WADI HALFA: After sleeping for a week under the tree in the backyard of the mosque in Wadi Halfa in a Sudan town, Dalia Hassan is torn over whether she should cross the frontier into Egypt and wait until her 18-year-old son gets a visa.
Some paces away in the hot, dusty desert settlement, the family, including three pregnant sisters and their grandmother with an oxygen cylinder, takes back on rented beds as they await an Egyptian visa for Mohamed, Reuters said.
Amid the wave of displacement caused by the conflict in Sudan, several of the country’s well-off have fled Khartoum and embarked on an expensive and gruelling road to the border with Egypt, 720 kilometres to the north.
While children, women and older people can enter Egypt openly, though often after waiting days in testing conditions at the packed border, Sudanese men aged 16-50 must apply for visas to enter Egypt.
The rule has led to the bottleneck in Wadi Halfa, 25 kilometres south of the frontier and home to the Egyptian consulate, as businessmen, doctors and other well-to-do Sudanese pack schools, hotels and hospitals and spill onto the streets.
“We left our home where we lived a good life. Look at us now,” said Hassan, who travelled with her son from the upscale Kafouri neighbourhood, just over the Blue Nile from Khartoum.
“If he does not get the visa, we will go, but how can I leave an 18-year-old who has never travelled alone?”
Sudan’s consul in Aswan, Abdel Qadir Abdullah, said that 6,000 passports were awaiting visas in Wadi Halfa as Egypt’s foreign ministry sent reinforcements to speed up the process.
In immediate response to questions about the border crossings, the ministry said the previous week that officials had been working to help the evacuation of all citizens from Sudan since the start of the fighting and provide care for those crossing the frontier.
