"They couldn't smile, they couldn't cry. They talked as if there was nothing left in them," Ms. Bodkin says. "Just empty."
Once word got out that Ms. Bodkin and her fellow investigators were there, people lined up for hours to talk to them. She remembers one woman who waited all day, still as a stone in the blistering heat. As she told her story of being kidnapped and gang-raped for six days, she kept repeating, "Thank you, sister."
"Are you not concerned for your own safety?" Ms. Bodkin asked her.
"It doesn't matter about me, I want to die anyway," the woman replied. "I want you to save the rest of my people."
Ms. Bodkin returned to Canada believing that the atrocities she and others had documented would move the UN, the United States, Canada, somebody to take action and protect the people of Darfur.
She was thrilled when Colin Powell, then the U.S. Secretary of State, declared that the killings were, indeed, genocide. And then ... nothing.
The slow realization that the West was not going to save Darfur crept through Ms. Bodkin like a poison. "If there's a serial killer in Waterloo, we're going to do something about it. We're going to arrest someone," she says, still furious. "In Darfur, the government is a serial killer, and no one is doing anything about it."
She fell into a deep depression - triggered not, she believes, by the horrors she'd heard, but by her feeling of powerlessness. She couldn't sleep, she couldn't laugh, she couldn't look at any of her 800 digital photos of Africa.
A counsellor diagnosed her with PTSD and suggested that talking about her experiences would help. Ms. Bodkin started talking - to schools, rallies, civic groups, conferences - and she hasn't stopped. She has bookings through November.
The depression retreated, though frustration still rears its head. Her family is supportive, but she struggled to find the right words when one relative asked her why he should care about Africa when there are poor people to take care of right here in Canada.
It's not just that the Darfur refugees are poor, she told him, they have nothing - no house, no food, no family. And yet they're so generous they offer strangers their last bottle of water. She remembers one woman who, after describing how she was gang-raped and driven from her home by soldiers, looked at her and asked, "Are you okay?"
Most days, she knows the answer to that question. She doesn't think about Darfur all the time, but it's still the first thing on her mind when she wakes up. She tries to do something every day for Darfur, and that makes her feel better.
Her boyfriend (not Miguel - their romance ended, though they keep in touch) sometimes encourages her to take a night off, watch a silly movie, not worry about the fate of the world for a while. But there's always another phone call to make, e-mail to send or speech to write, she says.
In the back of her mind, the idea persists that if only she tried a little harder and found the right words she could make us all care.
In the past five years, more than 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million displaced from Darfur - to her, those victims have faces and names. If only we all knew what she knows, Ms. Bodkin believes, we couldn't look away either.
She remembers one well-meaning Canadian who heard her speech and told her about a new type of therapy that would help her recall her memories of Africa without getting upset.
"It's good," the woman told Ms. Bodkin. "You won't break down any more."
No thank you, Ms. Bodkin thought.
"I don't want to just feel empty, I'd rather feel the emotions still," she says. "I think, if the killings stop, my crying will stop. Once we get over there and it actually stops, that's my goal. Once it stops, I'll be okay."
