Every time she talks about Darfur, Debbie Bodkin cries. Every single time, and she's spoken to hundreds of groups about what she witnessed the two times she travelled to Africa to document the genocide there.

She feels embarrassed each time her voice breaks, but she's more frightened of what would happen if she stopped crying. Maybe then she would return to her old life as a 47-year-old woman from Guelph, Ont. who didn't have post-traumatic stress disorder. She could be like the rest of us, who turn away from the news of African atrocities with a shake of our heads and sleep soundly at night.

But she can't. Or maybe she won't.

"It's part of me now," she says, during yet another night of writing to politicians and scheduling speeches. The constant pull to do something about Darfur dominates her free time and interferes with her personal life occasionally, but, she says, "I think I'd be missing something if it was gone."

Debbie Bodkin grew up in the small, safe world of Florence, Ont., about an hour southwest of London. Her father owned the farm equipment dealership in town, her cousins ran the hardware store and pizza shop, one aunt ran the car insurance office and another had a hair salon. Global issues didn't enter the dinner-table discussion unless they affected the price of corn.

She was working at the Waterloo Regional Police Service, where she's now a sergeant, when the call went out in 2000 for officers to join a NATO team investigating mass killings in Kosovo.

Recently divorced and childless, Ms. Bodkin jumped at the chance to travel, motivated more by the desire to see the world than to change it. The furthest she'd been from home was Disney World in Florida.

It was a trip to hell, or at least some Hieronymus Bosch vision of it: She assisted coroners as they exhumed mass graves and sorted through bones to identify the remains of murder victims and determine how they died.

Strangely, the gruesome and exhausting work filled her with hope. Sure, she helped people as a police officer in Canada, but the Kosovo victims had suffered so much more than anyone she'd ever met. She finally felt she was making a difference in the world.

Also, she fell in love. His name was Miguel, a younger man from Argentina. Miguel was just one of the fast friends she made in Kosovo: Everyone she met seemed to have a fascinating story and a brightly burning sense of purpose.

As soon as Ms. Bodkin returned to Ontario, she started searching for another overseas mission. When the U.S. State Department put out a call for volunteers in 2004 to interview refugees from Darfur, she signed up immediately, not realizing that this trip would redefine her life for years to come.

She first arrived in Africa in July, withering in the 40-degree weather. She was tired, hungry, hot and, "like a typical Canadian," she says, she started complaining. Then she interviewed her first victim.

His two-year-old son, his wife and his parents had all been slaughtered before his eyes just hours before.

"Life is nothing," he told her, between sobs, "when you have no one."

Ms. Bodkin remembers thinking, "I will never complain again."

In her two trips to the region -- she used six vacation weeks in 2005 to interview more Darfur refugees for the United Nations -- Ms. Bodkin heard story after story of families killed, villages destroyed, and rapes at the hands of the government-funded militia.

She remembers two girls, aged 7 and 10, who were gang-raped by janjaweed, the soldiers funded and supplied by the Sudan government. The older girl was so badly injured she could not walk; her father carried her to the interview. In a culture where girls are usually considered "spoiled" by rape, the father's devotion stood out for Ms. Bodkin. So did the glazed look in the little girls' eyes.

"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."