Before the war, long before she ever imagined living anywhere else, UCLA Psychobiology student Afnan Gabir woke up each day to the sound of her name being called from downstairs. The voices of neighbors drifted through open windows, the market buzzed in the distance and the Nile hummed softly behind the city. In her world, mornings began with family. Her grandparents waited on the floor below, and the house around her was wrapped in gardens, flowers and memories that stretched back to her father’s childhood.
“Sudan is family. Sudan is comfort; its beauty comes from its people and the simple life,” Gabir said. “Sudan is my home. It always will be.”
Her childhood house felt like something out of a story. The streets outside were quiet and lined with trees. The rooms were filled with photographs from decades before, and the garden often held iftars to break the days’ fasts and gatherings with friends. Even with all that comfort, she knew the truth around her.
“I lived a very privileged life,” she said. “And I knew not everyone in Sudan lived like that.” Her parents made sure she understood the sharp divide between those who had everything and those who had almost nothing.
That understanding stayed with her when her family boarded a plane in April 2019 for what they thought would be a short vacation to the United States. Her father had already paid her school fees for the next year. Nothing felt final. But after the June 3rd Khartoum Massacre, with schools shut down and the streets filled with fear, her father made a decision she never expected–they would not go home.
“We didn’t even get the chance to say goodbye,” she said. “Not to my family, not to my friends, not even to my house.”
Years passed. Then, in 2023, the Sudanese Civil War began. Her first fear was for her relatives. Once she learned they had escaped, her thoughts returned to the house she grew up in. She already knew the Rapid Support Forces were breaking into homes, looting everything and killing anyone who resisted. She did not want to accept what that meant, but deep down she understood.
Months later, her father’s friends reached Sudan’s capital Khartoum and recorded what was left. Her house was raided and destroyed.
Instead of tears, she felt nothing. “Maybe it was numbness. Maybe I already knew,” she said. Then, she added in the same breath, “People have lost their families. People have lost their lives. This is just a house.”
Gabir doesn’t feel at ease when people call her strong or brave. She said she understands the intention, but she worries it overshadows the suffering in Sudan. “There are people who have lost everything,” she said. “That is where the attention should be.” She hopes people remember how different thoughts on daily life look like for Sudanese families compared to the day-to-day concerns most people typically think about. “Because in the end, this isn’t about me. This is not about what I’m going through, about just my feelings. This is about an entire population, dying, in silence. This is about the people in Sudan, and the people in Gaza, and all of the oppressed people around the world who are honestly tired of the world being silent.”
She also believes racism is the driving force behind ignorance for Sudan’s crisis. “If this were a European country, it would be on every headline,” she said. “Even in our Ummah [Muslim community], people don’t talk about Sudan. Even in khutbahs [sermons], you don’t hear it.” Her father once told her that the world has made it painfully clear that everything seems to be valued except a Sudanese person’s life. These words stayed with her.
The stories she later heard from her relatives only made her urgency for action stronger. When the fighting began, Sudan was cut off from the world. There was no Wi-Fi or mode for contact, and communication was cut off. Her cousins lived in the center of the violence, narrating to her how they slept on the lowest floor of their home each night with blankets on the ground because bullets were ripping through the windows upstairs.
It was Ramadan, the month of fasting, when they escaped. They waited for the Maghrib prayer, the only hour when the fighting briefly quieted as soldiers broke their fast. They packed one or two changes of clothes, prayed and fled. “They expected to die,” she said. At one point of the night, her cousin stood up to use the bathroom. Later, they found a bullet hole in the exact spot where she had been standing.
Even after escaping the city, the crisis did not end. With flights shut down and borders overwhelmed, people were trapped between Egypt and Chad with no food or aid. Many had no money, no relatives outside Sudan and no way out. Living with that reality, and watching her community scattered and struggling to survive, changed something in her.
The war shaped her future in a way she never expected. She had picked up a curiosity in medicine early in her education, but as a high school-junior watching Sudan collapse, that interest deepened into a calling to help her people. “Instead of letting guilt consume me,” she stated, “I have to take advantage of the opportunities I have here. I have to become the best version of myself to give back to my people. Because if I don’t, then who will?”
Now, when she speaks about Sudan, her voice becomes firm. “Awareness is not enough,” she said. “Don’t stop talking about Sudan. Don’t stop talking about the people who don’t have voices.” She urges people to learn what is happening, talk to others outside the Muslim community and refuse to let Sudan fade from conversation once the headlines move on.
Gabir’s final plea is steady and clear: “Please don’t forget to keep Sudan in your du’a [prayers]. People are dying in silence. Don’t stop speaking up for Sudan.”