The 21-year-old is one of an estimated 1 million Sudanese refugees living in Cairo. Poor, jobless and subject to racist abuse, he has few aspirations other than to leave Egypt.
"I will go anywhere. Maybe Australia," he said, standing on a rooftop in the Cairo slum where he lives with other refugees, mostly from south Sudan.
Marc, who was reluctant to give his full name, is a member of the Outlaws, one of Cairo's biggest Sudanese street gangs, a new and violent phenomenon that has emerged in the past two years within Cairo's impoverished Sudanese refugee community.
A month ago, Marc watched a close friend, Maliah, die in the street outside a World Refugee Day celebration after the rival Lost Boys gang hacked at his skull with machetes.
Community leaders and experts say about five Sudanese have died gang-related deaths in the past year but there is no official record.
HINDERED FROM RETURNING HOME
In two decades of war between the Sudanese government in Khartoum and the Christian and animist rebels in the south, more than 2 million people died and 4 million were displaced.
Many of the refugees fled to neighbouring countries such as Egypt before a 2005 peace deal was reached.
Before the peace agreement, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) helped to resettle a stream of south Sudanese refugees in Europe and North America.
But now the focus has shifted to voluntary repatriation to Sudan or integration into Egyptian society, said Marwa Abdel Fattah, a senior UNHCR official.
"The war is over, so we cannot give them refugee status any more," she said, because resettlement was no longer a UNHCR priority for south Sudanese as about 100,000 have already returned home from neighbouring countries including Egypt.
The policy shift, which sparked a mass protest in December 2005 in which 23 Sudanese were killed, has dashed hopes for many in the refugee community who believe they cannot go home because of insecurity, unexploded ordnance and the lack of infrastructure.
"I cannot return to my country. Is the south Sudanese government building camps for the returning refugees? No, there is nothing in the south," said Christopher Albino, and father of two and a former fighter in south Sudan's rebel SPLA.
But in Egypt, Albino, 42, and other refugees live in limbo without rights or work, he added, displaying an Egyptian visa with the words "work not permitted" stamped across it.
"What are we supposed to do?" he asked.
