(NewsNation) — An American couple living in Khartoum, Sudan, for an international teaching job is finally back in South Carolina after spending weeks trying to escape the conflict.

Now, the couple said they have mixed feelings about their return to America.

“It’s kind of bittersweet,” Denise Bowers, an American teacher, said. “We’re happy to be home with our family, but the country did nothing to save us.”

Last year, Denise accepted an international teaching position at a school in Khartoum where she and her husband, Chris Bowers, moved.

When the fighting broke out in Sudan, the American embassy told the two that they could no longer help them, leaving them stranded in the war-torn country.

The U.S. has come under scrutiny for immediately evacuating roughly 70 embassy staff in a helicopter mission conducted by elite SEAL commandos while warning thousands of private American citizens in Sudan that there would be no similar evacuation for them.

The Bowers were trapped in their home amid the fighting, experiencing power and water outages due to the conflict.

After a couple of days of sheltering in place and assistance from the school Denise was working with, the two were able to travel to a meeting spot to catch a bus to escape the fighting.

The bus trip took five days before it safely crossed the border into Egypt. The couple said they spent two nights in Cairo before making the long journey back to the U.S.

Denise told NewsNation’s Adrienne Bankert that they had registered with the U.S. Embassy in Sudan last August when they first moved there. She explained when the fighting first broke out, the embassy sent Americans registered with them an email, asking for those who wished to be evacuated.

But even though about 500 Americans had said they wanted to be evacuated, they only received updates urging them to shelter in place.

“There was one time they said, ‘OK, you can join the Turkish Embassy convoy,’ but it wasn’t safe for us because we would have to drive our own car,” Denise said. “They didn’t really offer anything until we were out of Sudan.”

Chris said the whole experience was “pretty surreal.” He explained that at first, the fighting was happening pretty far away from them, but then the mortars started hitting closer to the school, near where they lived.

“I heard the bullets flying by, and seeing the planes shooting the missiles and things like that — it was just really scary for a time,” Chris said.

He said it was hard, but he tried to remain calm.

“We had a nice group of people that we were able to communicate with that lived with us,” Chris said. “We were able to kind of keep our heads together, but the evacuation part was really scary.”

The Bowers had to leave everything behind, leaving with only a backpack each. Now that they are back in America, Denise’s brother Raymond DiBiasi organized a GoFundMe for the couple to help them replace some of what they lost.

Hundreds of American citizens were evacuated in the first U.S.-run evacuation Saturday, but an estimated 16,000 American citizens and dual citizens remain trapped.

According to the Associated Press, most of the estimated 16,000 Americans believed to be in Sudan right now are dual U.S.-Sudanese nationals and only a fraction of them have expressed a desire to leave.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.