Garfield High School graduate Jackilin Abiem remembers fleeing civil war in Sudan and walking three months across the country with her father to Ethiopia. Some refugees traveling the same path never made it, she told me. They were killed by lions along the way. Although her father managed to get her safely across the desert, he was killed in the fighting when he returned to Sudan on his own. She doesn't know what became of her mother in Sudan.

The same week that Abiem told me her experience as one of the rare lost girls among thousands of "Lost Boys" orphaned by that war, I was hearing another story of countless others suffering in the seemingly endless conflict in Darfur.

A dozen of the largest humanitarian organizations, including Mercy Corps, were expelled from Darfur eariler this month by Sudan President Omar Hassan al-Bashir. He accused them of cooperating with the International Criminal Court in the Hague, which issued a warrant for his arrest on war crimes charges. World Vision was among a few groups allowed to continue operating.

Save the Children President Charles MacCormack, who is also chairman of a coalition of 170 humanitarian aid groups, said the situation leaves about 3 million displaced people in a crisis. His agency had been working to supply a million people with food, shelter, protection and medicine in Darfur.

"What's going to happen to those people?" he said. "There's nobody there to run the thing. We've got 500 trucks and all the infrastructure, but that's unraveling as we speak."

I met MacCormack while he was in Seattle briefly last week. While he said nobody deserves indictment more than al-Bashir, he wondered whether the decision was ultimately the right one for people on the ground.

"I've been ambivalent about how smart it is to have done it under that set of circumstances... I've always felt don't start something unless you're prepared to see it through to the bitter end," MacCormack said. "This thing has no game plan, other than to issue the indictment."

There are stories of aid workers basically held hostage as the government demands millions of dollars in fines in exchange for the necessary exit permits.

Both sides appear to have reached a stalemate. Al-Bashir doesn't have any choice now, MacCormack said. "If he were to back down, he'd be overthrown." The Sudanese government has not responded to pressure from the UN, and it has written off the U.S. "as a Western cabal imposing anti-Muslim ways and out for regime change," he said.

Meanwhile, with private aid groups out and the rainy season on its way, Darfur is likely to see even more disease and starving children, as this story warns. Abiem, who left Sudan when she was 3 years old and lost everything, is one of the lucky ones.