The Long Road Back Home

The boy’s name was Yasir, and he was nine years old when the war swallowed his village.

He remembered the morning clearly, not because it was different, but because it was painfully ordinary. The sun rose over the dry plains of western Sudan as it always did, painting the mud houses with soft gold. His mother was grinding sorghum outside their home, humming an old song in a low, tired voice. His father had already left with other men to look for work and food, walking toward a distant town that had not yet been burned or looted.

Yasir was chasing a thin tire with a stick when the sound came.

At first, it was distant—like thunder rolling across the earth. Then it grew louder. Gunfire. Shouting. The sky filled with smoke before the village even understood what was happening.

Men with weapons arrived in trucks, some wearing uniforms, others wrapped in scarves and carrying rifles older than Yasir himself. No one knew which group they belonged to anymore. In Sudan, lines between armies, militias, and gangs had long since blurred. All Yasir knew was fear.

His mother grabbed his arm so tightly it hurt. “Run,” she whispered. “Run and don’t stop.”

He turned to ask about his little sister, Salma, but the crowd pushed them apart. People ran in every direction. Shots cracked the air. Yasir fell once, scraping his knees on the hard earth, then got up and ran again. He screamed his mother’s name, but his voice was swallowed by chaos.

By nightfall, the village no longer existed.


---

Yasir hid behind a burned tree as the fires died down. The air smelled of ash, blood, and something sour he could not name. When silence finally arrived, it felt heavier than the noise.

He waited for his parents. He waited for Salma. He waited until the stars filled the sky.

No one came.

The next days blurred together. Hunger arrived quickly, sharp and merciless. Yasir drank muddy water from a dried riverbed and chewed on leaves he recognized from his mother’s warnings—only these, never the others. He walked with groups of displaced people when he could, then lost them when his legs failed him.

Everyone was searching for something: food, safety, missing children, lost parents. Some cried openly. Others stared ahead with empty eyes.

One old man shared a piece of flatbread with Yasir on the second day. “Where are you going, boy?” he asked.

Yasir thought of lying. Instead, he said the truth. “I’m looking for my family.”

The man nodded slowly. “Then you must keep walking.”


---

Weeks passed. Yasir learned the geography of survival. He learned which roads were controlled by armed groups and which paths only held thieves. He learned to hide when trucks approached and to sleep lightly, one eye open. He saw bodies by the roadside, covered in dust, forgotten by everyone except the flies.

At a refugee camp near the border, aid workers gave him water and a plastic bowl of lentils. They asked his name, his age, his tribe. They asked where his parents were.

“I lost them,” Yasir said.

A woman with tired eyes knelt in front of him. “We will try to help you,” she promised.

But the camp was overflowing. Thousands arrived every day, fleeing fighting between rival forces, militias, and foreign-backed groups. Food was never enough. Medicine ran out. Children disappeared as often as they arrived.

Yasir stayed three nights.

On the fourth morning, rumors spread that armed men were recruiting boys. Fear returned to his chest like a familiar enemy. Before sunrise, Yasir slipped away, carrying nothing but a piece of cloth and the memory of his mother’s voice.


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The land grew harsher as he moved east. Drought had turned fields into cracked earth. Dead animals lay where they had fallen, ribs showing through skin. Hunger became a constant ache, no longer sharp, just endless.

One afternoon, Yasir collapsed near a small town controlled by yet another group of fighters. He woke to the sound of chanting prayers.

An imam and his wife had found him.

They fed him watery soup and cleaned his wounds. For a few days, Yasir allowed himself to rest. The imam spoke quietly about peace, about patience, about a Sudan that once felt whole.

“Why don’t you stay?” the imam asked gently.

Yasir shook his head. “My mother is waiting.”

Even if he wasn’t sure she was alive, saying it kept her real.


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As months passed, Yasir grew thinner, taller, harder. Childhood slipped away somewhere between hunger and fear. He learned to work for food—carrying water, sweeping shops, unloading trucks. Sometimes he was paid. Sometimes he was beaten instead.

One evening, in a crowded market, he heard a woman calling a name.

“Salma!”

His heart stopped.

He ran toward the voice, pushing through people, shouting his sister’s name. But when he reached the woman, she was holding a different child. Yasir stood there, shaking, until the crowd swallowed him again.

That night, he cried for the first time in months.


---

The final lead came from a truck driver. Yasir had helped him load sacks of grain.

“Your village?” the man repeated. “Some survivors were taken south. Near the river.”

Hope, fragile and dangerous, returned.

The journey south was the hardest. Armed checkpoints. Stolen money. Days without food. Yasir walked barefoot until his feet bled. He talked to himself to stay awake. He imagined his mother’s hands, his sister’s laugh.

Near the river, he found another camp—larger, dirtier, louder. Thousands of faces. Thousands of stories like his.

He searched for days.

Then, on a quiet afternoon, he heard a familiar hum.

His mother’s song.

He froze. Turned slowly.

She stood near a tent, thinner, older, holding Salma’s hand.

Yasir ran.

They fell to the ground together, crying, laughing, holding each other as if the world might tear them apart again. His father was gone—killed on the road months before—but in that moment, grief waited.

They were alive.

Together.


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Yasir never forgot the road that shaped him. Even as the war continued, even as peace felt distant, he understood something most adults never learn:

Hope does not end where suffering begins.

It walks.

It bleeds.

And sometimes—against all odds—it finds its way home.

Stories like Yasir’s are not fiction for millions of children. Share this story, speak about Sudan, and support humanitarian efforts that protect children affected by war and famine. Silence allows suffering to continue—your voice can make a difference.