Last week, Emmanuel Nwachukwu showed how Christians are coping after the loss of their church communities in Omdurman. Today, he describes the war’s impact on Christian families split apart by violence.
In April 2023, Kilani Rahama heard gunshots crack through the air as he walked to church in Port Sudan, the country’s main seaport for international trade. Fighting between the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary group Rapid Support Forces (RSF) forced Rahama and his wife, Nawal, to hide indoors for three days with little food or water. When he ventured out to the market days later, Rahama saw looted shops and stores shuttered by sellers too afraid to open them.
Rahama worked as a detention officer—someone who manages and tracks shipping containers—and taught evening classes part-time to elementary and middle school students. After the war started, he lost his job as shipping companies closed. Bread prices skyrocketed. His 20-year-old daughter had already left to study in Nairobi, Kenya. Rahama wrestled with whether to leave Sudan with Nawal and his mother or send them away without him.
Fearing he wouldn’t be able to find work in another country, Rahama stayed behind while his wife, mother, and sister and her three children fled to South Sudan by bus, then flew to Juba, Uganda. From there, they settled in the Kiryandongo refugee camp in the outskirts of Biale, which houses nearly 600,000 Sudanese nationals.
“That summer, the war stopped our lives as a family,” Rahama told CT.
The Sudanese civil war has ripped apart many families. Some heads of household or medical workers chose to stay in Sudan while sending family members to safety. Three years later, they’re still separated.
“[Before the war], our situation was good. We were a very happy family,” Rahama said. Now, he doesn’t know when he’ll see them again.
Clashes between the SAF and RSF have forced more than 14 million people out of their homes, according to Oxfam. Almost a third of those—4.5 million—have fled to neighboring countries such as Chad, the Central African Republic, Egypt, Ethiopia, Libya, and South Sudan.
For family members who have fled, life in internally displaced person (IDP) camps can be dismal, without enough food, medicine, or jobs to help pay for basic needs. According to a Norwegian Refugee Council survey of displaced households, more than 80 percent of those living in Sudan and nearly all in South Sudan regularly skip meals. Most can’t find work.
Rahama sends what money he can to displaced loved ones. In late 2023, he found a full-time job teaching three subjects—English, mathematics, and Christian religious studies—to seventh graders at an Episcopal school, making 40 percent less than his pre-war salary. He said he sets aside more than half of it for his family in Uganda.
He can’t send more because the cost of his own survival has skyrocketed. Sudan’s economy has been decimated by the conflict, with inflation soaring to 45 percent in May. Housing prices have risen. Rahama said the price of bread in Sudan is now five times the pre-war cost.
Families have a hard time staying in touch, too. The International Committee of the Red Cross said thousands of Sudanese refugees have no phones or internet connections to speak with their relatives at home. The long days and months of separation leave emotional scars and stress even on those now reunited with their families.
In May 2023, Malak Louka, a Coptic Christian who works as a butcher, fled from Omdurman, Sudan, to Egypt on a bus with six other family members, including a sister who was nine months pregnant. Unable to find sufficient work in Egypt and desperate to provide, Louka returned to Sudan after less than a month. He barely recognized it. The fighting had destroyed buildings and left streets empty. He couldn’t get chicken and meat to sell in his shop due to low supply.
“Sudan didn’t feel like home,” he said. “It was so sad to see what war had done to us.”
Louka told CT he spent six months in Dongola, the capital of Northern State in Sudan, looking for work. But the relatively safe portion of Sudan didn’t provide the work he’d hoped. Louka said those months separated from family felt like losing everything.
“I no longer take things granted,” Louka said. “Nothing is guaranteed.”
For many, returning isn’t a viable option—about 90 percent had their homes destroyed by the conflict.
Some Sudanese refugees face illegal deportations from Egypt where they’ve sought refuge. In March, the United Nations expressed alarm over the Egyptian government’s surge of arrests and deportations. Though authorities in Sudan said many IDPs have voluntarily returned home—especially to Khartoum, the capital city—they’re coming back to neighborhoods with poor access to electricity, water, and health care.
For some families within Sudan, especially some Muslim communities, the separations aren’t physical. According to NPR, political alignments also split many Sudanese families. In one family in Khartoum, two brothers don’t speak to each other due to aligning with different sides.
Displacements and family separations have hurt churches, too. Rahama said the war has weakened the church in Sudan, which was already a minority. Many have scattered to escape violence. Rahama recalled that before the war, 40 to 50 church members used to meet at his Episcopal church each morning to pray. Now, no one comes. Sunday services that overflowed from the sanctuary before the war have dwindled to filling only a quarter of it.
Rahama still serves as a youth coordinator for the church, organizing outdoor events and Bible study groups for teens and young adults. The young church members he mentors ask him why the war is happening to them and why God allows it.
“They tell me: ‘I just want to work. I just want to improve myself.’” he said. “I don’t have any answers … but to encourage them.”
Rahama said he tells them to be hopeful. He reminds them how they survived the most intense parts of the war and how God protected them through it: “I want them to know that this situation is not permanent.”
Rahama said Sudan remains tense and unstable. In early May, an RSF drone strike killed five civilians in Khartoum, despite the SAF regaining control of the city over a year ago. Another strike the same week hit a hospital in the Jebel Awliya area, around 25 miles south of central Khartoum.
“Sometimes I feel like I have to leave this country,” Rahama said. “Then I remember I have a family to support.”
Rahama hopes to see his family again but doesn’t expect that to happen soon. His teacher’s salary doesn’t stretch far, so he can’t afford to travel 1,300 miles to visit them in Uganda. When the three-month school break for summer arrives, he won’t receive a paycheck unless he can find odd jobs.
Meanwhile, he worries about his family’s health and living conditions. In April, Rahama’s mother Madina, who is in her 80s, fell while walking to the toilet, injuring her head and chest. Some neighbors rushed her to the hospital in Bweyale. His wife and sister notified him over WhatsApp.
“It keeps you worried,” Rahama said. “It’s not easy. It’s not the life we expected.”
The ONE Campaign, a nonprofit group devoted to African development, paid for and organized CT’s trip to Sudan but did not have any control over CT’s coverage.
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