The Plight of Sudanese Women
“Wives and Mothers”, When culture has survived under Genocide
REALITIES OF THE RETURN / Kakuma Interdenominational School of Missions GRADUATION Dec. 2007 –
From Kakuma Refugee Camp – “Hopeful against great odds for a New Sudan”
The statistic says that 70% of the refuge community is now a family structure of single mothers. The questions that haunts my heart and brain when I look at what is at hand for these very precious and half extinct cultures of the Nilotic people of Southern Sudan, is how do you reinvent a new society out of the devastation of fifty years.
We have trained men that were child soldiers from the age of 8, 9, 10, or 11 for the past six years or so, thinking that by Gods intervention they are going home Soldiers of peace, and not relentless, hopeless defense, and in the end annihilation. The last year or two have been spent serving young people who don’t really know the old world of the Sudan and have been raised in the refugee camp at the risk of entitlements and standing in line for what is needed … or a bit less.
This shot was taken by the keen insight of another woman [Yulia Bowman] at the graduation celebration 2007, in Kakuma Camp. Our subject has such a lovely smile of rejoicing for the moment, and the feminine strength of a seasoned veteran of war and “mans inhumanity to man” in the background sharing the hope for “redetermination” of their culture and a home land. It’s a great picture with maybe a husband far back in the upper left hand corner with his Grad gown on. The UNHCR [UN High Commission of Refugees] has been surprised that most of the persons who have entered into the “all voluntary repatriation” process are over 80% young male without their wives or children. I am thinking, that “they have been through this movie before”, and know the treachery and dealings of a religious system that god rewards them for lying to the enemy and seducing their weakness. It’s been a hard road since the mid 80’s as indigenous peoples being bombarded with oil dollars dropping soviet munitions on the life that they once know of self sustainment. There is again hope, but tempered caution mixed in this photo.
This camp of usually some 100,000 at a time has been the holding tank for Sudanese since the Islamic government of Khartoum had been moving to finally annihilate the last male population under the age of 12 to achieve their Islamic social-architecture in the rich lands of the tribal South.
The realities of the return for the majority of family units, with a “single woman head of household”, whose brothers, fathers, uncles and husbands are not part the return. The return back home to reconstruct their homeland is problematic at best for them.
I wonder if the western church has been growing up through the missions org era, then the short term missions era that were not to much more that tax write off’s for a vacation to experience real co-dependence at its absolute finest. We hoped it was developing good will, but to deal with the learning curve to network with some of today’s complex problems for the remaining indigenous tribes was often missing.
As I look into this young lady’s face, I think it has become time to network effectively with indigenous people who want to do their own work, but need some network to become effective, era. As professionals and having the time to influence our world working with a credible labor pool of trained indigenous laborers is the key to concluding the great commission.
So I am at the limit of how much a website reader is willing to endure, and need to enquire is there mobility in the female sector of the western church not just with time and financial ability. The potential is to make high impact influence with the necessary women’s movement that has to take place in South Sudan. I think it is about connecting the right dots together, in this era for mission.
There has to be network partners coming forward as individual life-streams. They can develop micro-loan banking conduit for women’s small business enterprise on a broader scale, for instance. Writers of curriculum, and agendas that can be conducted inside of tribal areas of the south in dialect by our solar communications systems, specifically to make the realities of the return viable. Before the passive Islamic invasion hits, striving to control by” peace time” efforts we have to act, and act quikly, amongst the Floodplain of the Nile, and through out Southern Sudan, for family redevelopment.