Sudan Family Evacuation & Safety Fund

Hi there. My name's Raghad El Niwairi and above is a photo of me climbing a tree in my mother's former family home in Sudan. I am here because I'm learning this year to ask for help more and that contrary to what I thought, people often do want to help you and want to see you succeed. I'm surrendering to my belief that people, communities are exactly who and what we need during times like these and must be how we survive. Thank you for visiting this page and caring <3

I am fundraising on behalf of my large family scattered around Sudan and displaced around the world under varying degrees of emergency due to the crisis in Sudan. It has been over a year of myself and my family of 7 in Canada working and contributing half our paycheques trying to get our relatives to safety. If you know me personally, you have probably seen me try various methods of fundraising to support my family's safety and evacuation out of Sudan over the last year.

We've worked incredibly hard to try to handle this on our own and using the tools at our disposal but as the situation has not improved and our circumstances become more and more urgent we could really use some help.

This is especially the case when we have elderly and disabled family members risking their lives in the harsh conditions experienced while fleeing from village to village, house to house, from one dangerous possibly fatal situation to another. We are also extremely concerned for the children and adolescents in my family who are at risk of both brutality and being abducted as child soldiers.

Some of the core costs we need to cover are:

Photos of some of my cousins and grandparents we're trying to help that my brother Mohamed El Niwairi took on his last visit before the coup back in 2021:

This photo was taken as my family was forced to flee from village to village for safety.

If you want to know more about our situation from the words of my sister Hana El Niwairi:

"After the war broke out in April 2023, we had hoped that my family could weather the storm and stay in the family house and village. But by December 2023 it became very clear that it was no longer safe for them to stay in the country. At that point, we started actively trying to get them out but so many countries, including the neighbouring Egypt and Ethiopia, have either fully closed their doors to Sudanese refugees or have made it extremely cumbersome and prohibitively expensive; in some cases, it has become life-threatening to seek shelter in Sudan’s direct neighbours, as is the case in Ethiopia and Egypt right now. In March 2024, we were able to get my grandfather and one of my aunts out to Saudi Arabia, to stay with my uncle temporarily (the visa allowed them to stay for 3 months). They have now moved on to the UAE to stay with my other uncle on another short term visa, and the search for a more stable landing continues.

In addition to the family members mentioned above, all of whom are our mother’s immediate family, we also have my father’s immediate family (mother, 5 sisters and 4 brothers, all with their own families) who are still stuck in Sudan, in various internally displaced conditions. We are doing what we can to support them financially and facilitate any outside travel, but the situation has become so dire that folks need support even to access food day by day, which is becoming more and more expensive as famine has hit due to the RSF burning crops in Gezira state (the agricultural hub of the country).

All of this is to say: we need help. We have been doing what we can to carry on by ourselves. All six adult members of our family here in Canada are working and on top of weathering the rising costs of living here, we are all chipping in to help everyone in Sudan."

Thank you for visiting this page, sharing this link, donating or telling your friends and family. As the main organizer, I will be collecting the money here in Canada on behalf of my family. Whatever comes of this I'll never forget the people who have helped me and my loved ones when we were most in need, during this fundraiser and before so thank you once more.