3:44 PM
KHARTOUM — With an April 8 deadline looming for ethnic South Sudanese to leave Sudan or acquire documents allowing them to stay in the north, Bol Wunj's family decided on Thursday that it was time to go.
Without a reservation, they showed up at a rubbish-strewn patch of sand where 20 train carriages waited to take around 1,500 South Sudanese home to a country that some of them had not seen for decades.
"My wife is worried about April 8. She is listening to a lot of rumours," Wunj said, hoping his family could get some of the seats still available.
"My children want to leave," said Wunj, 58, who plans to join them once he receives his severance pay from the Khartoum government.
His towering size seemed appropriate for the job he held as a guard in Sudan's prison system until he and all ethnic southerners lost their jobs ahead of South Sudan's independence last July.
The split came after an overwhelming vote in the wake of a 2005 peace accord ending 22 years of civil war which killed two million people and drove many more to the north.
An estimated 500,000 South Sudanese remain in Sudan.
Khartoum has given them until next month to leave or regularise their status, but both options are unworkable, says the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), which organised Thursday's train.
"It is logistically impossible to move half a million people in less than two months," Mohammed Abdiker, an IOM official, said in a February statement.
During a visit to Khartoum on Thursday, Britain's Under-Secretary of State for International Development, Stephen O'Brien, encouraged Sudan to extend the April 8 deadline.
In order to apply for northern residence, people need documents from South Sudan. But even if they have their papers, the north has not put in place the system to legalise their status, the IOM said.
Those travelling by train with the IOM do not need documents.
The intergovernmental body, which is dependent on donor funding, has helped to move more than 23,000 southerners from Sudan to South Sudan, mostly by river barge.
Last month, though, Sudan's military stopped the use of barges from Kosti, about 350 kilometres (217 miles) south of Khartoum, because of suspicions they were also being used by the South to reinforce troops near the tense border, sources said.
With trains still able to move, more than 1,000 southerners registered to board the sky-blue and yellow carriages leaving Khartoum on Thursday.
Another 456 were to join a second train in Kosti, where southerners have been "sitting there basically in the railway station since August," said Julia Hartlieb, of the IOM.
The bloated Kosti way station on the White Nile River, designed for about 2,000 people, now holds more than 11,000, the IOM says.
Mahadia Ramadan, 29, who spent years in the north after fleeing the civil war, has not had a regular income since June when she lost her job as a government office cleaner.
She heard about the April deadline but says it means nothing to her. She just wants to go South, even though she has no job, house or land there.
Ramadan proudly showed off two crates of rabbits she plans to sell for food during the journey, which could take up to 14 days, to Wau in South Sudan's Western Bahr El Ghazal state.
"I'm happy to be going back to my homeland," she said. "The war is in the past now."
She and the other returnees will find a grossly underdeveloped young nation reeling from multiple crises, including ethnic violence and fighting along the disputed border with Sudan.
"I'm not afraid of anything. I'm not worried about anything," said Antoneta Jumaa, 38, who has not seen the south since she was a child.
"God will bless me," she said.
In her hand she held her pink IOM registration form and a white piece of paper confirming that she is healthy enough to make the journey on the wooden benches of the battered-looking train with no air conditioning.
A grey card showed her boarding pass number, 000456, and her destination. "Wau Station," it said.
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