They’re the most vulnerable of refugees. And they’re remarkably resilient

Editor’s note: This story contains descriptions of sexual assault.

When I meet him, 14-year old Mahamat Djouma is doing what many teenagers do in their spare time: dribbling a soccer ball with his foot.

But when he’s done, tired and hungry, he doesn’t have anyone to welcome him home with a warm plate of food. Instead, he has a world of responsibilities: He’s the sole caregiver for his 5-year-old twin brothers, Hassan and Hissein, who are waiting for him in their mud brick home in a refugee camp in eastern Chad.

Mahamat and his brothers are refugees from Sudan — among the 10 million who’ve been displaced by the violence of the civil war that broke out in April 2023. The U.N. calls it the world’s largest humanitarian crisis. Both aid experts and the refugees themselves bemoan a lack of support due to funding shortfalls and difficulty in reaching those in need of food, shelter, health care and other assistance. When I spent a week visiting camps in Chad in September, one refugee elder, Yahya Adam Nadhif, asked me: Do Americans know what is happening to us?

In this huge and unfolding crisis, there are certain groups who seem the most vulnerable and yet are overlooked by the systems meant to help them.

“Nobody’s looking out, really, for people who fall through the cracks of assistance because there are too many new people coming in,” says Sasha Chanoff, the executive director of RefugePoint, which has operations in Chad.

Unaccompanied minors like Mahamat and his brothers are one such population.

According to UNICEF, which tracks child refugees, there are 3,310 unaccompanied and separated refugee children in Chad. Either they came on their own or lost touch with their parents in Chad, which is the country with the largest number of Sudanese refugees. Over 600,000 have come since the civil war began; those who’ve fled previous conflicts bring the number to over 1 million.

Some of these youngsters are taken in by other refugees or friends of their family who’ve made the trek. Others like Mahamat fend largely for themselves, often while caring for younger siblings.

“The crisis is quite huge,” says Francesca Cazzato, UNICEF’s chief of child protection in Chad. “The thing is that in the situation of Sudan, many of the refugee children that we see are in very, very complicated situations and very vulnerable and at risk of being exploited.”

Another deeply vulnerable group are girls and women who were sexually assaulted in Sudan.

A U.N. fact-finding mission published a report in October that detailed large-scale sexual violence against women and girls by soldiers in the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces and, to a lesser extent, by government troops.

“The sheer scale of sexual violence we have documented in Sudan is staggering,” said Mohamed Chande Othman in a statement issued with the report. He’s the former chief justice of Tanzania and chaired the fact-finding mission. “The situation faced by vulnerable civilians, in particular women and girls of all ages, is deeply alarming and needs urgent address.”

The report did not cite numbers — indeed, aid groups say it would be difficult to document cases of sexual violence because of the stigma in speaking out. Families and communities often view these women and girls as degraded and shamed even though they were attacked and raped.

Those who’ve been sexually assaulted and the unaccompanied minors both are in need of mental health support, say representatives of aid groups working in the area. But mental health professionals in these camps are rare due to the lack of resources, these groups say.

Here are profiles of two of the many in these groups.

Mahamat Djouma: a 14-year-old caring for little brothers

Before the civil war, Mahamat led a quiet, normal life in his village of Garadaya in Darfur in Western Sudan. He’d go to school, come home to eat dinner and then head back out to play with his friends.

His mother fell ill a few months after the conflict erupted in April 2023. Mahamat doesn’t know exactly what was wrong but her chest was swollen, he remembers. Since both warring parties had attacked hospitals and other health-care facilities, she was not able to get treatment and died within a matter of days.

The war was closing in on Mahamat’s family. One day in June, his father left the house to buy food and other supplies from a bigger town and never returned. Mahamat says at that point the villagers had started hearing from nearby communities that the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) — a group that evolved from a largely Arab militia that committed atrocities in a genocide 20 years ago — was conducting an ethnic cleansing campaign of African tribes in areas they control in Darfur. Mahamat and his siblings were among the targeted people.

News came that the RSF attacked a neighboring village, rounding up older boys and men and killing them. Word was their next target would be Mahamat’s village, just an hour’s walk away.

“One of our neighbors and a friend of my father came and took me and my brothers and said we had to leave now or we would be killed,” the teen recalls. “The RSF were chasing us out of Sudan. So we ran and had to leave my grandmother [who was too frail to join them] behind.

“We still have no idea what happened to our father,” he adds.

Traveling with one of their adult neighbors, the boys walked more than 10 hours to get to Chad. Mahamat, who’s about 6 feet tall and very thin, says he carried one of his brothers on his back most of the way. They ended up at the camp near Guereda in eastern Chad. Mahamat’s older brother, who’d also fled, joined them for a while, then left.

Those first few weeks in Chad were difficult, Mahamat says — and not just because of the shortage of food and other forms of humanitarian aid. The adult neighbor who accompanied Mahamat and his brothers had left to search for his own relatives. So they were on their own.

Mahamat did find some distant relatives who had fled Sudan during the Darfur genocide 20 years ago and had lived at the refugee camp ever since. They became a comforting presence for him to talk to but had limited resources to help. Mahamat has had to find work to feed himself and his young brothers — and he’s also had to support them emotionally.

“My brothers still don’t know that my mother is dead, they don’t know what death is, they don’t understand it,” he says. “They used to ask about her a lot, and I would try to tell them stories about her, but it’s been over a year now and they ask less.”

I interviewed Mahamat outside the small mud brick hut where he and his brothers live; he says his distant relatives at the camp gave it to him. It’s a single room with a mat on the floor where the three of them sleep. There’s no roof — just a plastic tarp.

That’s a constant worry for Mahamat.

“Our house leaks water so when it rains I have to find a place for me and my brothers to sleep,” he says. His tone is serious and matter-of-fact. His head hangs low as he speaks; he looks at the inside of his elbow and picks at the ants around his feet.

Last year, Mahamat attended school. His distant relatives at the camp helped pay for his school fees. But going to school meant he couldn’t spend the day looking for work, which meant that he and his brothers were often hungry during the academic term.

“I have a hard time focusing in classes when I am hungry and I get headaches,” he says.

This year he dropped out because he couldn’t afford the fees — and he needs to find work to earn money to buy food. His dreams of going to university and becoming a teacher or a doctor are slipping away, he says.

“I’m not afraid of responsibilities but the thing that scares me the most is that I have a financial problem,” he says.

There aren’t many job opportunities for refugees — especially a 14-year-old. Occasionally Mahamat finds work making bricks out of clay. He and a friend together can make about 1,000 bricks over 4 days, earning the equivalent of about $6.50. They split the pay. Mahamat spends most of that money on flour and other grains to make a porridge he and his brothers eat twice a day for as long as it lasts. He says he tries to stretch supplies so they will last around 15 days.

I saw Mahamat and his brothers two days in a row. On both days he told me they’d each had a small bowl of porridge for breakfast but that there was no lunch or dinner. It had been a few weeks since he last made bricks, he says, and breakfast was all he could afford. He’d have to find work soon or borrow money, he adds, or else they’d go without eating.

Then there’s the matter of water. Fetching water is Mahamat’s least favorite chore. The nearest source — a stream in a valley — is a 30-minute walk away. Sometimes he can borrow a donkey from other refugees to make the trip but mostly has to carry the heavy jerrycan by himself. The water he gets from one trip lasts them only a day.

“[Mahamat] is carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders, very valiantly. But how long can you expect a 14-year-old to do that?” says Theresa S. Betancourt, director of the research program on children and adversity at Boston College. She says that in her studies of refugees she has seen children in situations like his who eventually get an opportunity to go back to school and are cared for by a foster family.

“This is the kind of person who would really flourish, I think, if given that opportunity,” Betancourt says. “What’s concerning is to hear how under-resourced this environment is. It’s really neglected, and there isn’t a targeted solution to triage kids facing adversity in that setting, which really paints a grim picture for the long term prospects for a young man like that.”

When Mahamat is not home to watch his brothers, they spend time in a section of the camp that aid groups like World Vision and UNICEF have turned into a play area for kids — there’s even playground equipment. Other times, the twins hang out with other children near their hut.

There are few things in his life that bring him joy, Mahamat says. He loves his brothers and teases them with a compassionate cheeky smile. He’s given them nicknames: “Doctor” for Hassan, because their mom said he took his time coming out of the womb during birth, and “Azak” for Hissein, which means intelligent in Arabic. “Because he’s smart,” Mahamat adds proudly.

And of course … there’s soccer. Mahamat lights up when he talks about Barcelona, his favorite team, and Lionel Messi and Lamine Yamal, his favorite players. If he had more money, he says he would first fix their leaking roof, then buy clothes for his brothers, soccer cleats for himself and a soccer jersey too.

“I’m ok with any team’s soccer jersey,” he says laughing. “Except for Real Madrid (Barcelona’s rival team), I wouldn’t wear that one.”

The laughter fades as he remembers playing in a soccer tournament at the refugee camp last year. He’d signed up to join this year as well but now he says he’ll have to drop out.

“I can’t afford to play anymore,” he says. “I have to find work.”

But over the four hours I spent with him, he did not complain. He just says: “I have no choice, I have no choice.”

“I know they are suffering here,” says Maqboula Ahmad Adam, a Sudanese refugee who volunteers with World Vision. She says she checks in on Mahamat and his brothers a few times a week. “But the only thing we can do is call them to the child-friendly spaces and provide counseling and advice on how to be safe from the rain and the collapsing huts.”

Part of the problem for unaccompanied minors in Chad — one of the poorest countries in the world — is the overall lack of resources and systems in the country, even for the local population.

“What we really need is to continue to invest, to have more funding, not just to focus on the emergency,” says UNICEF’s Francesca Cazzato. “But also really to work on what we call the humanitarian nexus, to enforce the local system, to integrate those kids within the local structure, like helping them to get food, helping them to have access to health providers, having a social services network strong enough to support and to follow up on those kids.”

“I don’t want to raise my brothers here in this environment, I just want to take them somewhere better and safer, somewhere they can go to school,” Mahamat says. “The problem is that if they grow up here they will be in the same situation as me, and I don’t want them to be like me.”

The only person Mahamat knows who managed to leave the camp is a friend who moved to the United States with his parents under a refugee resettlement program earlier this year.

“The U.S. does actually have a program specifically for unaccompanied minors, where children are identified, referred for resettlement and a receiving family in the U.S. essentially takes them in, and they’re fostered into that family,” says Sasha Chanoff with RefugePoint. “And it’s been largely successful. But that’s also pretty rare and challenging for people to access that.”

“I feel that I have been forgotten but I am not alone. There are other people like me and some are even in worse situations,” Mahamat says. “I still can’t stop hoping that maybe things will get better for us somehow.”

Entesar: ‘They raped me. There were 3 of them’

Entesar proudly lists all the fruits and vegetables she is growing in a small garden outside the small tent where she lives with her mother and an older sister in Adre, a town in Chad where over 215,000 Sudanese refugees are living in camps. The tent is made of twigs and a tarp.

“We have watermelon, pumpkin, cucumbers, tomatoes, beans, lemons, okra,” says the 21-year-old. “We had a garden in our house in Sudan too, and my mother taught me how to grow plants.”

That, she says, is the only similarity between her life in Sudan before the civil war and what it has become now.

Before the war, Entesar was studying computer science at a university in West Darfur and learning English, a language she loves.

She had first-aid training so she could volunteer with the Red Crescent.

And she was married — although she says she and her husband were still living with their respective families. They had decided to wait until she finished college before holding a wedding and moving in together.

She came with nothing — all her belongings had been destroyed in the conflict, she says. She really wishes she had her laptop and her favorite Charles Dickens books: Oliver Twist and A Tale of Two Cities.

When I meet with her the first time, Entesar says, “We can’t talk here, there is no privacy,” referring to the tent where she lives. So we drive to an empty field far from the refugee encampment and sit under a tree where she tells her story.

She asks to be identified by her middle name because most of her family members — including her husband — don’t know what happened to her as she fled.

On June 15, 2023, the day after the governor of West Darfur was killed by the RSF and just days before the group took full control of her hometown, Entesar left with her family and cousins. By then, chaos had spread across cities and roads in West Darfur. But RSF troops blocked their path and forced them to return.

“The RSF attacked us several times on the road and also when we got back home, they beat us and beat us and beat us, they took our stuff, they killed all the men and they kidnapped some of the girls. It was a terrible day,” she says.

She tearfully describes atrocity after atrocity — mass killings, the kidnapping and raping of young girls, pillaging of civilian homes — noting the names of the streets and neighborhoods where they happened, even the clothing of the soldiers who attacked them.

She remembers the slurs the soldiers spewed.

“They told us ‘get out you slaves, you have no place in Sudan. We killed your men and we will make you our slaves.'”

One of her cousins was pregnant and near her due date. She heard RSF soldiers tell her cousin that if she delivered a boy they would shoot him on the spot. A few days later, once Entesar and her cousins had recovered a bit from the beatings, they left their home city again. This time it was only women and children; most of the men in her family had been killed during their first attempt to leave, she says.

We’d been talking for 30 minutes by this time. For several long moments, Entesar is silent. Then, looking far away, her eyes dry, no tears, she whispers:

“They raped me. There were three of them, RSF soldiers.”

It happened on the road to Chad, she says. RSF soldiers grabbed three of her cousins — the youngest was 15 years old — and raped them. Entesar was carrying her baby niece on her back. She says the soldiers threw the child off and beat the two of them first, before taking turns raping her.

When she got to Chad 4 days later, an aid group on the scene screened her and gave her emergency contraception pills as well as medication to prevent HIV. Doctors Without Borders said they have screened more than 500 survivors of sexual violence in Sudan and in eastern Chad since January 2024.

Entesar says she still suffers chronic pain in her back, hips and thighs from the beatings she endured as well as infections after the attack.

She says she and the many survivors like her need medical and psychological support. But international aid groups say they don’t have the resources to respond to the overwhelming needs of Sudanese refugees across Chad.

What’s more, like most women in Sudan, Entesar had undergone female genital mutilation when she was younger — which can bring physical pain during sex and particularly during sexual assault.

Entesar has only shared her story with her mother and older sister. She has not told her husband, who also fled his home but went to a different part of Sudan.

On rare occasions when they can talk on the phone, it’s all she can think about. But she can’t bring herself to say it.

“I want to tell him, I just can’t find the words,” she says. “He trusted me a lot and he was so open with me and I worry this will hurt him and strain our relationship.”

There is another layer to her pain. Since she and her husband hadn’t lived together, Entesar was a virgin. She valued her virginity.

“The RSF did this to destroy the sanctity of our families, to destroy our dignity,” she says. “And I am utterly destroyed.”

“In certain armed conflicts, sexual violence is used to humiliate the ethnic, racial, religious group as a means of destroying them,” says Adeyinka Akinsulure-Smith, a professor of psychology at the City University of New York, who specializes in violence against women. “And also to serve as a warning, you know, this is what we do to your people. This is what we do to your women, who are often the most vulnerable.”

Akinsulure-Smith says women like Entesar need to be seen immediately for a full psychological and physical evaluation. But Entesar says she hasn’t had any counseling. Akinsulure-Smith says that it is hard to fathom the collective loss for a society when people like Entesar are left to fend for themselves.

“It’s so large that it almost leaves me speechless, and what we also need to remember is that it’s not just that woman, that community, but also we’re looking at something that then gets passed down generationally,” she says. “The trauma that comes out of them, physically, psychologically, becomes part of their social fabric, and it reverberates into the future.”

Entesar says she’s trying very hard to piece her life back together. She doesn’t blame herself for what happened but says she is often overwhelmed with sadness.

“I cry a lot and think that my life has no value anymore. Then at the end of the day, I turn to my God. This is my fate, I have to accept it,” Entesar says, her voice wobbling.

But there is a defiance, too, as she thinks of how this attack changed her.

“I now understand the true value of having a homeland, and the value of being a free person in that homeland, the importance of being a patriot and defending yourself and your homeland against an enemy,” she says.

The attack has also changed how Entesar views the men in her country. She used to trust and respect them as she would her father and her brothers, but not anymore, she says.

Still, she doesn’t want revenge. She wants her life and her country back. And she has a message for the Sudanese women and other women around the world who have survived rape and sexual assault:

“Don’t be sad, leave it to God. It wasn’t voluntary, it wasn’t your fault. Let’s try to forget the past, focus on the future and rebuild our lives. I tell myself this too.”