Children keep asking me when we can go home – I don’t have answers for them

Sudanese people have been suffering for two years following the outbreak of civil war.

Across the country, people have been exposed to extreme violence, poverty and insecurity. There are more than 12 million of us who are displaced, who have had to leave our homes and move to safety multiple times, never knowing when we will need to move again.

As a humanitarian worker who supports children that have lost their parents, or those who are at risk of seeing their families split up by circumstances outside of their control, I know that what I do is a lifeline to the children we support. We give them a sense of home, and a sense of security.

But this level of instability affects all of us. I too, am displaced from my home. None of us know if our homes or belongings will still be there when we go back.

What we are going through is the biggest displacement crisis in the world. Half of those who are displaced are children. Unsurprisingly, the conflict has exposed them to deep psychological scars. Many of the children I work with have developed PTSD, struggle to sleep because of the nightmares, and suffer from severe anxiety. Too many have lost their loved ones. It is painful to see a whole generation so afraid for their future.

Unfortunately, the children we care for at SOS Children’s Villages Sudan have been exposed to multiple instances of displacement, as our village was occupied by armed groups within the first few hours of the conflict.

As the conflict has spread, we have had to relocate multiple times, adding to the trauma and sense of instability that the children have had to experience. Children are afraid for their safety, and always wondering where they will have to move to next.

We are still in Sudan, but we’ve moved hundreds of miles from one part of the country to the other. It’s difficult to adapt to a new culture, a new environment. And across Sudan, the displacement hasn’t stopped. The conditions in the camps housing internally displaced people are very crowded and there aren’t sufficient services to support everyone. During the rainy reason, there is always an outbreak of disease.

Some children are too young to understand why they’ve left their homes behind, why they are no longer going to school and why their friends are no longer around. Children are always asking me if they can go back home. They tell me that they want to check on the friends they’ve left behind. They want to go home to make sure their toys are okay. They do not feel stable because they know where they are living is not their home.

It’s difficult to provide an answer to such questions as its still unknown. Instead, our team does its best to provide a variety of activities for the children to keep them distracted.

Schools have also been closed for many months. Before the war, many children had their education impacted by Covid. Now, we’re looking at a whole generation of children that has missed out on education. Despite many attempts, it’s next to impossible to resume education for them because more and more schools need to be used to house internally displaced people.

But being away from education hasn’t stopped our children from having a strong desire to learn. One of the children I work with is seven years old and he loves to learn languages. He uses his mother’s phone to learn three new words in English every day, practising how to write them. We are working to provide children with digital access to education, but as more and more people become displaced, the scale of the problem only grows.

My hope for Sudan is that we find a light at the end of this dark, dark tunnel. It motivates me personally to see how resilient children are. How they smile in the face of such challenges. In the future, I want to see them smile from a place of stability. We need the world to listen to us. The more the world forgets about us, the harder things get. Sadly, the voices of the children of Sudan have been forgotten about on the global stage. Far too many have been robbed of their childhood.

We have seen how powerful the international community can be with the way the world responded to the outbreak of war in Ukraine. Politicians, diplomats and leaders now have a role to play in making sure that Sudan is not left behind, before it’s too late for the next generation.