The little girl, maybe 6 years old, was shoeless in the scorching sand.  I looked closely at her feet, struck by how old they appeared, wrinkled and calloused gray, and it occurred to me, she's probably never worn a pair of shoes. 

I saw her near Nyala, in Sudan's Darfur region, in a camp for displaced people called al-Salam, Arabic for peace, it is a place surrounded by war.
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Now, 700 camps like this one dot Darfur, and the majority of the people in them are children. Glimpsing a brand new baby in one camp, when the wind caught the fabric of her mother’s headdress, I wondered how one keeps a child alive in this hell.

The feet of children -- old and worn by the sands of Darfur.
Photo by NBC News

For more than three years, Darfur has been tortured by a war started when the government included Arab militias into its police and armed forces while trying to put down a rebellion amongst its black tribes.  Hard to control, these militias are blamed for a kind of terror the U.S. has called genocide and the International Criminal Court calls crimes against humanity. 

The ethnic Arab tribes were historically slave traders in this region, but in the years since, they have intermarried and lived so closely with ethnic black tribes that it is sometimes difficult to tell the two groups apart. 

Called to arms, the ethnic Arab nomads were already motivated to push into new territories. The Sahara desert is moving south, perhaps because of global warming, drying up lands they once used to feed their herds. 

Video: Ann Curry travels to Darfur

When the history of Darfur's tragedy is written, the outside world may see it as a firestorm sparked by politics, fanned by a thirst for resources on a tinder of long-forgotten ethnic tensions.

Like most wars, this one too has lost meaning and clarity as the violence spirals. Now, the government is fighting several rebel groups and appears to have lost control of some of the Arab militiamen within its ranks. There are even reports of Arabs attacking Arabs and blacks attacking blacks. 

Stuck in the middle of this horror is Darfur's future -- these children who, along with their parents, are experiencing a kind of suffering that traumatizes.

They are the first to draw near to you, an alien with your clean clothes and Thuraya satellite phone.

Looking at them standing there, dirty and hungry, their clothes in tatters, you wonder what hope there is for them and for the future of Darfur. Then you realize, they are looking at you for something to make them smile. And so you try and BOOM! You discover that even in hell, a child can laugh.

One of the children Ann Curry met in a camp outside
Nyala in the Darfur region of Sudan.
Photo by: NBC News

We just finished an unprecedented two-hour, no-holds-barred interview with President al-Bashir. He was emphatic that the world misunderstands what is happening in Darfur. We will air this interview on Nightly News, TODAY and Dateline this week, and will post it as soon as we can here on MSNBC.com.

How does one interview a man accused of unleashing genocide?

Flying now to Sudan, in a matter of hours I am to come face to face with President Omar al-Bashir, whom the world lays most of the blame for the atrocities in Darfur.

Ann Curry and Sudan President Omar al-Bashir
Photo by Antoine Sanfuentes, NBC News

It was al-Bashir, international observers say, who armed Arab militias to put down a rebellion among the black African tribes in Sudan's Darfur region, encouraging old racial hatreds to burn out of control across the region.  The toll is estimated at more than a thousand villages burned, more than 200,000 people killed and 2.5 million others displaced.  The violence has bled across Sudan's western border into Chad, and it's southern border into the Central African Republic, theatening an entire region.

It is a war now complicated by rebels on all sides, and even global warming, as the drying of lands in the north drives Arabs south into African tribal territories.

But to the African tribespeople, it is very simple.  Men on horseback, called Janjaweed, set fire to their homes, and shoot, yelling "zurga" and "abid" meaning black slaves.  Women are targeted with rape, and are marked with knife wounds, so they are not able to marry. One 17-year-old girl told me she was asked which tribe she belonged to before she was raped. They wanted to make sure they got the right one.

Human Rights Watch says President al-Bashir should be prosecuted  for war crimes in Darfur. The International Criminal Court has summoned one of the ministers in his government to face possible charges for crimes against humanity. Al-Bashir has just suspended cooperation with the ICC investigators and continues to publically state the situation in Darfur is exaggerated and solely a regional conflict . Now, in his first television interview to the west in four years, he will have a chance to answer these accusations. 

So how exactly am I to face this man? How will I exact the truth, and at the same time keep the horror that I saw on the Darfur border from being revealed in my own eyes? I was never good at poker. I am gearing up for one of the greatest challenges of my career.

11:37 a.m. EDT update: We just finished an unprecedented two-hour, no-holds-barred interview with President al-Bashir. He was emphatic that the world misunderstands what is happening in Darfur. We will air this interview on Nightly News, TODAY and Dateline this week, and will post it as soon as we can here on MSNBC.com.

Everything is gray about him now -- his hair, his skin, but not Dad's eyes... full of mischief and sparkling green like a lily pond at sunset, they invite you to jump right in.

I always do, into our intense debates about politics and war and history and inevitably his lessons about life, part of his constant effort to teach me the value of being of some service to others so that at the end of my days I will know it mattered I was here. He started telling me that since before I can remember.

Now 77, as he approaches the end of his days, he has never seemed more alive. A hospital candy striper, health club Tai-Chi teacher, and senior citizens' club ballroom dancer, he is so happily busy that I must check his schedule before I visit.

You would never guess watching his whirling dervish energy that he has both a defibrillator and a pacemaker in his chest, reminders of his nearly fatal heart attack three months after mom died.

They had been married for 53 years, meeting during the occupation of Japan, marrying in the face of racism, surviving 24 years in the Navy, and five children, before losing one in the line of duty. When he lost her too, he asked me how he could go on before collapsing, doctors said, because his heart had enlarged. 

So what gives one in old age the strength to climb from the valleys of sadness and loneliness to a new summit of happiness? For Dad, it was realizing, with encouragement, that he could find ways to contribute.

Just look at him in this photo I took Saturday, after interviewing him for tonight's report in our "Trading Places" series.

Am I blinded by my love for this soul who set the course for everything I am? Or do I really see a youthful glint in the old man's eyes?

Oh, how I wish he could stay forever.

Nightly News Producer Clare Duffy shares what it was like to work on Ann and Bob Curry's story
Ann's father Bob and I were just wrapping up our first conversation, discussing the plans for shooting our story.  I'd been thoroughly entertained by this most gregarious and engaging man, and I could easily tell where Ann gets her good nature. 

"And you, what about your father?" Bob asked.

"Oh, unfortunately, he passed away two years ago," I told him.  I looked down at the date in my notebook.  Two years ago today.  I hadn't even noticed it was January 18, but now I realized why I'd been feeling a bit melancholy about this assignment.  Taking care of elderly parents is something everyone thinks about, and when you've lost a parent, as I have, after a long and debilitating illness, it's easy to look back and wonder how things could have been different.  I miss my father very much, and chatting with Bob Curry made that feeling even more acute. 

We arrived in Oregon last Thursday to follow Bob around, capturing everything this extraordinarily active man does.  The camera crew and I were hard pressed to keep up with him.  Ann joined us on Saturday for our interview.  We squeezed around the dining room table and settled in for a conversation.  Ann and her father have the kind of relationship where it seems they've never stopped talking.  They discussed everything:  love, loss, learning, what it's like getting older, and how to keep one's zest for life.

If there's one thing I'd like to see people take away from this series of reports, it's this:  Do what Ann did.  Sit down with your parent or parents, set up a video camera and start talking. 

Don't do it around a holiday, when there are presents or other distractions. Do it for no other reason than to get them on the record - both the stories you've heard a thousand times, and the things they'll tell you that will surprise you. It might feel strange, but eventually you'll all forget the camera is there. And don't wait.

Photo by Clare Duffy
Ann Curry shows her father, Bob, a digital image on her camera. NBC cameraman Ray Farmer is in the background.

Michael Jackson and his mom, Tangela Miller, with his sisters in front of their FEMA trailer. Photo by Ann Curry.

Tears on his eyelashes, an 8-year-old boy told me today that he fears his life will never be happy again. We were sitting on the steps of the tiny FEMA trailer on his front lawn in New Orleans, and it was clear his trauma ran deep.

"I pray for a miracle," he told me. 

He wants his nightmares to end. He wants his mother to stop crying. He wants more than anything to have his home back the way it was, so his life can "be normal."

Experts believe tens of thousands of children are suffering Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome in the Gulf region, 17 months now since Katrina, most undiagnosed.

Michael's young brain has him asking a lot of questions he can't answer. What happened to his friends? Who died and who lived? 

What happens to a child who has to worry about so much so young, as his sense of the world is still being formed?

I can tell you a breathtaking level of compassion happens.

In his suffering, Michael says he also prays that people will be all right so they don't have to be scared, that he thinks about the people who died and people who suffered. He admitted to trying not to be sad in front of his mom because he doesn't want to upset her. And he wants to be a "famous lawyer" when he grows up so his mom will never have to suffer again.

Yes, he's only 8.

There is some good news for Michael. A few weeks ago, his family moved back into their home in progress. I took the photo above of him in the kitchen. His smile says it all. Normal is coming.

"Every war is a defeat for all of us... the practice of journalism is a commitment to life."
Jesus Abad Colorado
Photojournalist, winner of the International Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists in Nov. 2006

Journalism is an act of faith in the power of truth. We reporters are sometimes described as calloused, but under even the toughest exteriors lies an idealistic wish that if we tell you the truth about a wrong, you will want to help right it.

We felt this hope when our NBC news team recently reported about the atrocities in Darfur and neighboring Chad, where ethnic Arabs shouting racial epithets are systematically killing and raping black tribes people, driving them from their villages.

Our reports aired on NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, the Today program, MSNBC, and MSNBC.com. Now, so that more people can see what is happening, NBC News has decided to take the unusual step of offering FREE downloads of these reports on iTunes, starting today.

Pretty cool, if you, like me, believe the heart of America beats with compassion, and for justice. Want proof? So many e-mails have overwhelmed NBC News in response to our reports, we are told they broke a record for our Web site. Most  writers have expressed outrage the violence has not been stopped and a desire to know how to help.

That more people say they understand what is happening in Darfur and Chad and care about it, as NBC Nightly News executive producer John Reiss puts it, "is all we can ask for."

But in fact we got more. One viewer, a philanthropist, called to ask our help in directing his response: a $1 million donation to help the victims of ethnic cleansing.

"Never again" is happening again. See for yourself and bear witness.

"Crisis in Darfur" is available as a free download. You can find it in the iTunes store. Click on the "TV Shows" category and then "NBC News" and "NBC News Specials." The 28+ minute video includes my reports for the network and a conversation New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof and I had recently about our travels to the region. I urge you to also read Nicholas' compelling columns. (If you have an NYTimes.com login, click here.) He, like me, knows the truth is powerful, and has faith it might save the people of Darfur and Chad.

Atrocities are escalating, as our NBC News team has returned to Darfur's edge - this time we carry body armor. Landing in Goz Beida, Chad today, it is immediately clear that it is much more dangerous than 8 months ago when we were last in the region. First came reports that thousands of Sudanese government troops had amassed from Darfur to back the Arab militia called Janjaweed. And with the end of Ramadan and the rainy season there was wide-spread fear that a mass killing campaign was being planned.

Then came hard evidence this fear is justified -- the UNHCR, the U.N. refugee agency, has substantiated at least 10 African villages have been attacked. Most are set on fire. Men are being killed, women are gang raped - the attacks are systematic in most cases by black Arabs against  black Africans. A new crisis is begging to be stopped.

A top Bush Administration official told me days ago the U.S. government is deeply concerned the killing could even rise to what it was in 2003-04 when it's estimated mostly tribal farmers were targeted and killed in Janjaweed attacks. Millions were set fleeing - many are now living as internally displaced people and as refugees in Chad.

Ironically, the thousands who fled here to Chad are being attacked a second time. Adding to the fragility, rebel groups and the military of both countries line the border amid fear that Sudan will try to back a coup of Chad's government.

But it is the simplicity of the story we are hearing from the wounded that tells the real ugliness here. A 27-year-old man bayoneted in both eyes this past Tuesday lies in a hospital bed in pain and panic about how he is going to care for his wife and two young children. They called him "nuba" - racist slang for black as they pulled out both his eyes.

Photo by Antoine Sanfuentes

It is the racism that fuels this violence that really gets to you. Here I thought going back, experienced in reporting about these kinds of crimes, it would be easier this time.  It's not. It breaks your heart. How could it not?

Saturday morning we are going to meet the survivors of these burned villages -- they are amassed, hundreds of them, living under trees with so many stories to tell. As we go to bed tonight we are steeling ourselves to hear  what the world will also be shocked to hear: It's still happening.

Ann Curry will be reporting on the Darfur conflict all week. You can see her reports on the Today Show, Nightly News and online at www.Nightly.MSNBC.com and www.Today.MSNBC.com.

Additional information on how you can help:

Today, with tears in his eyes, a minister described to me seeing an Amish mother embalming her 13-year-old daughter Marian, who was shot in the forehead at the school. She was carefully and lovingly dressing her girl in white, even putting the cotton in her nose.

All around the family watched, crying softly, even the little children, who listened as their grandfather told them not to hate the gunman who did this. 

"Forgive," he was instructing them. "Forgive, as God forgives us..."

Rev. Rob Schenck called it the most powerful moment he's seen in 25 years as a minister.

This forgiveness seems especially incredible coming on the same day the coroner is reported to have counted almost 20 bullet wounds in the body of a 7-year-old girl.

An Amish woman told me perhaps the good that might come of this tragedy.

"We can tell people about Christ and actually show you in our walk that we forgive, not just say it but in our walk of life," she said. "You know you have to live it. You can't just say it. "

I realize I did not know what forgiveness was until now.

Editor's note: Ann will report more tonight on the grace and dignity she has observed among the Amish this week.

Maybe it's because it's the Fourth of July. Maybe it's because it's been awhile since we've seen a shuttle launch.  Probably it's because we in America have heard so much bad news of late.  Whatever the reason, it was thrilling to watch Discovery's successful rise into the heavens, accelerating from 0 to more than 17,000 miles-an-hour in just eight-and-a-half seconds this afternoon.

Nerves of steel is what it must have taken for the seven astronauts to endure such a ride, not just because of the roar, but because of the incessant debate about whether foam would jeopardize the safety of their flight. Two top NASA officials had voted "no go" for launch, and that was before a small triangular piece of foam fell off one of the brackets holding the external fuel tank.

Preparing for the NBC News Special Report to show America the historic launch, the first on Independence day, I read a quote from NASA Administrator Michael Griffin that may give pause. On Friday, he said, "We are playing with the odds." He said balancing the dangers of another accident with the pressure to keep to a schedule that could shut down the shuttle program in 2010 is "What you pay us for as taxpayers. It's called risk management."

Taking this risk in these trouble times, on this day we celebrate our nation's birth, took both confidence and courage. But then, I suppose without the risk, maybe it would not have felt as good today, to watch America soar.

Going over the day's top stories, as we prepare to broadcast NBC Nightly News tonight, I am struck by what they say about the best and worst of these times in our nation's history.

One is about the possibility of a Fourth of July launch of the space shuttle Discovery. Call me hokey, but I can imagine Americans feeling pretty good about watching a successful shuttle launch again -- that soaring rise into the heavens reminding us of the greatness among us, and how far we've come since Neil Armstrong first stepped on the moon, and how far we might still go.

Even with today's sobering news that inspectors have found a five-inch-long crack in the foam insulation on the external fuel tank, and that scientists are weighing the risks of launch, as I write this, you get the sense in their descriptions about the science of foam insulation and their debate about whether to fly, that the men and women of NASA, are trying to uphold the standards of the best and the brightest before them.

On this same day, we saw the first images of a former U.S. soldier accused of raping and murdering of a young Iraqi woman, and gunning down her family, including a 5-year-old child, before burning their bodies. In part because this soldier, Steven Green, has already been discharged by the Army, federal prosecutors were brought in to file the charges. Our Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski tells me what he found remarkable is how quickly the federal governement filed charges, given that the military just found out about the incident a week from last Friday. They clearly wanted to get this guy into custody.

Both sides, Jim says, were extremely careful not to release details about Green, which made it difficult to report the story. But with the usual "hammering away" to get sources to talk, Jim has been able to get the story out.

The really scary part of this: Jim reported that the military only found out about these murders while helping soldiers in Green's unit deal with combat stress after the recent slayings of two soldiers in that same unit. Those soldiers you might remember, were kidnapped, tortured and beheaded.

At least one member of the platoon, stirred by feelings of guilt, talked. Investigators learned from at least two soldiers that the rape may have been premeditated -- that before it happened, "They were sitting around at a checkpoint, talking about raping the woman."

I asked Jim, what that says about how many other crimes in Iraq may go unreported. He said, the feeling at the Pentagon, is that there are "more cases just waiting to be uncovered."

A court will decide the truth in this, but at this moment, this too is a reminder. To be the best, America must still stand up to the worst imaginable.

Exhaustion. NBC News Middle East Correspondent Richard Engel is hanging on in spite of it, a sleepless three days now since the killing of terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.   

"I'm running on adrenalin," Engel tells me on the phone, his voice only slightly slurry, as he describes what he is filling for Nightly News tonight:  a dramatic show and tell of what's left of al-Zarqawi's hideout.

Engel, the first and only network correspondent on the scene, describes a remote farm area, filled with wildflowers.   

"We landed in a chopper in an overgrown field," he's saying.  "In a clearing we were to find a house
surrounded by these palm trees.  But when we got there I thought, where is the house?
It was just a big hole in the ground..concrete, cinderblocks."

He explained what the U.S. was telling him from the scene: "The two missiles went into the same crater, and blew up the foundation. There were 6 people in the house,  al-Zarqawi, two men, and two women and a child. By the time we got there, U.S. forces had picked through the rubble, and pushed all the debris back into the crater, which was the size of a swimming pool."

I asked him whether there was anything left in the rubble and was stunned by what he said next.
"We found a Newsweek magazine, from last week, I think."  Al-Zarqawi was known to be well-informed, but Newsweek?  "We found women's clothing and underwear, shoes, and propagandist leaflets.  We had heard that there were some computer flash drives and documents."

After covering this war for three in a half years, I asked Engel to stop for a moment and gauge this moment in the conflict. He said he'd been thinking about that. 

"For me it was a marker of time... one of the seminal moments. It felt the same way as when I was taken to another farmhouse where Saddam was captured." 

He added,  "I can't tell you how many stories I've done on Zarqawi. He killed thousands of people and to be there on the site where he died. I was exhilarated. There is not a lot of sympathy for al-Zarqawi here."
 
Exhilarated and exhausted. Maybe that's why he can keep going, our man Engel, now preparing to show Americans the place where one of the world's most dangerous men was last alive.

With press releases Thursday night from his campaign committee and his Senate press office touting his return, 2004 Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., flew back from Davos, Switzerland Friday to join the effort to block a Senate vote on President Bush's nomination of Judge Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. 

But Kerry's behavior left Capitol Hill reporters wondering why he had gone to the trouble of flying back. He made a 30-minute speech on the Senate floor, winding up with the phrase, "This is a fight worth having."

But then he tried to evade reporters who were staking him out at the Senate floor exits and promptly left the Capitol building. Thanks to alert spotter work by one of our colleagues, several of us did catch up with him as he headed out the door of the Capitol. Kerry sounded detached, almost apologetic as we peppered him with questions.

"I'm supporting this effort along with a lot of other people... there are a lot of folks involved in it," he said.

A reporter asked, "Are you leading the effort?"

Kerry: "No, I'm just supporting the effort like others. I'm very supportive of it. Obviously, I support it."

As he reached his waiting vehicle in the Capitol driveway with his driver poised to whisk him away, another reporter asked Kerry. "How many votes you think you're going get out of it?"

"Can't tell you. Don't know. Thank you."

He flew back from Davos for this?

Centrist Democrats such as Sen. Kent Conrad, N.D., had already said they would not support a filibuster. "I can not justify a filibuster in this case, I don't think it is warranted," Conrad said Friday morning after meeting with Alito for an hour. "A filibuster is not going to be sustained."

As Chip Reid posted earlier today, it seems extremely unlikely Kerry and his allies could prevent the Republicans from getting 60 votes to end debate and move to a final vote on the nomination Tuesday morning.