Dear Reader,

I’ve recently noticed a pattern. The world today has become remarkably comfortable making Sudanese suffering relative: relative to geography, relative to other conflicts, relative to who is responsible for them. We are cast aside as an unfortunate situation, our struggles treated as both instinctual and inevitable on the global scale. But when the lives of millions are on the line, no amount of ignorance will alter our reality.

Sudan has an unfortunate relationship with democracy, having spent far more time fighting for it than actually living under it. In 2019, the country’s most recent president, Omar al-Bashir, was overthrown after nearly 30 years in power. Two years later, a military coup disrupted the country’s transition toward civilian rule. In 2023, the country was again thrown into civil war, this time between the formally recognized state military, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary force that had grown alongside the army under Bashir. Once allies, the SAF and RSF have since turned their weapons on each other, transforming their struggle for power into a war consuming the country. 

With Egypt backing the SAF and the UAE accused of supporting the RSF, both pursuing their own interests in Sudan’s rich natural resources and strategic location along the Red Sea, the conflict seems to have no end in sight. For each new country that joins, I question how many more people need to suffer, how many more need to die, before the international community decides that the price of human life is greater than that of gold or power.

Every day, I open my phone to military generals posting videos and photos of bodies piled along the streets of Darfur. Women hang from trees by their limbs, and men incite death in the name of God, screaming bismillah! I counter by spitting out the phrase astaghfirullah. After seeing enough of these videos, I have learned how to keep scrolling, even when I know that I shouldn’t. Not because I do not care, but because I know that tears will not change the reality of the situation before me. I want the world to understand that behind every body is a person, and that my people deserve the same urgency, grief, and attention afforded to suffering elsewhere.

It is this internal struggle that sent me 8,000 miles away from my home in the grassy fields of Illinois to the United Nations office in Nairobi, Kenya, this summer. I was determined to shift the discussion on my people from a game of numbers to a discussion of who those numbers truly represented.

Within the UN Refugee Agency, I forced my thoughts on this war into suggestions for action. I spent my days drafting proposals to the European Union and the African Development Bank, thinking about ways in which Sudanese youth, students, refugees, and women could have a voice in discussions about rebuilding Sudan for its remaining population while in the midst of war. On the weekends, I would meet displaced Sudanese artists and musicians across Nairobi, talking about the war in a way my parents had only ever discussed in hushed tones with each other. 

I learned about the 13 million people who the current war has displaced. Some have crossed borders, and others have fled from one Sudanese city to another in search of safety. Some are even going back.

Back to cities like Khartoum, where many of the systems that once made it possible to live have been damaged or destroyed. For many, returning is not entirely a choice. Some have been deported from the countries where they sought refuge, returning to find essential documents stolen or destroyed. Others return because they no longer feel welcome or because they cannot afford to build a life outside Sudan. They will soon find that there is nothing waiting for them at home, either. Even the government has recently called on university students to return to in-person study, ignoring the fact that their classrooms sit in piles of rubble mirroring the debris-filled streets of the city.

The more I worked, the harder it became to separate the broader category of humanitarian response from these questions of development, governance, infrastructure, economic recovery, and, ultimately, self-determination. Returning home requires more than conflict subsiding. It requires political and economic stability, available food, safe passage, and the assurance that the lives people rebuild will not be taken away from them once more.

As I sat at my desk in Nairobi writing about these problems, my family was living with them only a couple of hours away. The distance felt so strange. I was, for the first time in a long time, close enough to Sudan to hear its stories and feel its beats and see its faces every weekend, but still far enough to retreat into my “real” life when the workday ended. Whenever I became too overwhelmed, I could close my laptop and walk away from my desk, away from the meetings, emails, and bureaucratic processes that made responding to a crisis feel painfully slow. For my grandparents and my aunts and my uncles and my cousins, there is no such separation. 

As I write this piece, I keep returning to the question that has haunted me throughout this past summer: Why does Sudan have to become someone else’s problem before anyone is willing to care?

I do not think it is because what is happening in Sudan is too complicated. In fact, we as a collective have become very good at making suffering sound complicated enough that we no longer have to feel responsible for it. We call it an African problem. An internal conflict. A resource war. A refugee crisis. We explain the factions and the foreign interests, the gold and the geography, turning a country and its people into something easily overlooked by society. 

As people begin to return, they are finding that the end of fighting would not mean the end of the crisis. But, what is happening in my country is not a conflict waiting for the world to care. It is a cause for which my fellow Sudanese and I will continue to advocate and fight, so that one day we may speak of a free Sudan.