They lost everything to Sudan’s war. Then rebuilt from scratch.
- Six Sudanese women shared what it means to hold a family together when war has taken everything else.
Sh, 20, Khartoum
“He grabbed my hand and made me get into the rickshaw. He said, ‘Go home.’ I didn’t go home. I called the woman we knew and told her what happened. She came immediately.”
When Sh returned to her mother after being raped by an RSF soldier, she was met with blame and accused of choosing men over her family. Her younger siblings began calling her names. Her mother stopped trusting her. “The fact that my mother accepted me and let me stay in the house, that itself means the world to me.”
Today, she ties her eight-month-old son to her back and works in the fields. She is raising him alone. “I learned that I don’t need my family. I hope to stand on my own and raise my son by myself until he becomes a man.”
Layla, born 1988, Khartoum
“I had just felt I had established myself in my work,” she says. “Then displacement came and destroyed every detail of my life.”
She fled Khartoum with her sisters’ children and her aunt’s orphaned daughter, with no clear plan for what would come next. For four hours outside Al-Bageir, they drove along side roads to avoid the bodies of people who had been shot in their cars.
“I felt there was danger. Who exactly I was supposed to leave from, I couldn’t specify, but inside me something was saying: leave.”
She arrived in Gedaref at 4:30 in the morning.
Abeer, born 2000, Nyala, Darfur
Growing up Fur in Sudan meant hearing from childhood that your people were slaves, cowards, and fair targets. Abeer entered university in Khartoum determined to prove otherwise, and graduated top of her class.
When war came to Nyala, she buried her phone and her gold. She watched an Antonov plane burn overhead, loaded with barrel bombs. She crossed checkpoints, survived a robbery on a bus, and arrived in Gedaref without a plan.
“The war restructured the whole family. I became the head of the household.”
She started a soap business from scratch, trained dozens of displaced women, and pushed back against a brother-in-law who tried to stop her.
“I never felt regret at being a woman. Women turned out stronger than the men.”
Muruwwj, born 1994, Gedaref
Muruwwj learned grief before she learned war.
When her father died suddenly, the world stopped. “He was a brother, a friend, a beloved, and family.”
She enrolled her younger brother in school, became his guardian while still young herself, and kept producing her cosmetic formulations out of the family home.
When Khartoum fell, she packed every bottle. “I told my mother, this war is not an obstacle to stop me.”
She fled through two cities, lost her workspace twice, and started again in Gedaref with borrowed capital and a supplier who handed her raw materials on trust.
“Responsibility is a very nice thing. It makes a person depend on themselves and try to produce in any situation.”
Her business survived the war. She is still running it.
Saadiya, born 1970, Nuba Mountains
For decades, Saadiya led women’s associations, helped install water pipes in her neighbourhood, organised communal weddings and circumcisions, and served as women’s secretary for 13 years.
The war took the furniture, the savings, and the life she had built.
In Gedaref, she wakes before dawn to make kisra, a fermented flatbread, and sells it in the market while men ask her where her husband is.
“I sat here to earn a living, not to talk about improper subjects.”
An ambassador she once worked with called from Morocco and sent her money. “She said, ‘It’s better you sell kisra while sitting with your family than the things I hear are happening in Khartoum.”
Saadiya agrees. She keeps going.
“I learned it’s better for a person to think wisely, to do something that benefits them and their family. It doesn’t have to be a man.”
Faiza, Khartoum
Faiza was not born disabled. An injection she received in primary school damaged a nerve. It did not slow her down.
She studied political science, married, raised four stepchildren who had lost their mother, and later built a second career connecting people with disabilities to resources, mass weddings, and medical care.
The war found her living alone with her daughter Fajr, near the Armoured Corps. She fled to Gedaref with almost nothing.
There, she formed the Hope Association for Disabled Women, lobbied for a hospital cafeteria run by disabled women, and paid for her daughter’s school transport by making ice cream.
Fajr came first in her municipality exam. “I told her: if you focus on your studies, all my worries will go away.”
Faiza is not waiting for the war to end before continuing her life.
“I paved my own way. Just as I entered, I learned to get out on my own.”
This story was published in collaboration with Women for Women International.
Edited/Reviewed by: Sarah Etim, PK Cross, Uzoma Ihejirika, Awom Kenneth, and Caleb Okereke.
