SUDANESE OPEN THEIR HOMES TO ETHIOPIAN REFUGEES DESPITE THREAT OF CORONAVIRUS
▶ Residents of the border town of Hamdiyet share meals with people fleeing the Tigray conflict
Despite the pandemic, Yasmine Amin hosts about 60 Ethiopian refugees in her home.
She already shares the house in Sudan’s border town of Hamdiyet with 14 family members.
“They had nowhere else to go, so we opened our homes to them,” said Ms Amin, 21.
Since November last year, Ethiopian federal government troops have been fighting the regional government of Tigray, in the east of the country.
Ethiopia wants to push out the Tigray People’s Liberation Front after it seized federal military bases in the region. The conflict has forced more than 60,000 Ethiopians to flee to neighbouring Sudan, says the Sudanese government.
Jannat, 43, comes from Tigray’s agricultural centre of Humera. She fled with her family after their house was destroyed. They hoped to find food and shelter, but only got blankets and a bottle of water upon arrival in Hamdiyet.
“Our numbers were greater than the supplies available in the camp,” she said.
“We ended up being hosted by a Sudanese family. This is our second month living with them.”
Zahraa Abu-Bakr, a 25-year-old Sudanese woman who lives with her husband and four children in Hamdiyet, decided to host Jannat and her eight family members after seeing the shortage of supplies.
“Although we are not leading an easy life and we suffer from soaring prices, we’ve decided we can’t leave the refugees to starve. So we opened our homes to them, sharing with them the little food we have,” Ms Abu-Bakr said.
Hamed Abu-Bakr, 28, who hosts three Ethiopian families in the house he shares with his brother and sister, is enjoying the experience. “It is very nice to have these families live with us,” he said. “We eat together and have afternoon tea together. Instead of being just three people in the house with almost the same daily routine, we are now 18 people living in the same house and it’s adding a different lively vibe to our life.
“When I come back from work in the afternoon, I find them all sitting around a tree in our house and some of our neighbours join too.”
Language is not an issue. His family knows a little of the Tigray language because there is regular movement between Hamdiyet and Humera. The refugees have also started to pick up some Arabic, he said.
Sudan has a long history of hosting refugees. During the Ethiopian civil war, from 1974 to 1991, Sudan hosted thousands of Ethiopian refugees in Umm Rakoba camp in the state of Al Qadarif.
Despite this, the country was not prepared for the latest arrivals.
The mayor of Hamdiyet, Taher Bartid, said authorities were surprised by the large numbers of refugees arriving.
“We had to act swiftly and open the town’s homes to them,” he said, because the refugee camp in Hamdiyet was not big enough to host so many.
The 300-person camp in Hamdiyet is part of the reception centre where refugees are hosted temporarily until their relocation to a proper camp.
Director of the refugee reception centre in Hamdiyet, Yaqoub Yaqoub, said this spontaneous act of hosting the refugees in people’s houses was helped by family links.
Some of the town’s residents are married to Ethiopian women, given the trade and people movement between the two sides.
But not all residents received the refugees with open arms. Hamdiyet resident Imad Omar said the influx has led to food shortages and other problems.
“I would go to buy bread in the morning to find there was none left due to the higher demand after the refugees’ arrival,” he said. “Also, some refugees entered Hamdiyet with their own crops and started selling them at lower prices.”
Hamdiyet residents, who are mostly farmers, were angered by the undercutting, Mr Omar said.
“In the beginning, we were annoyed but after that we started coping, for example, bakeries increased their bread production.” But these are not the only challenges.
Houses crammed with refugees pose a health risk to both the residents and refugees during the coronavirus pandemic.
Mr Yaqoub said Hamdiyet has about 6,000 residents and has hosted at least 16,000 refugees over the past two months.
“Every family in Hamdiyet hosts at least one Ethiopian refugee family,” the town’s mayor said.
But for refugees and their hosts, the risk of contracting Covid-19 is far from their minds, with more immediate problems looming.
“I am fleeing war. I don’t care about getting sick,” said 49-year-old Ethiopian farmer Zaraai Abrahi, who walked for three hours from Humera to safety in Hamdiyet with his wife and three children, the youngest nine months old.
Mr Abrahi left Humera two months ago after losing all his crops in the ongoing conflict.
Officials say there have been no Covid-19 cases in Hamdiyet so far. Abd-al-Hafiz Khalil, an official in the Sudanese commission of refugees in Qadaref, said all refugees had their temperatures taken on arrival in Hamdiyet. But the town does not have Covid-19 testing kits.
“If there are any suspected cases, they are transferred to other cities with bigger facilities,” he said.
“So far, no suspected cases appeared in Hamdiyet. We had 30 suspected cases in Umm Rakoba, of which only four were confirmed as Covid-19 cases and received treatment.”
Sudan has confirmed 26,279 Covid-19 cases since the outbreak began in the country in last March.
The figures available for Kassala state, where Hamdiyet is located, are from December 19 and stand at 301.
Mohammed Nasri, the director of the UN refugee agency’s bureau in Khashm Al Girba in Kassala, said the organisation was doing its best to provide aid in co-ordination with the Sudanese government.
“But the level of support available to us from donor countries is modest,” he said.
“We’ve been asking for more and we’ve been promised to be given more support.
“It is the government’s duty to transfer refugees from border areas to safe locations, while our duty is to provide aid to them. Between 500 and 600 refugees are transferred daily from Hamdiyet to Umm Rakoba, where every refugee family resides separately to avoid large gatherings.”
According to the Sudanese government, 45,235 refugees have entered Hamdiyet since the start of the conflict, out of which 26,632 remain. The rest have been transferred to other locations.
Hundreds of refugees continue to enter Hamdiyet on a daily basis.
Although we are not leading an easy life and we suffer from soaring prices, we can’t leave the refugees to starve
ZAHRAA ABU-BAKR
Resident of Hamdiyet