Refugee Stories: Fony Joyce Vuni, Sudan

“Even though I’m a refugee I’m still proud to be Sudanese.”

Fony Joyce Vuni, 20, was born in Nairobi after her parents fled war in eastern Equatoria, in southern Sudan, in the 1980s. As a child, she lived in fear of her parents being deported.

“Playing with other children was not easy because you cannot trust them, you don’t know what they want to do,” she recalls. She stayed close to her siblings, as a result.

“Growing up as a refugee child, it has good times and bad times: I have learned so much in Kenya that I want to take back to my country.” Still, she admits, “I feared, I feared people, I did not what to socialize with people, because what was going through my mind was what are these people planning to do against me or my family.”

Her mother, Lucy, recently returned to South Sudan after it gained its independence. Fony stayed behind in their house on the outskirts of Nairobi in order to see her siblings through secondary school. She dreams one day of joining her mother and returning to Sudan.

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No one chooses to be a refugee, forced from home, family and everything they have ever known. Yet 43.7 million people around the world—nearly the combined populations of New York and Texas—find themselves in this exact position.

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