OMIMA

Omima Jabal komt uit het zuiden van Khartoem, de hoofdstad van Soedan. Al sinds haar jeugd zet ze zich in voor haar gemeenschap, beter onderwijs en de ondersteuning van jongeren, vrouwen en meisjes. Toen in 2023 de oorlog uitbrak, sloot ze zich aan bij een lokale vrijwilligersorganisatie voor noodhulp. Ze hielp voedsel en medische zorg te verdelen, veilige plekken voor vrouwen en kinderen te creëren en burgers in veiligheid te brengen. Na bedreigingen moest ze haar land verlaten. Vanuit ballingschap blijft ze zich inzetten voor de bescherming van humanitaire hulpverleners in de frontlinie. Vandaag wordt Omima ondersteund door Protect Humanitarians als lid van ons Survivor Network.

Omima grew up in a southern neighbourhood in Khartoum, an area burdened by poverty and no access to local resources. From around 2018, she and other youth established an emergency room flood relief, food distribution, and rehabilitating schools. Then came a community project built on one belief, that knowledge changes everything. They opened libraries, two of them for children, managed to put teenagers back into school, made sanitiser and ran awareness sessions through COVID, and built cohesion across a community of many different backgrounds. By 2022 the neighbourhood had changed for the better, crime had fallen, and an area people once feared to enter was open again.

When war broke out in 2023, that groundwork became a lifeline. Omima volunteered within her base Emergency Response Room (ERR). Established before the war broke, this was one of the grassroots frontline respondents that kept aid moving amongst the gunfire and bombing. They arranged safe passage between neighbourhoods, shared food through the communal soup kitchens and food baskets, first aid and funds, and ran an early-warning system to get ahead of danger. What began informally, grew into coordination across Khartoum's various localities. It worked because people like Omima had the trust, the access and a real-time knowledge of what communities needed, in places no international organisation could reach.

Doing that work made her and her fellow volunteers a target. Her own neighbourhood was held by one armed party, and that alone made her suspect: they accused the volunteers of working for the enemy. The other side distrusted her for operating inside enemy-held areas. Volunteers around her were arrested, kidnapped and killed. She herself began receiving anonymous threats, by phone and online.

Being a woman raised the danger higher still. In a war where both sides used rape as a weapon, the threats she and other women carried, of rape, of abduction, of forced and child marriage and sexual exploitation, went beyond what the men beside them faced.

The danger to herself, Omima could carry. But she knew colleagues whose relatives had been taken hostage, held to force the worker to give themselves up. The threat to the people she loves is what finally drove her out of Sudan.

After leaving Sudan, Omima was faced with a new set of challenges, both economically and emotionally. She found herself alone for the first time in her life, far from a family she had always lived close to, carrying the weight of supporting them. From outside, she was safer. But her family remained behind. That, she says, was the worst part.

And yet, from outside Sudan, she could do more. She could reach donors directly and advocate for the Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs) and frontline responders in a way that had been impossible before. She took on coordination roles at the national level, becoming the first female representative of a program office, a body that coordinates aid at a national level. Advocacy trips around the world brought the needs and the achievements of the ERRs to a global stage. She pushed in particular for the women's side of that work, running projects built around women's needs.

Omima speaks not only for herself but for a whole category of people the system does not see. International staff have recognition and protection. If something happens to them, someone is obliged to look for them. National staff have organisations, codes of conduct, guarantees. Frontline responders like Omima have none of it, because they are not registered and so are not officially counted as humanitarian workers at all. If one disappears, only their friends go looking.

Omima is all too aware of this. Asked who supported her through the hardest moments of her work, her answer is stark: no one. She met her own needs, managed her own health, held herself together, alone.

What she asks for is not charity but a place in the decisions. She calls for local, frontline responders to be recognised as humanitarian workers, to have less bureaucracy, and to be seen as partners, with an equitable partnership rather than aid handed down, and ownership, for Sudanese people to shape how aid works in Sudan.

Omima is insistent on one thing that too often goes unsaid. The work women do on the front line is taken for granted, at home and abroad, and it should not be. In her experience, where the work involves more women, it tends to hold, delivering what it set out to and lasting. Women sustain not only aid distribution but the resilience of whole families and communities, and she wants that contribution named and credited, starting, she says, with women recognising it in themselves.

When people see her portrait and read her story, Omima wants them to see resilience, hers and that of every woman in Sudan, and to feel compassion for what she and so many others have lived through. Above all she asks one thing of anyone her story reaches. She asks that you make sure to do something, to not be silent, share her story and listen to more stories from others just like her. She believes Sudan will come through this, even if she cannot say when.

How Protect Humanitarians supports Omima

Protect Humanitarians stands with Omima as part of our survivor network, alongside humanitarians and families affected by attacks, detention and persecution worldwide.

Photos: © Colin Delfosse/Protect Humanitarians