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Egypt Is Uneasy Stop For Sudanese Refugees
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Tonga fled Juba in southern Sudan in 1992 for Khartoum, the capital, after his brother was killed in the war. In 1999, he was arrested and accused of secretly working for southern rebels. He was jailed, caned, kept on low rations for a week, then released, he said.
Using fake documents, he fled to Cairo, where he won asylum status from UNHCR. But Tonga said he wanted to be resettled in the West. "I felt that Egypt was no good for us before the killings," he said.
Returning to Sudan is not an option, he said. "Who will protect me when I am there? I was tortured once and that was enough," he said.
Tonga lives with seven men in a room built into a ground-floor recess of a tenement in Arba wa Nus. Their toilet is a walled-up hole in the ground. Water drips from a pipe connected to another house; Tonga bathes by bending down and sticking his head under the faucet.
He spends his days in the dirt alleys of Arba wa Nus huddled in conversation with other refugees or seeking handouts from churches. Goats roam the neighborhood. Egyptian carpenters and stonecutters labor outside workshops.
On a recent morning, Tonga shared tea with a compatriot, Yusef Teet, who fled fighting in Sudan in 2001. As the two men drank, a group of Egyptian boys strolled by, laughed and murmured, "Donkey, donkey."
Teet shines shoes for a living, bringing in the equivalent of 30 cents on a prosperous workday. Most people in Arba wa Nus wear rubber sandals, not shoes.
In Sudan, Teet had wanted to be a physician, but completed only one year of high school. In a corner of his room rests a single book in English on anatomy. "I have ambitions!" he exclaimed.
He shares a room with two other Sudanese. They sleep cheek by jowl on thin cotton mats. Teet dreams of going to Libya, where he might be able to catch a boat to Italy. "But the smugglers want $1,000," he said, "and you can die in Libya and no one will know about it."
When police raided the protest encampment, Teet was captured and bused out of Cairo to a military camp. He said they took his sandals, so when they dropped him off back in town, he had to walk barefoot to Arba wa Nus, several miles away.
"They call us beasts and black dogs here. Maybe I will go back to Sudan," he said, adding that after the recent violence, "it is better maybe to die there than live with these miserable people."
