rubble.

That's producer Justin Balding on the left, sound man Drew Levinson in the middle and cameraman Mike Simon on the right.

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