Claudia Godid sits on a bed frame and pushes the green headscarf over her face to protect herself from the omnipresent dust. She looks wearily at the two flagpoles that mark the border between South Sudan and Sudan a good 100 meters away.
She came to the Joda border point from the Sudanese city of Rabak and originally lived in Khartoum.
“It was bad, very, very bad,” says Godid about the start of the bloody conflict in Sudan a year ago. “It was no longer safe – the airstrikes, the shootings. Many women were raped.”
She wipes away a tear as she remembers the horrors and constant feeling of uncertainty. She felt safe in Rabak for a long time before shots were heard and armed men appeared on the outskirts of the city.
“The whole community decided to leave,” says Godid. “I couldn’t have stayed even if I wanted to. All shops closed. Everyone just wanted to leave.”
The dusty, sandy road that connects Khartoum to the Joda border crossing is busy as more and more refugees cross the border. Most are women with children, but young men are also fleeing the fighting in Sudan.
Those who can afford it rent donkey carts to make the journey with their luggage a little more comfortable.
For the people from the village of Joda, the new arrivals represent an additional source of income. Money changers wait for customers just across the border, in the shade of a thorn bush, with bundles of Sudanese and South Sudanese pounds spread out in front of them. “The conflict is good for our business,” says one, shrugging his shoulders.
When temperatures exceeded 40 degrees Celsius, the border guards retreated to a straw hut. There have been no controls here for months, although the Joda border post is used by almost all of the 600,000 people who have fled from Sudan to the neighboring country to the south.
“We have an open-door policy,” said Albino Atol Atak Mayom, the humanitarian minister in Juba, the capital. “These people are fleeing war. You have a right to protection.”
A year ago, the bloody power struggle between generals Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and Mohamed Hamdan Daglo began in Sudan. They once carried out a coup together, but now each wants to decide the future of the country alone.
Those who suffer are people like Godid and 1,500 other refugees who cross the border into South Sudan at Joda every day.
According to the United Nations, more than 9 million people have fled the conflict. It is the world’s largest refugee crisis, but one that rarely makes headlines and is overshadowed by conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine.
Renk, the small border town, was originally intended as a transit point, but has changed with the arrival of so many refugees.
There are two transit centers where new arrivals are expected to stay for a maximum of two weeks before moving on to either the Maban refugee camp or elsewhere in South Sudan.
But the sheer number of newcomers has thrown these plans into disarray. Around 15,000 refugees live in the camp, which is designed for 3,000 people. Since there is no longer enough space in the barracks, many have to sleep elsewhere. Some have built makeshift shelters out of sticks and blankets along the fences.
One of them is Aydel Naika, who came to safety with her nine children. As a native of South Sudan, things have come full circle for her. She fled to Sudan in 2013 to escape the civil war in her homeland, but fled south again due to the recent conflict. “When the bombs fell, we had no choice,” she says. “They affect everyone, whether civilians or militias.”
As an ethnic South Sudanese, she was exposed to attacks while fleeing. “They beat us, they took away all our valuables,” she says of the young men who hunted down refugees along the way.
Now she hopes to rebuild her life and that of her children with relatives in Malakal. “I hope we will be well received there,” she says.
In a barracks in the transit center, Fatma Mohammed cradles her youngest child in her arms. After the conflict broke out, she fled Khartoum to Wad Madani in the Sudanese state of Jazira.
But fighting broke out there in December after an attack by Daglo’s RSF militia.
The mother of four is Sudanese and her husband was a government employee. “I don’t know if he’s still alive, I fear the worst,” she says quietly.
An uncle who accompanied them rests on a straw mat in the barracks they share with five other families. Their future is even more uncertain than that of the ethnic South Sudanese, who are classified as returnees by the Juba government and resettled in their original home regions. For most people, however, these are strange places that are unknown to their children.
Fatma Mohammed doesn’t want to imagine a future in the refugee camp, perhaps for years to come. “Maybe I can make it abroad,” she says. “The most important thing for me is that my children can go back to school. They have already lost a whole year due to the conflict.”
She hopes to travel to Egypt, also because Arabic is spoken there and Sudan is not far away, whenever she can return.
Aid organizations are trying to give the young people structure after the chaos of their escape. Social workers look after children in safe rooms, sing or paint with the little ones to give them at least one or two carefree hours.
But many children are traumatized and need psychosocial support. The transit center was actually not designed for that, says Makuach Peter Deng from the human rights group Save the Children. “But we try to pass on information about children who need special support as quickly as possible.”
Human rights organizations accuse the parties to the conflict in Sudan of serious violations and violence against civilians: arbitrary shootings, rape and sexual violence, including against children. Serious allegations were made against the RSF militia in particular.
New trucks now arrive at the Renk transit camp from the border every afternoon, fully loaded with refugees and their belongings.
A slightly more comfortable bus ride to the transit camp is only possible for the elderly, the sick and women with babies. But even for them, the three-hour drive from Joda over the pothole-strewn, dusty road is anything but pleasant.
The situation is also extremely crowded on the barges that take those who can leave the White Nile camp to the city of Malakal.
More than 500 people crowd onto the boats and sit on bundles of their belongings. Few can afford drinking water, so most fill bottles and containers at the river before setting off. There are no toilets or washing facilities.
Even before the boats set off on the three-day journey, children lie apathetically in their mothers’ arms while others cry. No one has room to move or even stretch their legs.
Despite the increasingly precarious conditions, some prefer to stay near the border and wait for news of missing relatives in Sudan.
Among them are Katmalla Mahdi, 29, and her four friends. Everyone is desperate to find out where their husbands are, but the internet and mobile networks in Sudan are disrupted and the women fear they could now be widows.
They fled the fighting in Wad Madani to South Sudan in December. At that time they received food for the two weeks they were supposed to spend in the Renk transit camp, but since then they have been forced to improvise.
“We sold clothes to buy food,” says Katmallah. One of her friends is pounding sorghum after carefully measuring the grains from a cup. She has to make sure that there is enough for everyone, including the children outside, even if no one is fed.
“We support each other,” she says. They live in a shabby tent-like structure that is a safe haven where they comfort or encourage each other when they are sad or exhausted.
“Our friendship gives us the strength we need to get through all this,” says Katmallah with a weak smile. The five women can hardly imagine what the future holds and when the conflict at home will end.
“It’s hard to hope. We can only pray that things get better.”
