A writer shared her harrowing experience and the deep historical context underlying the conflict.
When I first invited Bayan Abubakr to write a guest essay on her experience evacuating from Sudan, the state of the country was very different. At the time, there was still some hope that the conflict would subside, that one of the many cease-fires would hold and that life would return to normal for tens of millions of Sudanese people. |
The essay not only draws together some of the many threads that explain what is happening in Sudan (after all, Abubakr is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Yale), but it also tells a deeply personal story. Inevitably, some of it was left on the chopping board. |
One such moment described Abubakr's experience returning to Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, after a cease-fire was issued on April 18. She fled to another part of the country days earlier but returned when she caught wind of the news. Upon returning, however, her hopes for peace were quickly dashed. She wrote this about her experience: |
Within minutes of my arrival, smoke and the whirring sound of gunshots enveloped me. Broken glass littered the streets, and electricity cables that once towered over us snaked around me on the sidewalk. Cut wires and fuses danced around shards of glass. |
The power of that moment really stuck with me, as did the hope it once contained. The theme of hope — in some ways destroyed and in some ways resuscitated — threads its way through the piece. |
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