When I step into the children’s ward at Bashaer Hospital in Khartoum, a few cries pierce through, but most of the little bodies on the beds lie still. On one of the narrow beds, a young mother named Touma cradles her daughter. Three-year-old Masajed does not move. Her limbs are skeletal, her lips cracked. Touma looks up at me, her eyes wide and empty, as if she has cried everything dry. “I wish she would cry,” she says. “She hasn’t cried in days.”
The words lodge inside me. My own son is two-years-old. I spend so much of my life negotiating his noise, the constant chatter, the shouts, the tantrums. Yet here, in this ward, silence is a mother’s worst fear.
Bashaer Hospital is one of the last facilities in Sudan’s capital still functioning. Families walk for hours, sometimes days, to reach it. But the care that might save their children’s lives is often out of reach, lifesaving medication must be paid for, and most families have nothing left.
Touma fled her village 200 kilometres south-west of the capital when the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) arrived. They stripped her family of everything, “our money, our livestock, our home,” she tells me. She speaks in a dazed monotone, as if recounting someone else’s life. With nothing to feed her children, she brought her twin girls to the hospital. She could afford treatment for only one.
One daughter received antibiotics and survived. The other is dying in her arms.
I don’t know where to look. I don’t know what comfort to offer. Before I leave, Touma murmurs, “I am alone. I have nothing. I have only God.” I carry her voice with me long after walking out of the ward.
The doctor tells me she believes none of the children in that room will survive. A few weeks later, we found out that Touma’s other daughter fell ill again when she got back home and died days later. We don’t know what happened to Masajed.
It is not possible to hold the stories of people in Sudan at arm’s length (Photo: Global Eye)I have worked in conflict zones for over a decade, but some truths still land with the force of a blow. This one did.
Across Khartoum, it feels as though childhood has been erased. Streets once filled with noise and movement now lie in ruins, burned-out cars, homes reduced to ash, tanks rusting in the sun. In Burri, in the north of the city, I meet Zaher. He’s 12, small for his age, and in a wheelchair. Both his legs were amputated after a drone strike.
We follow him through the wreckage. His wheels crunch over broken glass and shrapnel. As he moves, he sings softly: “I’m coming home… I can no longer see my home… Where’s my home?”
Zaher does not like to talk about what happened. His mother, Habibah, fills the silence. They had been selling lentils to survive when the drone hit. “There was blood everywhere,” she tells me. Her voice shakes as she relives it. “I prayed, God, take my life instead of his legs.”
Doctors saved his life but not his legs. “He asked me why I let them cut them,” she says quietly. “I had no answer.”
“I just want to play with my friends,” Zaher says. It’s such a simple request, a childhood right and yet utterly out of reach.
Sudan is one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. Everywhere are reminders of all that has been lost (Photo: Abdelrahman Abutaleb/Global Eye)I think of my children playing football in our garden, safe and carefree. The contrast is a reminder of how unfair life can be.
Still, Zaher plays. On a scarred football pitch nearby, he drops from his wheelchair and drags himself across the dirt on his knees. His friends shout encouragement. When he scores, a smile breaks across his face.
“Real Madrid,” he announces proudly when I ask about his team. His favourite player: Vinícius.
Journalism teaches you to create distance, to hold the story at arm’s length. Sudan does not allow that. Not when a boy sits in front of you wanting nothing more than prosthetic legs so he can play football again. Within days of our piece broadcasting on the BBC World Service, we received an outpouring of support from our audiences. They set up a GoFundMe account and collectively raised enough money to cover all of Zaher’s treatment abroad. A reminder of why the work we do is so important.
Joy survives here, even if only in flashes (Photo: Scarlett Barter/Global Eye)Later, by the Nile, I watch another group of boys fling themselves into the water, shrieking with laughter. I find myself holding my breath, trying to absorb the sound, a reminder that joy survives here, even if only in flashes.
In central Khartoum, we stop at a ruined funfair to film the rusted rides. A 16-year-old boy named Ahmed appears and tells me he used to play here with his brothers. Now he works clearing debris for $50 (£38) a month. He bends down and picks up a human jawbone. “I’ve found the remains of 15 bodies,” he says. “It makes me shake.”
He wears a faded grey T-shirt with a giant smiley face printed across the chest. Smile, it says.
Ahmed tells me he no longer imagines a future. “Since the war began, I’ve been certain I was destined to die,” he says.
Not far from the funfair, in an abandoned house, volunteers have created a makeshift school. Inside, children shout out answers, scribble on a whiteboard, sing songs. The sound is like a lifeline…sharp, unexpected, vivid.
When I ask what childhood should mean, they answer without hesitation: “Playing. Studying. Reading.”
Then Zaher raises his hand. “We shouldn’t be afraid of the bombs and bullets,” he says. “We should be brave.”
Their teacher, Miss Amal, 45 years in the profession, tells me she has never seen children so traumatised. They mimic the language and behaviour of militias. Many come to school hungry.
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Sudan is now one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. Three million children under five are acutely malnourished. Everywhere I go, I see reminders of all that has been lost: homes, families, futures.
And yet, amid the devastation, there is so much resilience. A boy dragging himself across a pitch to score a goal. Another threw himself into the Nile with a shout of pure joy. A teacher refusing to give up on a generation.
These images stay with me.
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