Facts about Sudan

• They have suffered the longest continual civil war in the world – conflict for nearly 21 consecutive years and for 37 of the past 48 years.
• An estimated 2 million people have suffered war related deaths during the past 21 years. Sudan’s death toll is larger than fatalities suffered in current and recent conflicts in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Somalia, and Algeria combined. Twice as many Sudanese have died in the past 21 years than all the war related deaths suffered by Americans in the more than 200 year history of the United States.
• The people of Sudan have fled their homes in larger numbers than any other country on earth—4 million are internally displaced within the country, and 800,000 are refugees in neighboring countries.
• The people of Sudan are struggling to escape one of the worst famines seen anywhere in the world in recent years—approximately 2,5 million people faced serious food shortages last year, thousands died.
• The 30 Million people of Sudan live in Africa’s largest geographical country. Their country is equal to the size of the United States east of the Mississippi River. The southern one-third of Sudan, where the warfare, famine, dying, and population displacement are worst, contains approximately 5 million impoverished people in an area roughly the size of Texas.
• Virtually all of southern Sudan’s 5 million people have fled home at least once during 21 years of war. Families have become scattered to the winds: brothers and sisters cut off from siblings; widowed or abandoned women forced to live alone.
• Many southern Sudanese people have lived an uprooted existence for 15 years or more. They have become vagabonds of their country’s war—forced to flee from one location to the next again and again and again. Many have been displaced a half-dozen times during the past decade.
• Daily life for uprooted Sudanese is harsh, with no margin of error. Stripped of their possessions, families struggle to feed and clothe themselves in strange new surroundings that feel remote and unwelcoming. Even as they go about the arduous daily chores of survival, individuals face loneliness, and gloom. Life they feel is passing them by.