Escape From Sudan

In Egypt, Africans fleeing a genocide find protection, and little else

A A A Comments By Kareem Fahim Tuesday, Sep 7 2004

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"They also thought I was converting Muslims," he said, insisting that he wasn't. "I didn't have time for that." Officials processed the film from the Kodak, and found nothing, but it didn't matter. Now they just wanted names.

Ismail was detained for a month, he said, and beaten many times. "They used to call it 'the airplane,' he recalled. "My hands and feet were tied with ropes, behind me. Then they hung me from the ceiling." At the end of the month, he wound up in a hospital. A guard was posted outside his door.

photo: Kareem Fahim

Anjima, a Sudanese refugee, lives in a one-room apartment in the Cairo neighborhood of Arba wa Nuss. She says local kids harass her four children.

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"I spent three or four days there, and I started to feel better. There was a lady, she was my nurse. She was very beautiful. She came and asked who I was. Was the man outside my door a relative? I wanted to be frank with her, but I feared everyone." The nurse brought him milk, and after Ismail had recovered some strength, she told the guard she needed to take her patient to the lab for tests. They spoke there for half an hour, and she agreed to help. She showed him a staircase that led to the doctors' cafeteria, where he could make his escape.

Late one night, when his guard went on a break, she turned out the lights on the staircase, and Ismail left. He went to Khartoum and stayed with a friend, who found him a passport. In April 2001, he hopped a steamer to the Egyptian city of Aswan. Since escaping, Ismail has worked in Alexandria as a shepherd and a farmer, and on the salt flats of a town called Damietta. The last two months have been hard, and work has been scarce, but he takes this in stride, accepting it as part of his lot.

"I'm not proud to be refugee. It's not a social status one should be proud of. We need to know what it means, and we need to endure it." Besides, he said, he feels safe in Cairo.

"It's as if I was in the hallway of death, and then I came out."

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