Long Trek Home to a New Land

ABOARD THE AL AMIN EXPRESS, Sudan-Eritrea border--After living their entire lives in a refugee camp in the baking desert plains of eastern Sudan, the Abdel-Rahman children are going to a homeland they’ve never known.

A rickety red bus, emblazoned with the name Al Amin Express, is taking the family to a new life across the border in Eritrea, a small country on the Red Sea.

Like other Eritrean refugees who are making the journey with them, the Abdel-Rahmans have no idea what awaits them, except uncertainty.

But 13-year-old Neima, despite battling a bout of malaria and leaving all her friends behind, says she can’t wait to see her parents’ native land. Her brother Elkhair, 23, says he wants to help the family erect a new mud hut before pursuing his goal of becoming a doctor. His 7-year-old sister, Marwa, wearing her special pink lace dress, bounces on her father’s knee. This is the most exciting excursion of her life, she says.

In the second row of seats in the clattering bus, Abdel-Rahman Mohammed and his wife, Fatma, seem pensive. They are worried about Hanan, the 21-year-old daughter they left behind in Sudan.

But the 65-year-old Abdel-Rahman has made his decision to return to his country, and he’s sticking to it. The couple and eight of their children are making the trip with 611 other Eritreans in a convoy of 60 buses and trucks.

Some of the Abdel-Rahmans’ fellow travelers are Africa’s oldest refugees. They’ve been living in Sudan since the early 1960s, when Ethiopia’s then-emperor, Haile Selassie, annexed Eritrea, a former Italian colony, sparking a 30-year conflict.

Now the refugees are desperately trying to beat a deadline. Two months ago, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees declared that it was ending refugee status for Eritreans in Sudan and elsewhere Dec. 31. The agency said the Eritreans no longer needed protection because their country had ended its struggle with Ethiopia in 1991 and attained independence two years later. A later border war ended with a peace treaty in 2000.

So the Abdel-Rahmans have boarded the Al Amin Express, a 50-year-old British-made Bedford bus with no air conditioning. Part of the welding that holds the dashboard to the front of the vehicle has come loose, making the bus clatter and dance even at the slowest speed.

Someone appears to have tossed a rock at the windshield in the spot exactly in the driver’s line of vision. The driver, a south Sudanese from the Dinka tribe wearing a lily-white robe known as a galabia, sometimes has to dip his head from side to side to look around the cracks for oncoming traffic.

Fleeing to Sudan

Sudan has been home for Abdel-Rahman Mohammed since 1974, the year he and Fatma fled with their two babies from their small town near the Eritrean capital, Asmara. Abdel-Rahman had heard that Emperor Selassie’s troops were slaughtering Eritreans, particularly Muslims like him, so one night he and his family made the 15-hour journey to Sudan, where he joined hundreds of thousands of other Eritrean refugees crammed into U.N. refugee camps there.

The United Nations had opened a single camp in 1967, but it soon established about 20 more that stretch over an area of eastern Sudan larger than Orange County.

The camps are a sea of tukuls--tiny round mud huts covered with grass roofs--arranged in cookie-cutter uniformity. Tukuls are the only respite from the searing Sudanese sun that on many days sends temperatures soaring to a paralyzing 125 degrees.

Over the years, the refugees cut down virtually all the trees around the camps to support their tukuls and use as firewood. Stripped bare of vegetation, the camps are badlands, exposed to the winds called mahboob that periodically rip through, stirring up dust devils and blasting the huts with ashen sand.

The small clump of bottle-brush trees that Abdel-Rahman planted in his frontyard stand like lonesome sentinels.

Despite the desolate setting of the Shagarab camp where he lived for 28 years, Abdel-Rahman considered it his home. It was the place where he welcomed nine children into the world, where he celebrated four of their weddings and where he was introduced to his first grandchild. It was where he provided for his family by working as a sanitation worker in his neighborhood.

And by most accounts, the Sudanese were gracious hosts. They permitted the refugees to cultivate nearby land and, unlike other countries that restrict refugees’ movement, allowed them to live in urban areas and attend Sudanese universities.

Refugee camps like those that dot eastern Sudan have become permanent fixtures on Africa’s landscape. U.N. officials estimate that 13 million Africans are refugees or have been displaced within their own countries by long-running conflicts such as the ones in Eritrea, Angola, Congo and Sudan.

While Sudan was welcoming Eritrean refugees in the north, it was creating millions of other refugees by pursuing a brutal civil war against rebels seeking autonomy in the south. Four million Sudanese have been displaced by the 19-year conflict, and 2 million others have died, mainly from famine. Many Sudanese refugees are living in decrepit camps in Kenya, Tanzania and neighboring countries.

Other African nations also swap refugees. The flow of refugees has been so prevalent in Central Africa, for example, that only two countries--Zambia and Tanzania--of the nine bordering war-torn Congo produced no refugees in the last decade.

The Abdel-Rahmans and refugees across Africa have seen their subsistence standard of living worsen in the last few years as wealthy nations cut their funding to the U.N. refugee agency and other humanitarian groups.

During the last year, the Abdel-Rahmans’ rations of wheat flour, beans, salt, vegetable oil and powdered milk were slashed by almost half after budget cuts at the U.N. food agency.

Many Eritrean refugees claim that the United Nations has been deliberately cutting rations to force them to return home.

Abdel-Rahman’s decision to return had little to do with alleged pressure or appeals from U.N. refugee agency officials, he said.

For weeks, he ignored leaflets assuring him and his neighbors that returnees would not be harassed by Eritrean government authorities. Returning families, the leaflets promised, would be given blankets, food and farming tools to help with resettlement. The refugees would be allowed to build small huts on land allocated by the government.

Last month, Abdel-Rahman was chatting with his longtime friend Idris, who had been living in the camp since the 1960s.

“Idris,” Abdel-Rahman recalled saying, “wouldn’t it be a shame if we died in this camp without our children getting to know their aunts, uncles and cousins in Eritrea? Wouldn’t it be a shame if they didn’t get to see their own country? A people need to be in their country.”

Idris agreed.

The next day, Idris suffered a heart attack and died.

That was the day Abdel-Rahman decided to register with U.N. officials to return to Eritrea.

On Their Way Home

The day before the Al Amin Express rolls out, neighbors gather in the Abdel-Rahmans’ yard to help them dismantle their tukul. Cutting trees is forbidden in Eritrea, so the family plans to use the grass roof and pieces of twigs to fashion a new home.

The beds, clothes and the rest of the family’s belongings are loaded onto a truck hired by the refugee agency.

Abdel-Rahman, who hopes to become a roadside shopkeeper in Eritrea, loads up a newly bought blue metal cupboard that will help him fulfill his dream.

His daughters round up the nine hens, which have provided the family with fresh eggs, to put on a separate truck that will transport refugees’ sheep, cattle and donkeys to Eritrea.

“This is an uprooting in transition,” says Bellings Sikanda, a U.N. official observing the move. “These people have grown roots here. Now they have to pull them up and start new lives.”

The Shagarab camp is all that Neima has known. All her friends live in it. They aren’t making the trip with the Abdel-Rahmans because their parents say they still need to repay shopkeepers who gave them credit to buy food, clothes and other goods.

Neima has been outside Shagarab only a few times, but she says she wants to grow up to speak English and live in a city.

“I want to be like you,” she says boldly to Aisha Hummeida, a U.N. refugee agency employee who recently graduated from Oxford University.

The day before the family’s departure, the neighbors throw a small party for Neima and three of her sisters. The girls’ hands are adorned with henna, and Neima is presented with a pair of dangling gold earrings, which cost $25--more than many refugees earn in a month.

Neima’s anticipation is mixed with apprehension. “This is my home,” she says, flashing a coy teenage smile. “All my friends live here. I know nothing about Eritrea. I feel like I’m Sudanese.”

Abdel-Rahman is in no mood for regret. “I want my children in front of my eyes,” he says. “I love Sudan, but I have to go home.”

The family will leave behind 21-year-old Hanan. A few years ago, her husband was among several thousand Eritrean refugees in Sudan who were resettled in New Zealand. She’s waiting in the Shagarab camp until he can afford to send her a plane ticket. An older brother will remain with her, then after she leaves he’ll join the family in Eritrea. Abdel-Rahman’s oldest daughter, 29-year-old Sofia, is already living in Eritrea.

The next morning, the Abdel-Rahmans wake up early and prepare for their trip. The Al Amin Express is at their front door at 7 a.m., waiting for them to hop in. Neima and her 15-year-old sister, Muna, wipe away tears as they say goodbye to their girlfriends.

Throngs of women and children dressed in colorful clothes run behind the red bus as it takes off. Muna and Neima begin to sob. Marwa can’t seem to hide her smile.

The Al Amin Express stops at a so-called transit center in the middle of the camps to join the remainder of the convoy: 16 buses, 33 trucks of luggage, six trucks of livestock and five spare vehicles.

Nearly 300 families--621 people in all--are making the trip. The overwhelming majority of them were born in Sudan or spent most of their lives there. Of the 160,000 Eritrean refugees living in the Sudanese camps last year, about 50,000 have returned in the last few months, according to Sikanda.

Many refugees say they will not return until the young nation of Eritrea is more stable. Recent arrests of Eritrean journalists and activists add to their anxiety. The Eritrean government, which has been criticized by Western governments for being authoritarian, has assured the refugees that they’ll be safe, but many don’t believe that.

“I’ll go back when the government changes,” says 74-year-old Osman Abdullah, who has lived in a neighboring refugee camp since 1970. “There is no freedom there.”

But as the Al Amin Express rolls out of the transit center, the Abdel-Rahmans say they have no such concerns.

Hopes Are High

The Abdel-Rahmans have brought their most valuable belongings: a battery-operated clock and two portable radios wrapped in cloth to protect them from the sand that blows through the bus.

It’s about 95 miles from the Shagarab camp to Tessenei, where the Abdel-Rahmans will be resettled. The journey will take about eight hours.

Elkhair, at 23 the oldest Abdel-Rahman child making the trip, recalls how his father would tell him stories about his hometown near Asmara where tall trees swayed atop green hills. He is looking forward to seeing them.

Elkhair is unfazed by the prospect of doing two years’ mandatory military service in Eritrea. He has dreamed of becoming a doctor ever since he saw a German aid doctor repair his sister’s broken hand. After military service, he hopes to enroll in university, then medical school.

The Al Amin Express coughs its way through the sun-baked desert plain, past the goatskin tents of the Rashaidas, a Bedouin tribe that migrated from the Saudi Arabian peninsula 150 years ago. Rashaida men, some of them dressed in bright purple galabias, drive herds of goats and camels across a grass-less field.

Soon after, the bus veers off the paved road and begins to follow mud tracks through fields where sorghum is planted for some months of the year. This is the road to the Sudan-Eritrea border and Talatasher in Eritrea.

The Al Amin Express is filled with dust kicked up by the vehicles leading the convoy. Neima and her sisters cover their faces with scarves to keep from coughing.

Half an hour later, the convoy nears the frontier and Abdel-Rahman flashes a broad grin.

But Marwa is feeling no jubilance.

“Where’s the border?” she asks, searching for the imaginary line that separates Sudan from the land of her father’s birth.

The bus begins to bounce as if its wheels have turned into jackhammers.

“This is it! This is it!” an excited Abdel-Rahman says.

“This is it?” asks Marwa, her voice expressing incredulity. “This is a pile of rocks. Sudan is better.”

But Abdel-Rahman won’t let his joyous spirit be dampened. He stands in the moving bus, whirls around and announces to everyone, with tears streaming down his face: “Yesterday I was a refugee, but today I’m an Eritrean.”

After eight hours, the Express arrives in Tessenei. The Abdel-Rahmans disembark and prepare to spend the night on some grass mats in a transit center before leaving for their new home. The center is overflowing. Other refugees make their beds outside.

Some begin to wonder whether Eritrea is ready to welcome home tens of thousands of refugees. The country will receive nearly $20 million from the U.N. refugee agency during the next two years to dig wells, build schools and establish clinics for the returnees. But some people ask whether that is enough.

Guglielmo Verdirame, a refugee expert at Oxford University, said small countries such as Eritrea are hard-pressed to cope with massive numbers of returnees.

“This is no different than having hundreds of thousands of new immigrants showing up overnight in a country,” Verdirame said. “And re-integration is much more difficult than integration.”

Abdel-Rahman is upbeat when he arrives. He could have chosen to relocate his family to his village near Asmara, but his children don’t speak Tigrinya, the main language in Eritrea’s highland region. In Tessenei, the children can attend Arabic-language schools.

The next morning, the family wakes early. The Abdel-Rahman girls feed their chickens and return them to their small coop that is placed on a truck with the family’s belongings.

The truck takes the family to their new home in a resettlement camp known as “4x4.” It has probably been named 4x4 because one needs a four-wheel-drive vehicle to get there.

The truck driver and his assistants unload the family’s belongings at the edge of the camp, then drive away.

The 4x4 camp resembles the Abdel-Rahmans’ Shagarab neighborhood--except it is bleaker.

Abdel-Rahman suddenly realizes that his social network is gone. He and his family are now on their own in a new place. It seems even hotter and drier than in Shagarab.

The day before, Sikanda, the U.N. refugee agency official, warned the returnees that the first two days of resettlement were the most difficult.

After several hours, Abdel-Rahman can’t find any water, schools or mosques nearby. A new neighbor tells him that the nearest water supply is several miles away.

Abdel-Rahman fishes into the pocket of his white galabia in which he is carrying the equivalent of $40--his life’s savings. He hands the neighbor some Sudanese dinars and asks him to buy a few bottles of water for his children.

“I was living an easy life in Sudan. I was spoiled. I used to shower and clean up several times and whenever I want, and now there is no water available,” he says.

“We were told that water would be supplied to you as soon as you reach your place, and up to now we received none.

“I really regret coming home,” he says, his eyes downcast. “This area is so far and remote.”

He pauses, then reconsiders: “But in the end, home is home.”

Fatma and the children are quiet. They arrange their belongings.

They wonder aloud whether they’re going to sleep outdoors tonight. It’s impossible to build a tukul today, Elkhair says.

But then the Abdel-Rahmans begin to rally around one another. Fatma breaks some brown bread and prepares an evening meal, while Abdel-Rahman and Elkhair rearrange the beds.

Neima releases the chickens from the coop and introduces them to their new home. She pulls her black scarf over her head to shield her from the 120-degree heat. A strong wind begins to kick up a small dust storm.

She ponders her new life and, as if speaking to the wind, says: “I’m not afraid.”

Maharaj was recently on assignment in Sudan and Eritrea.