Homes We Carry

Reath Bol

2025 – Ongoing — South Sudan

About this series

I have been searching for home for most of my life without realizing it. My journey began on December 25th, 2013, before sunrise, when war broke out in my hometown of Malakal, South Sudan. I was just ten years old. The day before, I had spent the afternoon playing inside our house, not knowing it would be the last time I would experience home as I knew it. Two days later, my family fled to a UNMISS protection site, where we stayed until we managed to leave Malakal in April 2014. Together with my parents and siblings, we moved to Khartoum, Sudan, hoping to rebuild our lives.
Khartoum became our next home. I spent almost ten years there, continued my studies, grew up, made friends, and built new memories. Life was good. Then, in April 2023, war broke out again, and once more my family was forced to leave everything behind. It was my second displacement, and it changed how I think about memory, belonging, and starting over almost from scratch.
With my parents and three siblings, we crossed into South Sudan through Renk, staying nearly two months at our aunt’s house. Life was hard, but I stayed grateful, since many refugees and returnees don’t even have that. My younger brother, impatient, escaped back to Khartoum without our knowledge, despite the war there, and our mother nearly had a heart attack.
The town was overwhelmed with people arriving daily, each carrying a different story of loss and survival. Looking for work, I moved to Paloch to stay with my cousin, then finally returned to Malakal, walking streets I still knew by heart until I reached the house where I was born. It had been completely destroyed, but the memories remained. In August, I reunited with my family, and in September 2023 we flew to Juba, where I stayed until January 2026, before continuing my journey to Kenya through Uganda.
I don’t know where I will call home tomorrow. What I know is that I want to return to these places, not only to photograph the homes I have carried with me, but also to continue documenting the lives of people whose stories deserve to be seen. Homes We Carry is my way of holding onto those places while they continue to change. Through photography, I explore how displacement transforms our relationship with home, and how memory allows us to carry parts of it wherever we go.