How a PhD candidate and her partner survived the raging fight in Sudan
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Khartoum/ Sudan: Eibhlin Priestley never thought her time in Sudan would include struggles to escape bullets and bomb explosions.
The PhD candidate who holds Biritish and Irish citizenship was barely two months into the nation when fight broke out one morning with gunshots outside her stay.
Eibhlin Priestley along with her German partner was not prepared for the chaos happening around them.
They stayed in their apartment for four days boarding up the windows with mattresses and furniture, reports The Guardian.
In the day time the temperature rose to 40 degrees and there was no electricity or running water and they were left with limited drinking water.
After bullets swished in through their kitchen window, the couple moved in with a family downstairs.
Eibhlin Priestley and her partner are among thousands who are caught in the conflict between Sudan’s military and the country’s main paramilitary force, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
Most of the 420 people died since the fight broke out in mid-April are civilians, according to The Guardian.
The 30-year-old and her partner spent several days with the family downstairs when they decided to leave.
But when the pickup truck they were expecting did not turn up, the couple moved in with their landlord’s family.
The situation was going out of hand after RSF soldiers began reportedly searching civilian homes.
When the family they stayed with offered to take them to a safer place in south Khartoum, they decided to go.
On the way one of the soldiers who flagged down their car said he didn’t like her partner, and made it clear that he was going to shoot him.
The father of the family the couple was travelling with talked the solider out of his deadly intent.
The father explained that the soldier may have taken her partner for somebody from Egypt.
After a trip fraught with anxiety, they reached a house in South Khartoum.
Soon the driver arranged by Priestley’s insurance company took the couple to the airfield.
The evacuation flight was organised by the German government but they were people onboard from different nations.
Meanwhile, the couple faced another glitch when the British Foreign Office doubted if she could be included among evacuations, because she travelled to Sudan on her Irish passport.
When Eibhlin Priestley’s partner thanked the family for protecting them, the head of the family said it was his duty.
That was perhaps the most heartening words she ever heard in her life.
