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ABOARD CAPTAIN 1 ON THE NILE RIVER, Sudan (AP) - Dozens of excited refugees leaned over the barge's railing as it glided up the Nile, marveling at the lush, green swamplands that had replaced the desert of northern Sudan. It was their first sign that they were nearing home.
"I'd forgotten nearly everything," said Kimo Achajh, 41, who since boyhood has lived in refugee camps around Khartoum, the capital, hundreds of miles north of his birthplace. "The first thing that came back to me are the smells," he said, inhaling the evening air filled with fragrances of papyrus, water-lilies and muddy floodlands watered by the White Nile.
The Captain 1 and Captain 2, barges lashed together and pushed by a motorboat, had crossed the ill-defined border between north and south Sudan a day earlier, carrying 401 southerners returning home. A few, like Achajh, remembered the south from their childhood, but most on the barge — born in camps in the north — have never seen it.
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