IT is very hard to ask, “How are you doing?” after three years. That is how long it has been since the war erupted in Sudan and changed our lives forever. Finding and creating the space to check on each other and ask how someone is doing in relation to everything the war has unravelled and uprooted is becoming increasingly difficult.
Everyone is surviving. Everyone is trying to overcome. Some are trying to forget. Some are trying to move on.
In different ways, we try to stay grounded in the present. To hold on to the goodness in the people and places that surround us. To safeguard the belief that tomorrow will deliver us from all evil. No matter the journeys we go through. No matter how long or how much it takes from us to finally arrive.
And so, I have been learning to catch kindness in the paths I cross and the people I meet, the same way a swimmer lifts her head for air, sustaining the body for what is to come.
What follows are fragments of this kindness, found along my journey from Sudan through Ethiopia, Tanzania, Uganda, and Rwanda. They show that while displacement is forced, sometimes it can bring positive things. I call this the paradox of unchosen beginnings.
Southeast of the border | Ethiopia
Eleven months into the war, in March 2024, my mother and I crossed the land border from Al Qadarif in eastern Sudan into Metemma, Ethiopia.
We crossed as part of a group guided by a travel agent. This felt incredulous to me: a travel agent helping a group of displaced people — a travel agency hints at luxury; a group of displaced people signals war and bereftness.
Nevertheless, the reality of the war was waiting on the other side of the border, in a tent where we were counted and given water and high-energy biscuits by humanitarian workers.
At that time, the Ethiopian region bordering Sudan, the Amhara region, was also facing the consequences of conflict. We spent the night in a hotel that was still being constructed, with no electricity, connectivity, or bathroom doors. But we made it to an airport the next day in the Amhara city of Gondar, and boarded a flight to the capital, Addis Ababa.
Addis demonstrated that, indeed, you can build lifelong friendships with people whom you have met only once or twice in person. Because the Ethiopian friend who met us at the airport, who helped carry our meager luggage, and who spent his evening helping us find a place to stay that first night, was someone with whom I spoke face to face only for a short period during a trip to Addis Ababa many years before, and proceeded to build a unique virtual friendship afterwards.
What mattered was that day when we touched down in Bole Airport; there he was, smiling and waving, reassuring us, without me ever having to ask.
He found us a bed-and-breakfast that was near his neighbourhood. To my surprise, when we reached the place and got out of the cab, we were warmly greeted by a middle-aged couple that I didn’t recognise. They turned out to be my friend’s parents. They had come to help us feel more at ease.
His father paid for our first night at the bed-and-breakfast. His mother, the following day, sent us a plate of rice: plain rice, to be specific. My friend explained that his Orthodox Christian mother wanted to make sure the food was halal (permissible) for my mother and me, who are Muslim.
Later, when I spoke to my friend about his parents’ kindness towards us, he told me that his parents said they understood, as Tigrayan Ethiopians, what it was like to flee and survive a war.
With hardship comes ease | Tanzania
After three days in Addis Ababa, we boarded a plane and flew to Kilimanjaro Airport, Tanzania, the intended destination for our journey out of Sudan. Tanzania held the promise of calmness, connectivity, and security – our priorities at the time.
My friend had travelled to the city of Arusha two months before our arrival. She was the friend with whom I roamed the streets of Khartoum for years, be it rain, sunshine, or tear gas, but we had been unable to meet since the war erupted on a forsaken Saturday.
After reuniting thousands of kilometres away from home, she would become my lifeline in Tanzania. I like to believe that to each other, we carried a bit of home in foreign lands.
She came to meet us at the airport on a crisp afternoon, and we drove the one-hour journey to Arusha, the town where we would spend the next seven months.
I cannot say that I am short on the blessing of friends, because in Arusha, I reconnected with a Tanzanian friend who did everything he could to make sure that in his hometown, we were alright.
He scouted with us for places to stay. He was there when language became a barrier and when bureaucracy became too complicated. He invited me to my first Tanzanian wedding: his.
Arusha had a small Sudanese community; small in numbers, but not in heart. Somehow, every person I met there carried with them the best parts of being Sudanese. From opening their homes to newcomers in town, to being each other’s social safety nets when times got tough, and everything in between.
In that rainy, quaint town in northern Tanzania, there came moments when I relearned the meaning of the Quranic verse “Indeed, with hardship comes ease” (Quran-94:5).
Detours and dead ends | Uganda
In November 2024, my mother and I boarded a third plane to Kampala, Uganda.
At first, Uganda held a different promise, one of a business opportunity. The promise did materialise, but only for a short window of three months. Afterwards, my job was terminated along with millions of others around the world, as the global development sector, where I worked, was hit by sudden changes.
Yet, those three months, in that office in Ntinda, a Kampala suburb, mattered.
The office where I worked had a mix of Sudanese and Ugandan staff. We all had to learn the art of holding space: of being human first and professional second. We needed to complete the arduous task of navigating tragedy in the workplace. Sometimes, it felt as if we worked while sharing a secret, the secret of war and displacement.
We all had to learn the art of holding space: of being human first and professional second.
The taste of Sudan was resoundingly present in our office. In the “breakfasts” we had the Sudanese way, at twelve noon, in the tips shared on navigating a new city, and in the tense atmosphere that followed every major battle development back home.
Uganda hosts a large number of Sudanese refugees. It is evident in the way the Ugandans acknowledge us, subtly, yet knowingly. I felt our presence when I saw Sudanese women wearing the Toub riding on a boda boda, when the streets filled with men wearing jalabiyas on Friday afternoons, and when I read the shops’ signs written in Arabic.
Gukomeza: To continue, to persist | Rwanda
I write this seated in a cafe in Kismenti, Remera, a bustling area in Kigali, Rwanda. It is late afternoon, and I am not far from a street dubbed “The Sudanese Street” by the Sudanese themselves, as many Sudanese-owned shops and restaurants opened there in the past few years.
We relocated to Rwanda in March 2025, after Uganda stopped presenting me with work prospects. We took a bus and crossed the land border one rainy evening after a 10-hour journey.
The thing is, the constant leaving and starting over never gets easy when you haven’t chosen it. You just get better at logistics.
Kigali is the kind of city that takes shape according to the beholder’s gaze. It can be malleable and inviting, and rigid and unravelling. In a way, it is a city of twos.
Efforts at modernisation extend to every corner of the city. Yet memory is living and palpable. It has an older generation that is cognisant of loss, and a younger generation that works for a future that transcends the country’s past.
On the bus to Kigali, I received an unexpected message from a Rwandan friend whom I haven’t heard from in years. The timing of the message felt telling; maybe I shouldn’t be fearful of the unwarranted changes. Maybe this city has something for me to find. I replied, saying that I was on a bus heading to Kigali. He came the next weekend with his family to see how we were settling in.
Our Rwandan landlords brought us fruit when we moved to their apartment building, and then helped me search for work opportunities in the city. They said they too understand what it means to survive violence.
The word gukomeza means to continue, to persist, to make strong in Kinyarwanda, the national language of Rwanda. I like to think that this word symbolises a path many of us, as Sudanese, are choosing to follow after three years of war: to continue moving ahead valiantly and to persist in our pursuit of peace and a better tomorrow.
#KeepEyesOnSudan
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The New Humanitarian puts quality, independent journalism at the service of the millions of people affected by humanitarian crises around the world. Find out more at www.thenewhumanitarian.org.
