Of course, all is not well in Darfur. More than two million people remain stuck in internal displacement or refugee camps, and some rebel groups fight on. But people who have been victimized and traumatized are sensing a change in the air and acting on it, risking their lives and the lives of their children to leave the relative safety of the camps to venture back to where loved ones were killed.

Abdallah Mohamed Abubakir, a skinny farmer, just brought his family back to Nyuru.

“Things aren’t great,” he said, “but they’re getting better.”

A quick glance around Nyuru illuminates what he means. The village school may be six sagging grass-walled huts — but it is a new school. The village hospital is one large dusty tent — but it is also new, paid for by an Islamic charity.

Not far away are smashed houses and traces of ash on the ground, the footprints of the violence nine years ago, almost as if the land itself was quietly saying: people were killed here, many, many people.

But, at the same time, there is a new police station standing on a hill, with a fresh coat of high-gloss blue, and there are no reports of major violence.

Until just a few weeks ago, the Abubakirs, like hundreds of thousands of other Darfurians, had been living in Chad. They were essentially serfs, renting a tiny spit of land and barely surviving off it. They fled to Chad in 2003, when nomadic Arab militias sponsored by Sudan’s government — the infamous janjaweed — rampaged the Darfurian countryside, slaughtering tens of thousands of civilians who belonged to the same ethnic groups as the Darfurian rebels.