The word Darfur means land of the Fur. And as is the case in so many of the world's crises, one of the central issues of the Darfur conflict is land. While I was in one of the capital cities of the Darfur states I met a professor of Romance Languages at one of the Universities there. He told me two stories to help me understand how important land was to the Fur.

"Whenever my grandmother leaves home, to go to Khartoum say, she always carries a little bag of earth with her. And when she arrives at her destination – before she eats or drinks anything - she takes a spoon of the earth, puts it in a glass of water, stirs it up and drinks it. She believes it helps her system adjust to the new surroundings. Then she seals up that bag and sleeps with it under her head, so she never forgets where she's from."

He also told me of a tradition the Fur have. Occasionally a child of the tribe is born outside of Darfur. When that person comes to Darfur for the first time there is a ceremony upon arrival – regardless of their age – in which the newly welcomed lies flat on the earth and family members take soil and rub it into each joint of the body, as if impressing onto the soul of that individual the place they come from. He said, in a wonderfully 21st century analogy, that it was like resetting the person's hard drive.

"In the history of Darfur we have had it harder" he told me. "The Turks, the Egyptians and English. They all did things much worse than what is being done to us now. But we prevailed. They never wiped us out and we always came back to our land. It will be the same this time. They will never drive us away. This is our land."

--Ted Braun