When racist graffiti and a stabbing shakes a community, who picks up the pieces?

Dr Habab Idriss was on a field expedition in Kassala, shadowed by Sudan’s dusty orange Taka monoliths, when the first gunshots rang out in her home town. It was April 2023, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces had just descended on Khartoum, dressed in military fatigues and brandishing automatic weapons above their heads as they paraded through the streets triumphantly. It was the early stage of a coup d’etat, the internet had just been shut down and a blockade surrounded the ancient capital. Idriss — holed up out east — hadn’t heard from her family in days. She was put up in Kassala, and remained there, nervously waiting for word from her loved ones. “In Sudan, everywhere is home”, she tells me from a park in Knightswood. Three months later, the word finally came: “We’re ok, we’re safe”. Idriss sprang into action. 

She packed her bags and crossed the border into Eritrea. In that instant, all her belongings on her back, she went from a doctor of archeology to a refugee. Idriss may have been separated from her family, but she wasn’t alone; she was but one of 12 million Sudanese fleeing the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. But how did she end up in leafy Knightswood? 

“I don’t say this is my second home, I say this is my first home” Idriss explains with warm eyes and a wide smile — belying the struggle she’s faced to find sanctuary in Scotland, two and half years on from the conflict that plunged Sudan into chaos. “I was a very fragile person, you know, leaving the kids behind and everything. Very desperate, very vulnerable,” she explains. When she first settled in Knightswood, she would spend her days looking out the window of her Kingsway flat across Glasgow’s western sprawl to the Kilpatrick hills — the “nice fields”, as she calls them. Idriss speaks with a levity that contradicts the gravity of the words coming out her mouth, chuckling as she says: “I can’t just think ‘Oh my God’. I keep myself busy, right?” If she didn’t keep moving, she explains, she’d be left worried sick about her family, about her country, thinking “oh my god, what will be my future?” So she just gets on with it, one day at a time.

Fortunately for Idriss, her sister had already come to the UK two years earlier, where she eventually settled in Glasgow. And so, from Khartoum to Kassala to Eritrea, via Dublin airport and a ferry-hop over to Scotland, Idriss finally arrived right here. As her sister helped her move into her Kingsway high rise flat, she said to her, “‘Habab, there is something you can see from the window, you’ll like it.’” Three thousand miles from home, speaking now over a cup of tea in a Knightswood community cafe, Idriss explains to me what she saw: community connection. 

Because, from high up in her flat — one of hundreds spread out across four grey 20-storey housing blocks — the first thing Idriss had spotted was the modest entrance to a community centre. “So I went there”, Idriss recounts, “I just entered with a nice voice”, she laughs cheekily. The first thing she felt upon opening the doors was a sense of “belonging”. 

Idriss’ life was about to change. In the space of a couple of months, she’d go from worrying alone in her flat to volunteering for three organisations, setting up her own women’s group, and even landing a big job interview the day after we speak. It’s hard to imagine the journey it’s taken her to get here, all the way from war-ravaged Northeast Africa to an unassuming, residential suburb of Glasgow — but she didn’t end up here by accident.

Hi, thanks for reading. We're Robbie and Calum, and we run The Bell. Today's story took about 6 trips to Knightswood and back to meet the characters (and many more) involved. Calum loved doing it, and Robbie hangs his hat on this kind of on-the-ground reporting. It's how we're able to squeeze so much life and local insight into our pieces - especially our Monday briefings, which you can read for free by signing up to our free mailing list.

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