Nearly 600,000 Sudanese refugees have arrived at Kryandungo camp, some after long and arduous journeys through several countries.
Located about 275 kilometers from Kampala, Kriandongo is also home to refugees from South Sudan, Burundi, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda, as well as the surrounding host community.
What unites them is greater than their differences: the experience of loss and the need to start over.
UN News He traveled to the camp to see daily life up close and hear about the most pressing challenges residents face since fleeing the war.
From engineering rooms to refugee tents
Hussein Hashim Taiman, a civil engineer with a master’s degree, once worked in the civil engineering department of the UNAMID mission in Darfur.
Hussein Hashim Taiman is living a life he never imagined. A civil engineer with a master’s degree, he once worked for the African Union-United Nations Hybrid Operation in Darfur (UNAMID).
Today, he sits inside a tent and serves as head of the Sudanese refugee community in Kriandongo, one of the largest refugee camps in Uganda.
She fled Omdurman with her children in May 2023 and passed through South Sudan before reaching Uganda on a journey she describes as filled with fear, harassment and abuse.
“Here, when you complain, you discover that someone else’s misfortune is greater than yours, so you try to forget yours to help alleviate theirs,” he told us.
“We draw strength from each other. Sometimes we sit together like professionals and talk about our past. Now I live in a tent, but that’s what war does.”
The situation has not improved as many expected. Aid has dwindled and tents designed to last six months have become permanent shelters more than three years later.
Health care is inadequate, education inconsistent, and even food and water have become a shared responsibility among residents.
Hussein warns that the future of an entire generation is at stake and urged the United Nations and the international community to pay greater attention to Sudanese refugees in Uganda.
Nutrition: A matter of life and death
Mutasim Mohamed Ahmed, originally from the city of Nyala in South Darfur state, lived in Khartoum and worked in trade between Sudan, China and Dubai.
Faced with this harsh reality, simple initiatives emerged. Among them were community kitchens, which began as a response to an urgent need, before gradually becoming a lifeline that helped save Kriandongo refugees from hunger.
Out of this harsh reality emerged simple but powerful initiatives, including community kitchens, which began as a response to an urgent need and have become a lifeline for Kriandongo refugees.
Twenty of these kitchens currently operate within the camp, helping to reduce hunger and create social bonds among Sudanese residents.
Mutasim Mohamed Ahmed, from Nyala in South Darfur, once traded between Sudan, China and Dubai. The war disrupted that life and he arrived in Uganda in 2023. Today he works as secretary of the community kitchens in the countryside.
“These kitchens were set up after the World Food Program cut food rations,” he said. “We saw malnutrition among the residents. There were deaths and miscarriages due to hunger.”
The job has changed him. “Working in soup kitchens taught me how to be human,” he said. “Here you see hungry people, and if you don’t have humanity inside you, you can’t feel this. I feel for my Sudanese people, they are my own flesh and blood.”
‘We survive to help others’
Dr. Wadad Makki (second left) travels long distances to reach the Kryandungo camp, because she has chosen to support those living within it.
From Kampala, where she now lives, Dr. Widad Makki regularly makes the long journey to Kriandongo camp, not because she has to, but because she has decided to.
A former university professor and director of the Khartoum State Department of Special Education, she fled her home under shelling.
“It was difficult to move my children between the gunshots, the smoke, the burning cars and the bodies in the streets,” she told UN News. “I used to ask them to cover their faces so they wouldn’t see.”
Widad, who now resides in Kampala, remains closely involved with the camp and visits regularly through her work with the organization Al-Malam Darfur for Peace and Development. She and her colleagues support community kitchens and provide meals to refugees in Kriandongo.
“We survived and arrived safely in Uganda, and now we are helping our Sudanese brothers and sisters in the fields,” he said.
But his concern about the prolonged crisis runs deep. “Our biggest fear is that this war will last a long time. There are many challenges here: education, rent, living costs, lack of income, no jobs. We dream every day that the war will end so we can return to Sudan.”
Refugee doctors on duty
Dr. Abdul Jabbar Ahmed Adam, a specialist in internal medicine, now works at Gombe Hospital in Kampala, Uganda.
Away from the fields, the picture is different in Kampala, where some Sudanese professionals have managed to rebuild their careers.
In one of the city’s hospitals, Dr. Abdul Jabbar Ahmed Adam, in his white coat, treats patients of various nationalities.
The internal medicine specialist, who previously worked at Ibn Sina Gastroenterology Hospital in Khartoum, arrived in Uganda in 2023 and joined Gombe Hospital.
“Uganda welcomed us warmly. The work here is good and there is no discrimination,” he said. “We have not felt strange, we feel the same as in Sudan.”
I wasn’t alone. Several Sudanese medical professionals found the opportunity to continue practicing their profession in their host country. Some have opened their own clinics. “Uganda has good hospitals, but there is a shortage of staff,” Abdul Jabbar said. “That’s where Sudanese doctors have contributed. Patients of many different nationalities come to us.”
He’s also willing to question a common assumption. “Not everyone who comes here depends on aid,” he said. “There are professionals, tradesmen and people with skills in many fields.”
White Heart Hotel
Ibrahim Zakaria Yahya recounts the chapters of a long journey spanning years of displacement and attempts at resettlement.
Ibrahim Zakaria Yahya settled in Biale, near Kriandongo, long before the latest wave of displacement. He left South Sudan’s Darfur in late 2007, arrived in Uganda in 2008 and, after five years in Kampala, moved to Biale, where he says he was the first Sudanese to arrive with his family.
The first years were hard. “I suffered a lot when I first arrived,” he remembers. But little by little he found his place: trading, farming and then moving onto property until he built his own business.
Three years ago he opened a hotel he called The White Heart. “I chose that name as an invitation to purify hearts and consciences, to overcome the bitterness that the Sudanese people have experienced during the repeated wars,” he explained.
“Anyone who comes here must come with a pure heart. We fled war and we need to coexist here so that one day we can return home safely.”
Ibrahim is grateful to Uganda. “They welcomed me with open arms. I never felt like a refugee. I am only a refugee on paper, I have the same rights as citizens and I even own land that I couldn’t own in Sudan.”
However, he is homesick and hopes that peace will come soon, so that he and the thousands of people still in Kriandongo can return.
For those inside the camp, that hope is what remains. The future is uncertain, services are scarce and anxiety runs deep, especially among children and young people. But people endure.
Until the war ends, life here continues with its simplicity, its difficulties and its infinite stories.