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Gamat (not her real name) has a long story of pain. The 32-year-old woman escaped with her five children from violence in Sudan in April 2023.

Sadly, Gamat’s parents did not survive the war. “I was born in an Internally Displaced People (IDP) camp. My father was a community leader of the Masalit tribe in El-Geneina [in West Darfur],”she told this publication at the weekend.

On April 25, 2023, Gamat’s life changed forever when the fighting between rival armed factions broke out in Sudan. On this occasion, several women and girls were sexually abused, and Gamat’s father, mother, all her three brothers and grandmother were brutally killed.

“We fled to the border with Chad, but we found that it was already close and entry to that country was restricted. Since I was working as a nutritionist, I sold my gold and I hired a car to cross to South Sudan,” she narrates, adding that, “When I reached the border, I sold the clothes to feed my children and to raise money for transport to Juba.”

On July 7, 2023, she boarded a bus which was transporting refugees to northern Uganda’s Nyumanzi Transit Centre in Adjumani District.

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