NAIROBI By Ozaz Hamid life was about to take a wonderful turn in the spring of 2023. A Sudanese university student had secured a half-year internship in New York.
War-torn Sudan is one of the poorest countries in the world. And New York, on the other hand, is one of the finest showcases of liberal and prosperous life.
Hamid, 30, was due to receive a visa for the trip at the end of April.
– But on Saturday, April 15, I woke up to terrible sounds. Boom, boom!
A war started in Sudan, a new war. The Sudanese armed forces and the paramilitary RSF – or rather their leaders – began to fight for power. They are former allies.
The war just started in the capital Khartoum, Hamid’s hometown. Army and RSF were fighting from the presidential palace, army headquarters and state television. Shots were fired in the streets and over the city flew fighter jets.
Hamid’s dream of New York was left behind by the war. Instead of seeing Manhattan, he had to leave his home without knowing where he would end up.
In this story, Hamid and another Sudanese tell where the war threw them.
The world’s attention has largely been on other wars, Ukraine and Gaza, but the war in Sudan is also a huge drama of suffering.
More than ten million people are forced to flee their homes in Sudan over the past year and a half. More than eight million of them are internally displaced in Sudan.
At least 20,000 a person has been killed. There may also be many more dead. US Ambassador to Sudan Tom Perriello by there may be as many as 150,000 dead.
According to the UN, more than half of Sudan’s population – nearly 26 million people – is at risk of acute hunger. Famine is already raging in one refugee camp.
Director of the UN refugee agency UNHCRN Filippo Grandi warned in September at the UN General Assembly that the conditions in Sudan are appalling.
– If people don’t die from bullets, they starve. If they survive, they face disease, flooding, sexual violence, or other horrific abuse—the kind that would make daily headlines if it happened anywhere else.
One hundred dollars to hide
Hamid is a single parent of a little girl. At the time, the four-year-old daughter fell ill just a week after the war started. There was little money for food. Hamid would have been paid, but the banks didn’t work.
Hamid began to consider fleeing Khartoum with his daughter.
– Decision-making was really difficult. My father had died recently, and I had practically become the head of the family, says Hamid.
The then 29-year-old woman is the oldest of nine siblings.
Hamid talks about the difficulty of his decision in the video below. He was the only one in his family who had a passport.
About two weeks after the start of the war, Hamid finally left with his daughter for the bus station in Khartoum, not knowing where the road would lead.
There was a hundred dollars in the travel fund, in one big bill. Hamid hid the note in his daughter’s hair. He counted on it that the four-year-old’s hair would hardly be passed through at the checkpoints.
One memory from the bus trip has not left me alone: many, many bodies on the ground. And the smell of clams. Even my little daughter saw and smelled.
The animated map below shows Hamid’s escape from Khartoum to Nairobi.
Around the same time as Hamid, she also ran away from home Giballa Ahmed. He lived with his wife, mother and three children in Darfur, in the western part of Sudan.
Darfur has a bloody recent history. A conflict started there in 2003, in which the UN estimated that up to 300,000 people died in 2008. Ahmed worked as a field office manager and program analyst at the UN in West Darfur.
At first, the family sought refuge with relatives living elsewhere in their hometown, Geneina. It became unsafe there as well. The food was running out.
The only safe place then was Chad, Ahmed says of the neighboring country.
The fact that, for example, the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs says something about Chad’s security advises to avoid all travel to Chad.
Almost 650,000 people have fled from Sudan to Chad.
The map below shows where the Sudanese who left their homes are now.
At the time, Ahmed’s family was only 28 kilometers from the border with Chad, but the journey was life-threatening. However, Ahmed managed to buy a car ride with his colleagues to the border in Land Cruisers. The owners of the cars went armed for safety.
Ahmed talks about his mood at the border in the video below.
From the border, the family’s journey continued to the refugee camp, and from there to a nearby town. Finally, they traveled 12 hours by bus to the capital of Chad.
Few Sudanese have fled to Kenya compared to neighboring countries. Between January and September of this year, almost 1,200 people from Sudan had come to Kenya.
Hamid and Ahmed now live with their families in Nairobi, Kenya. Their lives are derailed, yet their situation is not bad compared to many other Sudanese.
Ahmed was especially drawn to Nairobi because his seriously ill mother would receive better treatment there than in Chad.
In Nairobi, Ahmed was initially able to continue his work at the UN, and he sometimes went on business trips to more peaceful areas in Sudan. In May, however, the work stopped, and now the family is in financial trouble.
The family is registered as refugees. Ahmed talks about this in the video below.
Now the family perseveres in Nairobi. Giballa is thinking about looking for work, and he has also applied for work in his war-torn homeland. The family would stay in Nairobi, where the children can go to school and where it is safe. Or they could try to get somewhere completely different, even to Canada, Ahmed thinks.
Mother runs a Sudanese cafe
Hamid – who was horrified by leaving his loved ones in Khartoum – was unable to contact them at all for a month. Now, however, almost the whole family is together again, in Nairobi.
Hamid was able to continue his old job in Nairobi. He managed to send money to his family in Khartoum, and with the money, Hamid’s mother and seven brothers and sisters traveled to Nairobi. Part of the family had to stay in Sudan.
At first, the mother did not want to leave her home, but she was frightened when she heard about the rapes of older women. Now he runs a Sudanese cafe in a Nairobi suburb. The coffee is cardamom, the walls pink.
The cafe was Hamid’s idea. His mother does not speak English or Swahili. This would miss Sudanese company and miss home.
Hamid talks about the opening of the cafe in the video below.
Hamid continues to study alongside his work. He should receive his master’s papers next spring.
In Sudan, hostilities are accelerating. A fifth of the population has fled their homes, and according to the UN, in the worst areas, people are eating leaves from trees. From Hamid’s hometown Khartoum is being fought for still. At the end of September, the Sudanese army struck there with force against the RSF forces.
– I can’t imagine what my future will be like. I can’t say whether I will continue living here or return to Sudan, where everything has collapsed, says Hamid.