Cape Town - Wives, mothers, brothers, sisters and children arrived at Cape Town International Airport yesterday afternoon to eagerly welcome home another group of South African evacuees from wartorn Sudan.
The group faced many challenges, including being unable to disembark from their cargo ship, and even turned back to Sudan to save others.
The ship repair workers, 22 Capetonians and two Tanzanians, had chosen to evacuate Sudan with their employer, Africa Projects Consultants, a ship repair company.
However, they ran into difficulties and were stranded on a ship at Safaga Port in Egypt, unable to disembark for four days due to clearance issues with Egyptian authorities.
Gift of the Givers (GOTG) had received their distress call on Monday and founder Dr Imtiaz Sooliman immediately contacted the Department of International Relations and Co-operation to step in.
Within 48 hours, the group was permitted to disembark from the ship and make their way home to South Africa. GOTG said there was still one South African stuck in Sudan but the details were not immediately clear.
At the airport, the mother of one of the workers, Zubaida Karriem, had tears in her eyes as she watched the Ethiopian Airlines plane carrying her son land. Karriem said she could not stop crying after the sleepless nights they spent worried about if and when the group would return home.
On arrival, Ezzat Williams, director at Africa Projects Consultants, with his son, Muhammad Williams, were engulfed in a tearful family hug from his wife, mother, brother, sisters and daughter.
Williams was extremely grateful for all the efforts behind the scenes to get them back home and reminded them that although they were home safe and unharmed, Sudan was still racked with the deadly conflict.
“On Saturday, April 15, when the war started in Khartoum, we were in an area a bit further away but by the next day, on the Sunday morning, the fighting spilled over and we could hear fighter jets, bombs going off, and a lot of gunshots going off everywhere. That was when our company decided that the best thing would be to get everybody out, and chartered a ship to do this,” Williams said.
That was done within a 12-hour period, contracts were signed, and the next day the workers left Port Sudan on a ship on what was supposed to be a four-day trip, but became an eight-day trip.
While they were on their way, the company received a call that there were a lot more people who needed to be evacuated and they decided, from a humanitarian perspective, to turn the ship around and get as many people back home as possible.
“I’ve had to quarantine for eight days in a hotel, spend eight days at sea, four days at Port Safaga in Egypt waiting to be released from the ship, another six-hour bus trip, and now, two flights later, I am happy to back,” Williams said.
