the winter bites down so hard

At this time of year in Darfur the nights are as bitterly cold as any Manchester has to offer, but worse - without heating. Blankets become important. Structures without holes in the sides. Shoes.

You'd never believe it until you stand in the middle of a vast desert not too far off the equator and forget everything you thought you knew about geography.

People who've had to abandon everything at the drop of a helicopter chop now line up to receive coverings, warm material and replacements for the other necessary items left behind in a burnt heap - items that will mean one less member of their family, those left, will be weakened by the cold.

These are memories from three years ago - sleeping with all my clothes on, boiling water to wash ice cold skin, waking aching in that way that only a night of trying to stay warm in an unheated room in winter will leave you.

Three years ago the janjaweed militias were burning villages at a rate the local monitors could barely keep up with recording, never mind the international media. Camps of displaced people sprang up in the shadows of red mountains and wadi banks of 20 trees, and villages of 5000 swelled to 80,000 people with more arriving daily on foot and by birth - seas of plastic tarped temporary dwellings that had already lasted one year, then two, three...surely no more?

The world - once the tsunami waters had receded, the tourists returned home in planes or bodybags and the crisis deemed 'over' - watched the unpeeling of millions of lives in the desert. Leaders spoke of slow motion genocide and Rwanda and never again never again never again as everyone lifted their eyebrows up, waiting and expectant......for.......things to get so much worse.

On Sunday came the announcement that Musa Hilal, long-time leader of the janjaweed, has been appointed senior advisor to Omar al-Bashir, President of Sudan. All remaining pretence denying the government backing of atrocities flies out the window of an air-conditioned Khartoum office while Hilal tells a reporter from Al Jazeera that while he is most definitely not the janjaweed leader, no, he has, yes, recruited for them, and yes, also, he believes that 'what happened' was legitimate defense of his nation against outlaws. He TELLS a reporter this. Willingly.

Al Bashir states that Hilal 'has a very influential personality in Darfur' - all that with a straight face - and that's when I know, for certain, I know that despite the desperate intention behind all my fluffy positivity and spiritually nebulous prayers and supportive emails and paperwork shuffling it is not going to get any better. It's really not.

And so we will sit. And some of us will watch. And in 20 years we will teach children in English schools about the tragedy of Darfur, of the faraway land of hardship and awful people who did awful things. We'll miss out the irrelevant historical context of colonisation and political interests that needed to balance oil, ideology, and global economic influence, we'll ignore racist media spin and stalling tactics, and we'll ask for one multiple choice answer on the mid term exam - 'How many people died in the Darfur/Chad genocide?'

Will they even know the answer?