A Mass General Hospital nurse, Grace Deveney, has just returned from working for six months with refugees in the Sudan. She is a Durant Fellow, named after the late Dorchester doctor Tom Durant. A resident of Cohasset, she is the daughter of Gerry and Missy Deveney, owners of Deveney and White monuments on Gallivan Blvd.

Grace kept a diary, and the Reporter is pleased to print a portion of her account of life in a refugee camp.

We had been told that it got very cold here in the winter, but I suppose that we assumed the term was relative. How could it possibly get cold when the average temperature to date had been 110 degrees? Plus, I am from Boston! Boston is cold. Darfur could never be remotely as cold as Boston! But I neglected to consider that in Boston there is central heating, glass panes in the windows, warm fuzzy scarves, hats and gloves, and lovely hot showers. Thus, one can escape from the cold. In Darfur, the wind blows through your bedroom, warm hats and scarves are a fond but distant memory, and cold bucket baths replace those nice hot showers. Here, there is no escaping the elements.

I'd like to say that the moment this cold front arrived, I thought of the refugees, that I understood immediately the weather's greater implications for them. I'd like to say that I wasn't preoccupied with my own discomfort. That I thought of others before myself. But I didn't.

I thought of the refugees, yes, but it wasn't until I went out to the camps and saw it right in front of me that I truly understood what being cold means when you have nothing. I have never felt so guilty; lamely shivering in my sweatshirt and fleece and seeing the children wearing the same thin, ripped cotton rags that they wore in the blistering heat. Their tiny arms and legs exposed as the icy wind and stinging sand blew through the nutrition distribution site. Tiny bodies wracked with shivers as their mothers vainly tried to protect them from the cold with their own thin rags. I thought they would have winter clothes. I don't know why I thought that. I just assumed. Not that I expected much - a tattered little sweatshirt or a pair of hole-filled, wooly socks. I didn't expect that they would have nothing.

For the first time I really knew how the refugees felt. I was feeling it too. And I realized that up until that moment I had been only a spectator of the atrocities. Because we don't live it with them, the refugees; we live a hard life, but it is not the same. We don't go hungry with them, we don't walk for hours to get water, and at night we sleep secure in the knowledge that our guards are outside our doors to protect us. I had to live in the inescapable cold to know what it is like to be unable to escape the cold.

When you say, "See you tomorrow," to the people in Darfur the response is: "God willing." That's the response to everything. "We'll finish this in the morning." "God willing." But they are right. When I say, "See you in the morning," at home, there is a 99.9 percent chance that that is going to happen. For the people here, there is about a 50 percent chance at best. One of our staff members went to sleep and lost three uncles and a cousin by morning. And I am not negating the fact that tragedy can happen anywhere, but for the people who live in Darfur, the likelihood that tragedy will land on their doorstep is much greater. We can say that they are used to the suffering. That they don't know anything different from the poverty that they live in and ignorance is bliss, so to speak, but that is just a rationalization. Being cold is being cold, and just because you have felt it before doesn't mean that it is any less horrific the next time you feel it.