By Gaure Mdee
Kenyan teacher Hamis Ngare’s second child was born just eight days after conflict broke out in Khartoum, Sudan’s beleaguered capital where fighting has been heaviest.
He kept his family indoors as blast and gunfire rung out throughout the day and night as they waited for word from the Kenyan embassy on possible evacuation. He had lived in Sudan for 10 years and witnessed previous unrest in the country, but the fighting this time was heavier, he said.
Food and water supplies were running low and they had no electricity supply in the house.
The clashes between Sudan’s regular army and the paramilitary group, Rapid Support Forces (RSF), was continuing unabated. The death toll is in the hundreds and the injured in thousands with the casualties still mounting.
Word eventually went out of a meeting point in Khartoum from where all Kenyan nationals would be evacuated.
“I joined my fellow countrymen at a designated spot in Khartoum, called Araak City, where Kenyans were to meet as directed by the embassy in Sudan”, Ngare told TRT Afrika.
Dangerous 21-hour drive to border
But the evacuation suffered unexplained delays and forced Ngare to take matters into his own hands. His plan was to gather his family and travel 548km by bus to the south-western border town of Gallabat and thereafter cross to Ethiopia.
Media reports had already highlighted random clashes between the army and RFS soldiers on routes to the border towns of Gallabat and Metema.
“We took a 16-hour bus ride from Khartoum to al-Qadarif, where we changed buses and traveled for another five hours to the Metema border,” he recalled.
They found the border crossing busy and the crowd swelled with every arriving bus. People slept in buses as they waited for clearance, he said.
“The trip to the border was quite dangerous for us. As we crossed the border, we could hear air strikes in a distance, “ added Ngare.
Yusuf Muleri Faraj, an accountant who had worked in Khartoum for eight years, said he become numbed by the regular fighting in Sudan.
“It had become such a normal thing,” he said, but the intensity grew to a new level on April 15. “The non-stop way in which the bullets kept flying was a little different.
“I am not scared. My wife was really scared and we have a nine-month old child,” Faraj explained.
He said he hoped to crossover to Ethiopia through Gondar town and then head to the airport in Ethiopia for a flight back home, although he was worried about his limited amount of money.
Tanzanian Humaida Mussa Yusuph is a student at the International University of Africa in Khartoum. She said the two-day journey by bus to Ethiopia was organized by the country’s embassy in Sudan.
Air strikes and explosions were always within earshot during the trip, she added.
“No Tanzanians were left behind, when we got to the border everything was handled by the embassy, we didn’t even wait that long to process passes and paperwork to cross the border.
From the Ethiopian town of Gondar, the Tanzanians boarded small planes to Bole International Airport in Addis Ababa.”
There is no short term solution in sight to the conflict. Temporary ceasefires have been repeatedly broken.
The warring forces have agreed to send envoys for talks scheduled in Juba, the capital of neighbouring South Sudan. But negotiations have not yet started.
With foreigners and Sudanese making tense journeys to flee the fighting in Sudan, the African Union has called on the international community to help them as efforts are being made to find a lasting solution to the violence.
