Forgotten people stranded for years by South Sudan’s war
RENK COUNTY, South Sudan — “They told us we’d only be here for six days, and that was six years ago,” Ramadan Wani says.
Anxiously rubbing his hands together, the 46-year-old sits hunched on a makeshift stool in his tattered house in Payuer, a displaced persons’ camp in South Sudan’s border town of Renk. He hasn’t seen his family in all that time. He is one of several hundred who have become stranded because of their attachment to their belongings. They are waiting to be transported, with their baggage, a resettlement option that dried up long ago.
When South Sudan gained independence from Sudan in 2011, Wani was one of 68,000 people who returned from Sudan in hopes of starting a new life in the world’s youngest nation. Aided by the United Nations and South Sudan’s government, he was relocated to Renk, where he was told he’d be transported to his hometown of Yambio along the border with Congo — on the other side of the country.
“I was so happy that we were separate countries,” says Wani, who had been living in Sudan for more than three decades. “I wanted to go home.”