Fundraiser 1: Sudan
This site, Alloy, is just a couple months old. A baby. We’re establishing how it works and what it does right before your eyes. One of the things we’d like it to do, is to provide an outlet for us and our readers to do some good in the real world. So, I think we’re going to start the year off, every year, with a little fundraiser. For the first one, we were inspired by a friend of ours and a key member of the Alloy extended universe.
If you were following Alloy on IG over the summer, you may have spotted our friend Dalal Elsheikh in a handful of videos from Monterey Car Week. This site would not exist if a handful of friends hadn’t taken an interest in it and helped us get it off the ground. Dalal was one of the first to reach out to us and she ended up spending a lot of her entire Monterey trip shooting video and stills, doing interviews and editing for Alloy. Dalal is a designer, but she’s got a ton of experience in front of and behind the camera, which is why the stuff we published looked good, with the obvious exception of the stuff I shot which was notably not as good. (Thank you all for your feedback.)
We asked Dalal to tell us why this particular cause is important to her. This is what she said:
African conflicts can feel distant and removed from our lives here in the West, and as is true for most of my friends, I can safely assume I am likely the only Sudanese person you know. Rather than share a chronological timeline of the war and its aftermath, I would like to tell you how these events have directly impacted my family.
Many of the war’s first victims were in the capital city of Khartoum, where my father’s family lived. As the RSF made its way through the state and into my family’s neighborhood, looting homes and apartments along the way, my relatives fled to the north. Those who could afford the long trip to Egypt settled in Cairo. Many others were forced to take shelter in abandoned school classrooms in northern villages. They lived there for a year without running water. It is important to note that Sudanese people have received limited external aid because of the severity of the danger on the ground and the Sudanese Armed Forces’ distrust of outside intervention.
A few hours south of Khartoum in the Al Gazira state is where my mother’s family lives. In December 2023 the RSF gained ground in the region. Many families fled, including most of my own, who made their way to various parts of the Middle East. Residents hid their cars in neighboring villages to prevent theft, but many were unsuccessful. A number of the neighborhood men took up arms to protect their families, and my uncle was among them.
On January 19, 2024 my uncle was detained by the Rapid Support Forces and taken from our family home in Al Hasahisa to an undisclosed location.
In the days following his detention my mom and I reached out to the American Red Cross. Through word of mouth from other Sudanese families who had gone through similar situations, we learned that the organization had a process for retrieving detainees. We spent days sending countless emails and attending Zoom calls in which we recounted the incident, shared my uncle’s photos and personal details, and provided coordinates to our family home. I took some of these Zoom calls during my lunch break at Mercedes Benz Design. I remember sitting in the conference room describing the layout of my grandmother’s home to the caseworkers, with a ten-foot-tall mirror-finish Maybach badge hanging to my right. At this point two months had passed with no progress or news of my uncle’s whereabouts. He could have been moved to another detention center, or worse.
Here is an email sent to the ARC on March 13, 2024, two months after my uncle’s disappearance:
“Hi A** and team,
Thank you so much for your help so far.
We have gotten in contact with some family friends in Sudan, one of whom previously worked with the ICRC. He informed us that detainees have been released in the past after their names were submitted to the ICRC offices in the cities where they were being held. Usually names are submitted by close family members, but because we cannot be there to submit his name in person, can you connect with your colleagues in Kassala, Al Qadarif, and Port Sudan? Again, my uncle’s name is M****** M******** M****** E******.“
The American Red Cross Restoring Family Links program ultimately fell short because of an insufficient presence on the ground in Sudan. My uncle was eventually released in April 2024 with no explanation. He had significantly grayed and lost around twenty pounds, but he was alive and safe which is more than many can say.
Despite the cruelty of the situation, my family is among the lucky ones. Many of us in the diaspora routinely send money back home, which allows our relatives to escape, to eat, and to pay the steep rent prices in the remote locations where they have been forced to resettle. For many Sudanese people, especially in the most impoverished regions of the country such as Darfur, the Nubian Mountains, and the Blue Nile state, life is even darker. Mass killings, rape, and ethnic cleansing carried out by the RSF have mirrored and intensified the atrocities seen during the 2003 Darfur genocide, which was carried out by the same group.
What I hope you take from this is not just the story of my family, but the reminder that conflict is never as far away as it feels. It reaches across borders, across screens, and across the lives of people you may know. The team at Alloy has been generous enough to give me space to tell this story and to ask you to make a contribution of any size to the Sudanese American Physicians Association, an organization helping to bring food and medical resources to families like mine across Sudan.
Alloy’s philanthropic wing hasn’t been established at this point, so we can’t just donate a portion of our profits–but here’s what we’ll do to sweeten the deal for you:
If you donate any amount and send me evidence via email or DM, or just post it in the comments, you will be entered into a drawing. 5 people will get an Alloy hat. Another 7 people will get the top-tier reward from the Alloy Au membership. That’s right, I will personally hand-fabricate a model car out of steel and Fern will paint it just for you. Happy New Year and Happy Donating.
With words and artwork by Dalal Elsheikh
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