Afew hours after she and her son had been captured by the Sudanese Liberation Army in Darfur, Patricia Parker found herself at something of a loose end. Much of the shock of being fired upon, of seeing two truckloads of heavily armed soldiers roar up, take over their 4x4 and kidnap them, had worn off during the long drive to the rebel base.

To the pair’s relief, the rebels’ anger and nervousness was also dissipating; to their dismay, they were showing every sign of settling down for a long wait. Hopes of a quick release — that everything would be cleared up as a terrible misunderstanding — were fading. Furtive calls on the satellite phone to the United Nations in the hope that they might organise a rescue party had come to nothing; it was the weekend, and the staff who might have the right maps and knowhow to trace their signal were off-duty. The rebel base was in a village called Kulkul; you won’t find it on the Times atlas.

So after a couple of hours Parker, a keen and accomplished artist, sat down and got out her sketchbook. “Before long one of the soldiers came and sat near me,” she recalls. “When we were captured all the rebels were very nervous, but I remembered him as the one man who had stayed incredibly calm.”

Having drawn some of her surroundings, she risked a quick drawing of the soldier, mindful that he, as a Muslim, might object to having his image put on paper. There was no adverse response, so she tried her luck with a larger, more considered picture. “In the end I was very pleased with it,” she says. It turned out to be the best way to make human contact with their captors: “I didn’t know it at the time, but he was the second-in-command — he was called Adam Musa — and was the cousin of the rebel leader.” The sketch made an impression: before long other soldiers were trying to strike heroic poses within Parker’s line of vision.

Parker had made her first trip to Darfur four years earlier, in 2001, before the present conflict broke out. It was an unintended visit, and should have been a one-off. At the time she was a volunteer fundraiser for Save the Children. Her son, Alastair, was working in Khartoum, and she saw a chance to combine a trip to see him with a quick look at the charity’s work. “I arrived in Khartoum and his first words were: ‘I’ve organised a five-day trip to Darfur for you!’.”

They flew to El-Fasher, in northern Darfur. Parker arrived in the middle of a drought, which was exacerbating a level of poverty that was already shocking. Two thousand people had abandoned their villages to camp around the lake, which had itself dried up. “We went on a trip 90 miles north of El-Fasher with some representatives from Save the Children.

“Suddenly, in the middle of this country — it is very flat, with small hills in the distance and the occasional patch of scrub — we came across a nine-year-old boy carrying a jerry can. He had walked for seven hours to queue to fill his can with water, and was walking seven hours back. The Save the Children people we were with, who were Darfurians themselves, didn’t believe that he could have done it, but we asked him to describe his route and it turned out that he was telling the truth.”

They gave the boy a lift back to his home, near a village called Um Ga’al. “His mother lived away from the village, near a wadi [riverbed] so that her goats could eat the shrubs. The father wasn’t there; he was just another mouth to feed, so he had left.”

Parker was stunned when the mother brought them a bowl of goat’s milk. “She had four children, and she was giving us the evening meal. It was everything she and her family had.” And there might have ended another brief European encounter with African misery, if what Parker calls “the Surrey housewife in me” had not started thinking. She went back, first to Khartoum to raise awareness of the poverty of Darfur among the capital’s great and good and then to carry on the work in Britain.Within six months she had raised more than £50,000 and founded a charity to buy goats for families so that they had a supply of milk. “Kids for Kids — geddit?”

The charity broadened its work to supplying donkeys as working animals, providing water pumps (the first one went to Um Ga’al), training midwives and any other scheme that would leave the local population a little more self-sufficient and give them a chance of surviving conflict.

Getting out of the larger towns and into the far-flung villages is very much the goal of Kids for Kids, but Parker also backs the growing calls for the African Union peacekeepers — at present an ineffectual force of 7,000 soldiers for the entire region — to be given some teeth. “The AU is having to lease its planes, it doesn’t have its own — why not? It should be able to protect people, but it hasn’t even been able to stop the fighting. Then you need real negotiators to go in and do some proper negotiating.

“Three years ago the figure quoted by everybody for the number of dead was 200,000. It is still the figure that the media uses, and yet people are killed and women raped daily. But there is no oil in Darfur, nothing the international community wants, so there has been a diplomatic hush.”

It was in March 2005 that Parker, on one of her twice-yearly trips to Darfur, found herself an unwilling guest of the SLA. “By this time most of the area in which we were providing help was in rebel hands,” she says. “Only the towns and their satellite villages were under government control.” It was while trying to reach a settlement of about 1,000 families near El-Fasher that their vehicle, containing her, her son and two Sudanese colleagues, was intercepted by a pair of trucks “bristling with soldiers” who were brandishing Kalashnikovs and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.