Today Sahra is sheltering at the Wedwiel refugee settlement in South Sudan, but it’s not the first time she’s been displaced. Her adult life has been marked by moving to new areas in search of safety.
Her journey began all the way back in 2011, when she was teaching as an Arabic teacher in South Kordofan, Sudan. Violent clashes and bombing forced her and her husband to move to Khartoum, 12 hours away. They stayed there for five years, working and raising their son, before they separated and Sahra moved again, settling into life as a teacher with two children to raise.
When conflict emerged in 2023, Sahra didn’t think at first that it would last.
“I didn’t expect to be affected at all. At this time, I was in school teaching, and that is when we heard that there was conflict going on in some parts of Sudan. But because I was far from the places where the conflict was, I did not think that the conflict would ever get to us,” she shares. “I was continuing to teach at school, but after 3–4 weeks, the conflict started to come close to where we were.”
During this time Sahra was attacked by a man in her home. She decided to return to her family home, enduring random gunfire along the way. She stayed for a year, selling tea in the local market.
“There were some people asking me, ‘You are a teacher. Why are you working as a teamaker?’ They were seeing it as something shameful for a teacher to do. But the work was good, and I was able to make some money that would cater to my daily needs as well as to support my children,” she explains.
But this time when bombing and clashes neared the village, Sahra did not hesitate to leave.