The children and young people who receive help from SOS Children’s Villages in Khartoum were evacuated from their homes last week. They are now in temporary accommodation. Petra Nyberg, program manager at SOS Children’s Villages tells how the situation became increasingly urgent when the nearby military base began to enter the children’s village area.
– We managed to make contact with the armed forces and get them to pause for a while so we could get out with the children and families. They had to leave there in the children’s school buses.
To be evacuated further
There are 99 people, of whom 68 are children, 11 caregivers and eight local employees, who were allowed to leave the area. Many of the children SOS Children’s Villages helps have already been through trauma. Now another difficult time awaits. The hope is to be able to evacuate children and foster families to safer places in the countryside instead of living in Khartoum.
Even before the fighting broke out, 8.5 million children were in need of humanitarian aid, according to Unicef.
– Right now they are mostly on the floor in their homes to avoid being near windows. They can’t go to school, they don’t get food that you’re used to at set times. It is clear that it is very unsafe and frightening for the children, says Petra Nyberg.
