Ramadan Wani, who hasn't seen his family in the six years he has been stranded at a displaced persons' camp, stands outside his makeshift house in Payuer, South Sudan. (AP Photo)
Renk, South Sudan: "They told us we'd only be here for six days, and that was six years ago," Ramadan Wani says.
Anxiously rubbing his hands together, the 46-year-old sits hunched on a makeshift stool in his tattered house in Payuer, a displaced persons' camp in South Sudan's border town of Renk. He hasn't seen his family in all that time. He is one of several hundred who have become stranded because of their attachment to their belongings. They are waiting to be transported, with their baggage, a resettlement option that dried up long ago.
When South Sudan gained independence from Sudan in 2011, Wani was one of 68,000 people who returned from Sudan in hopes of starting a new life in the world's youngest nation. Aided by the United Nations and South Sudan's government, he was relocated to Renk, where he was told he'd be transported to his hometown of Yambio along the border with Congo — on the other side of the country.
"I was so happy that we were separate countries," says Wani, who had been living in Sudan for more than three decades. "I wanted to go home."
But South Sudan's civil war, which erupted in 2013, created the world's fastest-growing refugee crisis. Wani and hundreds of others like him are perhaps the conflict's most unusual displaced population. The Payuer camp is home to nearly 2,000 people, the majority of them stranded since the start of the fighting after arriving from Sudan.
Six years ago, Wani's wife and three children joined over 12,000 people who were flown by the UN from Sudan's capital, Khartoum, to South Sudan's capital, Juba. Because they were unable to carry their luggage on the plane, Wani travelled by land across the border to Renk with the family's belongings.
He says South Sudan's government assured him he soon would be transported by barge down the Nile and reunited with his family.