On World Refugee Day, we share the stories of 2 Sudanese women forced to leave the lives they had built when war arrived.
Every morning, Ikhlas wakes at 3:30am. She makes dough to bake into kisra (a thin fermented bread, which is a staple in Sudanese homes), then sells it, piece by piece, to families living in the same rows of tents she now calls home.
Just 2 years ago, Ikhlas had a government job in public health in El Fasher, a city in western Sudan. She would go door to door in her area, speaking to families about health, sharing advice, and helping connect people with support where she could. Ikhlas’s husband worked at the Ministry of Justice, while her children were in school and university. Life was not extravagant, but it was stable, and it was theirs.
Sari, who lives a few rows away from Ikhlas in the same displacement camp in the coastal city of Port Sudan, tells a version of the same story. A few years ago, she was an employee in the Ministry of Finance and her husband ran a successful trading business. Together, they were raising 7 children. “Before the war, alhamdulillah, we had a good life,” she says. “We had what we needed and more.”
This is the part of Sudan’s crisis that gets lost in the headlines and statistics. The over 9 million people displaced since April 2023 were not, for the most part, struggling to survive before war came to them. Many were teachers, civil servants, traders, nurses, and accountants. People with careers and savings and school fees already paid. People who had built something for themselves and their families, but the war did not distinguish. It took everything from everyone.
Abandoned homes, arduous journeys
Ikhlas left El Fasher on foot with her 85-year-old mother and 2 daughters after losing 4 family members in the early weeks of fighting. Her sister was killed along with her brother-in-law and their 2 daughters. A neighbour, a young man of 35, was shot outside her brother’s house. Ikhlas and her family walked and rode through desert checkpoints for nearly 2 weeks before reaching Port Sudan. She left her home unlocked with everything in its place.
Ikhlas left gold in the house. She left savings in an account she can no longer access. She left a government salary that is technically still accumulating somewhere she cannot reach. She left her 3 sons behind with their father because transport for the whole family was too expensive. Her husband, who has a disability, eventually made the journey alone on a cart. It took 12 days travelling through open terrain, and their sons joined them later in the IDP camp.
Sari’s journey was similarly gruelling, with checkpoints on the road creating uncertainty at every stage. “There are things I still cannot fully speak about,” she says. She arrived in Port Sudan 8 months ago with her children. Her husband, no longer able to run his business, now makes incense and sells it in the market. Life isn’t what it used to be but at least there is some income.
When everything you built collapses
Displacement strips workers like Sari, Ikhlas and their husbands of more than income. It robs them of the entire infrastructure their life depended on. Qualifications cannot be used here. Networks no longer function. Routines that kept families moving forward must be scrapped and rebuilt from scratch.
Sari has 6 children who should be in school but their path back to education is full of obstacles. Ikhlas’s daughter sat her Sudanese national exams as a displaced person, revising in a tent. Another daughter is trying to continue her university degree from the camp. One of their brothers has quietly set aside his own education to help his mother sell kisra in the mornings.
“These are not permanent decisions,” Ikhlas says. “They are what we have to do right now.”
Water makes everything possible
Water is something many around the world take for granted – essential for life but so everyday we barely register it. But in displacement camps across Sudan, getting clean, affordable water is one of the most exhausting and constant pressures families face. It impacts every facet of life, from what you can cook and if your children can bathe to whether someone who is sick can be cared for properly.
Both Ikhlas and Sari know this all too well. Before Islamic Relief installed water trucking at their camp, Sari was spending the equivalent of roughly five to seven thousand Sudanese pounds ($1.47 USD to $2 USD) a day on water, sometimes more on laundry days. With no regular income and a family of 7 to provide for, it amounted to more than $60 USD per a month on water alone. Ikhlas, who was buying individual cans of water at around 5 cents each, was spending a similar amount daily for a household of 6 or 7.
“Every meal, every wash, every glass of water had a price on it,” Sari says. “It wore you down.”
Islamic Relief’s project changed that, reducing what Sari and Ikhlas were spending to almost nothing, and freeing up money that could go towards food, medicine, or the other small daily needs that pile up when you are rebuilding your life from nothing.
But the impact was not only financial. Both women describe something harder to put a number on: the relief of not having to calculate every drop. The mental load of water insecurity – always needing to know how much you have, working out how to get more – is something that does not show up in any report. It just lives with you, every hour of the day.
“Water is the foundation of life,” Sari says. “Once you have that, everything else becomes a little more possible.”
Home is still the plan
Neither Sari nor Ikhlas sees the camp when they look to the future. Both women think of home.
“I want El Fasher to be calm,” Ikhlas says. “I want to go back and finish the work I started. I want to see my children graduate.” “And [I want to perform] hajj. I have never been. I would like to go before it is too late.”
Sari sees the road back home more concretely: “Once there is peace and stability, everything follows. You go back to your job, your children go back to school. You resume. Maybe life comes back better than it was before.”
On World Refugee Day, Islamic Relief is calling on the international community to scale up support for Sudan’s displaced families and to remember that behind every number is a person who built a life and deserves the chance to do so again.
Please help Islamic Relief continue supporting people whose lives have been upended by the conflict in Sudan. Donate to our Sudan Emergency Appeal today.
