“I know I’m not welcome here. I have no status for nine years, every two months I have to purchase a visa that doesn’t give me any rights. I have no health insurance, no work permit, I can’t open a business, can’t have a checkbook to rent an apartment legally, I can’t travel anywhere. And despite my degree, the only job I can get here is a cleaner, a construction worker or a cashier.

And as we have no status, people call us all kinds of names — criminals, infiltrators, rapists, thieves. In reality we’re none of those. Check the police reports — the crimes among the refugees are way less common than among the locals. We gather together to help each other. We raise money for education for our children and for medical treatment for those who need it. But no one sees this positive side, only the negative.  

Southern Tel Avivians organize demonstrations, they attack us physically, insult kids and women, once they beat up an Eritrean woman with a kid, a kid almost died. Instead of this they should work with us to make the government give us the status so that we could at least look for a chance outside this neighborhood. But now it’s the government that pushes us in the ghetto.

The Israeli government is playing a policy of no policy. They just don’t want to deal with the problem. Now they try to force us to leave making us pay 20% taxes from our meager salaries. They are making our lives here so miserable so that we decide to leave ourselves. But we can’t go back to Sudan because we’d get killed there. So Israel concluded a secret agreement with Uganda and Rwanda — they accept refugees from Israel and receive weapons from Israel as a bonus. As a refugee gets there, Israel takes away the visa and the person loses any legal status. So people have to run away from these countries to Kenya or South Sudan, to Egypt, some of them try to go to Europe and die in the sea on their way. So the circle continues. 

Most of my life in Sudan I felt fear of being shot or put in a prison at any moment. Only here in Israel I felt relief. More than that, I got my bachelor and master’s in political science here — something I could never dream of. So I’m very happy in Tel Aviv. And I feel very grateful to Israel. But my life here is a daily challenge. I’m not expecting any changes for the better, all the policy of the state is against us. I really hope to exercise my profession one day and to be a part of the changes. I believe in democratic Sudan. It may take long, but dictators never last forever.”