Lost and found: A Sudanese love story

Daniela Caride

Rebecca Madut and James Deng were deeply in love.

After dating for three years, they got married in 2004 at the First Lutheran Church in Lynn. Sudanese and American guests rejoiced with a banquet of African dishes served at the church’s hall after the ceremony.

This “typical” love story is actually an abnormality in Sudan, the couple’s homeland. There, Southern Sudanese men — generally polygamists — pay for arranged marriages and assume control of their women’s lives.

Even though the couple does not agree with those traditions, they asked Rebecca’s mother and James’ uncle to organize two rituals. So their families decided on a bride’s price — 110 cows, paid by James — and prepared a ceremony.

“We are different from people from Sudan,” said Rebecca, but “we didn’t want to forget our culture.

“You have to keep something.”

Rebecca is one the Lost Boys and Lost Girls of Sudan, a group of 3,800 Sudanese refugees now living here since the United States government established a resettlement program with the United Nations in 1999. The Sudanese refugees arrived here in 2000 and 2001. Of the 3,800, only 90 — less than 3 percent of the group — were women.

In the refugee camps in Ethiopia, girls were placed with foster families while boys stayed together to adhere to cultural traditions. Joan Hecht, president and founder of the nonprofit Alliance for the Lost Boys of Sudan, said that girls became part of the families in some cases.

But “in other cases, they were used as labor,” Hecht said, and “weren’t allowed to go to school.”

Fostering Sudanese girls was also attractive because brides’ dowries that foster families receive may reach sums of $5,000, paid in cows — these animals are the measure of wealth for Southern Sudanese people. An average dowry is 100 cows, according to Susan Winship, founder and director of the Sudanese Education Fund (SEF), a nonprofit organization based in Lincoln.

When the United States opened the resettlement program for Sudanese children, girls in foster families were not eligible. Only orphans were considered.

“It is really a sad situation. A lot of these girls were left behind just because they were born girls,” says Hecht.

Those Lost Girls who came to America started new lives that enabled them “to be who they are, who they want to be,” said Hecht. They could choose to follow Sudanese traditions or to marry whom they wanted.

The gender imbalance, however, quickly became a problem for the vastly outnumbered boys, according to Alex de Waal, a writer, activist and fellow of the Global Equity Initiative at Harvard University.

There weren’t enough Sudanese girls to date in the United States, and “Sudanese people have not been socialized in a tradition with courtship rituals,” said de Waal, director of the London-based research and advocacy institute Justice Africa and author of nearly a dozen books on famine, human rights and conflict in Africa.

Rebecca remembers feeling confused when she first saw girls and boys together at high school.

“It was driving me crazy. I could not tell whether they were dating, or whether they were just friends,” she said.

Later, she met James at one of the parties promoted for Sudanese refugees by volunteers. The two dated for three years before deciding to marry.

To Hecht, the Lost Girls are “facing the challenges of having the freedom they have never dreamed before.” She recalls that many of them became “Americanized” when they started school. They decided to give up Sudanese traditions and eventually choose their husbands.
“They have a voice now,” said Hecht.

Seven years after arriving in America, Rebecca says she feels more integrated, but she doesn’t believe she fits into any specific culture.

“It seems that I collect all the cultures — from Southern Sudan to Ethiopia, from Ethiopia to Kenya, from Kenya to the United States … It seems like I am westernized, but still I am Sudanese,” she said.

Rebecca began her travels in 1987. She started a three-month journey on foot to Ethiopia to escape the attacks of Northern Sudanese groups. Arab Muslims from the North were fighting against black Christians from the South in a civil war that started in 1963.

She was 7 years old.

Rebecca trekked more than 1,000 miles along with other 20,000 others, most of them small children. Thousands died from starvation, thirst and militia attacks. Many more succumbed to predators like lions, hyenas and crocodiles.

“There was no food, no water. A lot of people were dying. If you find a leaf from the trees, you could try to eat it, or find water from a footprint so you could get a little water,” she recalled.

After three years in Ethiopia, the refugee camp was attacked, and Rebecca had to run again — this time, 1,000 miles back to Sudan.

At the Sudanese border, the United Nations rescued the survivors — and placed them in a refugee camp in Kenya.

Trapped in another camp with little food or education for nearly a decade, Rebecca says she dreamed of change. She believed that coming to the United States would be an opportunity to escape an unwanted lifestyle — an arranged marriage, immediate pregnancy, subordination to a husband, and the end of her dream to get an education.

She remembers when her sister, Amina Madut, was carried off in 2000 to be forced into marriage. Certain that her destiny would be the same if she did not act quickly, she convinced United Nations workers to put her on an emergency resettlement list. In a matter of days, she was flown to the United States and was taken into a foster family in Natick.

Amina managed to escape to Kampala, the capital city of Uganda, and was later placed in Canada. Amina travels to America regularly to help Rebecca and James with Achol Deng, the couple’s 10-month-old daughter.

She remains single to this day.

When asked about marriage, Amina simply smiled.

“Maybe one day,” she said, then returned to cooking African food.

Rebecca is convinced that Sudan would be better if people had access to better education — especially women, who do not have the right to the same level of education as men do.

“Most of women are not educated,” said Rebecca. “Education is everything … You understand what is going on around the world.

“If you are not educated, it seems like you are in the darkness,” she continued.

Rebecca is following her dream of coming out of the darkness, but right now she is struggling to finish her studies. She took out a loan to pay for college, which she says costs her $8,000. She is taking classes online, and cannot work right now, since she is taking care of Achol. James pays their expenses by working full-time as a storekeeper at Logan Airport, and studies part-time at Bunker Hill Community College.

Before having Achol, Rebecca worked as a cashier clerk at a Target department store in Everett. She intends to get back to work as soon as possible, and to graduate from college at the University of Massachusetts in 2009. Only then will sheconsider having more children, she says while playing with Achol on the apartment’s carpeted floor.

Rebecca plans to teach her daughter the language spoken in their homeland, Dinka, as a way of keeping their Southern Sudanese traditions alive.

“I have to tell my story to her,” Rebecca said. “I don’t want her to have the same life.”

Saddened by the pictures that Sudanese friends bring from trips to Africa and afraid that one day her daughter would want to live in Sudan, Rebecca feels compelled to use her education to help her native country. One of her options is to major in international relations, in order to pursue a career that could create educational opportunities for African women.

Harvard University’s de Waal believes that Rebecca can make a difference, partly because there are “a lot of issues that she can address,” with education paramount among them, and because he says Sudan now has a very active women’s movement.

“[Sudanese women] achieved a lot of things in law, which have not been properly translated into practice,” he said.

Education is a major issue for the Lost Boys and Lost Girls, explains Susan Winship of the Sudanese Education Fund, which is why the organization focused on creating learning opportunities. Some of the girls, Hecht says, are studying to be doctors and lawyers.

While she thinks her life in America “is very hard,” Rebecca says she is happy — mainly because she has the opportunity to fulfill some of her dreams.

Foreign aid workers dubbed the Sudanese refugees “Lost Boys and Lost Girls” in reference to the fictional orphans of J.M. Barrie’s famous story “Peter Pan.” Rebecca feels that in her case, the once-appropriate name no longer fits.

“We were lost. If you run from place to place, it means that you are lost,” she said. “But if you finally are in one place, like I have been here for six years, and I go to school like other people, I don’t see I am lost again … I am settled.”

But even though she is no longer lost, like her fellow Boys and Girls, Rebecca still holds on to the name — a name that has come to mean so much more any fictional characters ever could.

“The name is very strong. We still keep them,” she said. “Maybe it is a blessing. … To be a Lost Girl and a Lost Boy is a blessing. I got a better life through that name.”