Amy Martin Amy Martin, left, formerly of Wiscasset, a member of a joint United Nations humanitarian mission is being interviewed by international media last month in Suleia, Africa, while doing an assessment of a village that was bombed and raided in December. (Photo Katharine Martin-Savage)

In today's society we have a tendency to complain about the way things are in our country, our state and the towns in which we live. We complain about taxes we pay nationally, to the state, and to the town we live in, we complain about traffic, the weather, price hikes in fuel, and electricity, the cost to train our children, the way our elected officials run our county, state and town.

Perhaps we should be thinking of some of the positive things within our daily lives. Most of us do have the money to pay our taxes, places to buy our food, and fuel, roads for our vehicles to drive on, and schools for our children to attend.

We can go to bed at night, and not worry about being bombed, militias coming in looting, killing our families, burning our homes, taking our food, and leaving only those that could not escape or that was no threat to them.

Amy Martin, a Wiscasset High School graduate, now working for the United Nations, witnessed the devastation of a village after an attack such as that recently.

Martin's United Nations assignment in Darfur, Sudan is with the United Nation Commission on Refugees position.

Thousands of civilians fled the town of Seleia, in West Darfur, Sudan after attacks in mid-December by the Sudanese army and Arab militia.

According to an article published in the International Herald Tribune, February 15, "Crammed into the school building in the centre of Seleia, just 200 people, out of the town's original 25,000 population, were left after an attack by the militia and the Sudanese army. Thursday, (February 14) was the first time anyone from outside had been able to reach the town since the attack on the village, and people remaining were mostly elderly women, those with babies, or old men," the article said.

Martin, part of a joint U.N. humanitarian convoy that brought food to the area for the first time since mid-December, was interviewed by a representative of the Herald. She talked about trying to "assess very quickly what we need to do and how we can move forward. The people here, they seem to be very cautious and trepidatious about coming and grouping so we are trying to get their story, and feed them as well."

According to the Herald article, the experience "was a clear indication why the few residents left in town were living in the school in the town's central square and had not returned to their homes."

One man told of burying his brother with his own hands, another man said the bombing and militia killed 32 people; some they buried right away, others not found right away were rotting in the sun.

"Some of them were so burned (from the bombing) that you could not even tell if they were women or men," a man said according to the article.

This is the second year that Martin has been in Sudan. She is the daughter of Katharine Martin-Savage of Wiscasset. She is a 1983 Wiscasset High School graduate, and a 1987 graduate of Clark University in Worcester, Mass., where she earned a Bachelor's Degree in International Relations.

She joined the Peace Corp in January 1988 and was assigned to a small village in Mali, West Africa. Martin returned to the United States in the early 1990s, deferred graduate school for a year and worked for an international consulting firm in Washington D.C.

She later became employed by the United Nations World Food Program and was assigned to Guinea, West Africa where she met and married her husband, Aboubacar Camara. The couple have two children, a son age 12 Djidba, and a daughter 10, Moumi. They make their home in Baltimore, Md.

Martin and her children will be visiting Wiscasset over the Easter holiday for a little rest and relaxation before going back to back to Africa.