Awut Deng Baak, a southern Sudanese leaving in Jebel Auliya, Khartoum State, says better to remain in northern Sudan if conditions remain the same in the South.

Since the signing of the comprehensive peace agreement in 2009, only some 90,516 returned from Khartoum up to June 2009. This year only 9,084 people returned voluntary to southern Sudan while their number in 2007 had reached 45,355 people.

Already disillusioned, many of these IDPs returned to the capital as well as the other parts of the country months after their voluntary return in their homeland in southern Sudan. Lack of resources, and infrastructure as well as volatile security situation pushed them to return to northern Sudan.

Awut, who fled war-torn state of Warrap on foot in 2000 to the north, where she spent more than three years before the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement on January 9, 2009, added that does not know the different between peace and war.

"I thought peace means everything including free transport to home from where we came. "I did not expect it is about creating and drawing classes of rich and poor," she said

She said what is happening now is like what was happening when she left her ancestral home in the south. Things were not easy in the south when my children and I left the region; she said adding that in the north, protection only in the camps was given without supports.

Living in the street with her two young daughters, just meters away from Jebel Auliya bus station, she said "no one helps us and I and my two children have no income. I am forced to begging money from passers-by to feed my children and myself," she adds.

"People talk of peace, Peace, peace, Peace, but I don’t understand what they mean when people of my likes are still out in the street begging something to eat each day," she posed.

"I have been living in this place for 8 years without any way to clean, or get drinking water. Nobody cares about my suffering. I was once in Wed El Basher Camp before I moved here. Asked why she moved, "I moved here because where I had lived was always crowded with public transports," she explained.

"It was also there where I fell out of a moving car and then spent five months in Omdurman public hospitals, where I was cared for and given medicine for free till discharged," she described.

"When I heard about free humanitarian treatment given to Internally Displaced Persons in the camp of Jebel Auliya by international organizations, I decided to come here. But when I came I realized that people here have no mercy, no sympathy and no humanitarianism here also. I found myself cheated," she said.

Asked why she did not return home when people were being returned home in 2007-2008, she said, "when peace was signed and people were being asked to return, I did not refuse returning home, but to whom am I returning to after all my husband is dead," she posed.

"This was one of the reasons I did not return. Another reason being that, people were being selectively returned, it was not general," she said.

Third was, "because of my disability, I can hardly move without using my crutches. I still need medicine to ease my pain. In the south where transport remains a problem, my return will mean death," she said. "It is better I remain here even if it mean south succeeding to form another country," she adds.

She also continued to add "my children cry out for food day and night and I barely sleep at night because of my illness and hunger. My condition is getting worse with time because I don’t have good food and medicine."

Awut, further added that, the war forced her to desert her ancestral home, leave land and lose cattle which she said to rely on for her livelihood, has changed hearts of the good people she used to know back home. I cannot imagine what our farmland looks like these days, she queried.

However, she said it would have been better for her to stay in the South even amid the conflict in which her husband was killed. I regret my decision to flee north where I’m stranded, she commented.

"My dream in life is to have a shelter for me and my children, and enough food and clean water. But I don’t know if it is possible for me to achieve this dream before I die, she queried.