Daniel Majak

Sudan: The pains of saying 'adieu'

Daniel Majak is a character to remember.

When we drove into the Gabarouna slum for displaced southerners outside Khartoum, Majak was the first person to emerge from the ruins of a mudhouse.

Frail and shabby and dejected … and seemingly out of a chronic famine – and yet Daniel is noble in spirit, hospitable by nature, easy going in character and ready to go out of his way to smile to us and to help us - a foreign crew who suddenly invaded his little world of ruins outside the town.

We walked around under the scorching July sun as he showed us a mound of mud and the remnants of a bathroom.

“This was my house” he said, “they destroyed it because it had no legal papers”.

During the early years of the civil war hundreds of thousands of southerners fled the south and chaotically lived around Khartoum.

Many like Daniel came here as children and grew up in utter destitution. Most of them did not go to a school.