May 28, 2007 (GOZ BEIDA) — Men driving donkey carts to the market and refugees crouching in the shade finally have something to break the boredom of life in this arid Darfur border village — news, hip-hop and Arabic music coming in on cranky transistor radios.

It’s Radio Sila, the village’s only radio station, funded mostly by U.S. taxpayers and pumping some fun into a violence-region suffering the spillover from the Darfur conflict next door.

"People follow our car in the streets, shouting ’radio, radio,’" said Fiacre Munezero, the station’s supervisor. "It’s a good start."

Broadcast from a metal cargo container converted into a studio, the station is run by Internews, a California-based aid group spreading news and music to crisis zones.

"First and foremost, we’re a community radio," said Jocelyn Grange, a French journalist who manages the program in eastern Chad. "We try to be directly useful to our listeners."

About 230,000 Darfurians are refugees in Chad, along with some 140,000 Chadians who also were uprooted by the violence.

Thousands of Darfur refugees are packed into a camp around Goz Beida, and the border region has become a crossroads of violence, where people live in fear of attack by Chadian fighters as well as Darfur’s dreaded janjaweed militia allied to Sudanese government forces.

Radio Sila is modeled after two others opened by Internews in 2005 and mid-2006 in eastern Chad, which offer a mix of local news and music seven days a week from morning to dusk. The stations also alert listeners to dangers, such as a recent janjaweed raid on a Chadian village that left 400 people dead.

On a recent day, the news on radio Sila covered a U.N. VIP’s visit, an upsurge in attacks on a nearby refugee camp, and a calendar of junior league soccer matches.

The Voice of Ouaddai in the region’s main town of Abeche broadcasts in French and Arabic — Chad’s two official languages. To the north, Radio Absoun is also broadcast in Zaghawa, the African language spoken in many villages and by the tens of thousands of Darfur refugees.

Radio Sila, in the south, largely caters to the Massalit tribe, whose language is rarely spoken in Chad, which is why it took longer to go on the air — it had to find a Massalit speaker with broadcasting skills.

Wearing a bright red cotton robe, Awatif Oussma did not seem at first glance like a radio host. Her soft voice was barely audible and she often appeared more concerned with her 2-year-old daughter crying on her lap than the bulging microphone in front of her.

But when Radio Sila’s studio light switched to red, she broke into a fast-paced diction and read the news headlines in Massalit’s rolling, high-pitched guttural sounds.

A schoolmistress by training, Oussma said she fled western Darfur three years ago when janjaweed attackers destroyed her village.

Now living in a refugee camp next to Goz Beida with her husband and two children, she was hired and trained by Internews to become a radio journalist.

Camp elders first wanted Oussma to remain a teacher, said Ahmed Zene, the station’s editor in chief.

"But then they realized it was better she switched to radio so that she could teach the whole community," Zene said.

Internews’ three stations operate on a $1 million budget for this year, with most of the funding provided by the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Along with news and music, the stations feature six weekly shows addressing topics such as health and safety in the camps. The star program, "She Speaks, She Listens," addresses women’s issues.

"We consider there’s no taboo, as long as you’re careful about how to address things," Grange said. "The only topic we carefully avoid is politics."

Music outplays news, and men glued to their radio in the Koubigou refugee camp said they preferred it that way.

"Life is so, so boring in the camps," said refugee Abakar Hamid. "At least listening gives us something to do."

(AP)