There is a meat market, where haunches of goat hang from the thatched roof. There are tea stalls and shacks selling hair mousse and skin cream. Some women dig vegetable plots while their neighbours shape clay and water with their bare hands to build new houses.
An enterprising refugee has even bought a satellite dish and set up a TV tent, where a crowd packs in every night to watch the Arabic news channel, al-Jazeera.
The refugee camp at Iridimi, in north-eastern Chad, is home to 15 000 people who have fled the violence in Darfur. They are showing every sign of settling permanently across the border.
There is a cross-section of Darfur society in Iridimi; peasant farmers and herders, but also middle-class refugees who are trying to rebuild their businesses.
Juma al-Hamdar (40) borrowed money from family in Libya and the Gulf to buy a generator-powered flour mill, where women queue each day to grind cereals.
Sipping black tea, the businessman speaks quietly in English about his six-year-old son Ahmed, who was killed when the Sudanese government bombed the town of Kornoi. ”My baby died by Antonov,” he said.
Here he has a new life and a new child, Salma, who was born in the camp eight days ago.
Stallholder Hashim Haroum (23) who sells pasta, soap and lollipops from a shack made of thatch and tree branches, was a student in Darfur.
But he chose to go into business in the camp with the support of a loan from family members who were already settled in Chad.
”If peace comes, I will return. But if not, I will stay here,” he said. ”Business is good, thank God.”
However, the success of some of the businessmen can be deceptive.
Life for the majority of the refugees is cramped and hard in comparison with Darfur — and conditions at Iridimi are better than at most of the other camps in Chad.
Some of these are still struggling to provide food, water and shelter for all those who need help.
The land in this patch of north-eastern Chad is drier than the fertile soil of their home villages in Darfur. Even in the wet season, less rain falls here.
Swathed in a faded purple shawl, Asha Aliya Yahya hacks at the earth in front of her UN-issue tent with a dull knife.
In a tiny plot of land no wider than the front of her tent, okra seedlings are sprouting. The sandy soil is stained dark brown with the buckets of water she has poured on it. ”[In Darfur] I had tools to dig the land, but here I have nothing, only this knife,” Yahya said. ”This is very hard.
”We had a big garden, growing sorghum, okra, tomatoes and water melon. We had lemons and oranges. We ate the things we grew ourselves and had cows to give us milk and buttermilk.”
In the camp the refugees receive rations of rice, peas, sorghum and a nutritional supplement, corn-soy blend, which is mixed with water to make an unappetising yellow gruel.
”It is not good, because it is not normal food,” Yahya said. ”Sometimes it upsets my stomach.”
Like many of the refugees in the camp, she came to Iridimi five months ago after Janjaweed attacked the village of Abu Gumra in north Darfur.
When she speaks of the attack, in which two of her sons died, she pulls her shawl over her face so that strangers will not see her tears.
Across the camp, refugee women are busy building new homes to replace or extend their UN tents.
When it rains, Aziza Hamid Jabar and her children sleep in their tent. But because the tent traps heat, she has built an airy shelter of thick tree branches and plastic sheeting next to it, where she and her children sit out the fierce midday sun.
A clay wall with a low doorway curves in a semicircle in front of her living space. Set beside the wall is an open-air kitchen where a cooking fire smoulders.
But for her too, life was better in Darfur. ”In Abu Gumra, we had a big wall around the house and many rooms,” Jabar said. ”We had a bathroom.”
These are resilient people, whose survival skills have been honed by a tough environment. They are accustomed to lean seasons in which hunger and disease will claim some of their children.
But none of them will return to Darfur to face the bomber planes and Janjaweed militias sent by the Sudanese government.
There are up to 190 000 refugees in nine camps along the border between western Sudan and Chad.
A tenth camp is being built by the UN, which expects many more to cross as the violence continues.
Digging at her okra patch, Yahya said: ”In my country, this would take two months [to yield a crop], but here I don’t know because the land is not good.
”This land is dry, but it is better than before because there is no war here, no bombing.”
She added: ”If peace comes, I will return back, but I don’t know when that will be. Only God knows.” – Guardian Unlimited Â