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Lost Girls of Sudan

Sudan Girls 300X175

At a Colorado natural foods store, Rose Lokwang briskly arranges the salad bar. “Can you imagine that there are twenty-two organic items and forty-four conventional items in the salad bar alone?” she exclaims. Such abundance was unimaginable a few years ago when she would go hungry when rations ran out in the desolate, arid refugee camp where she lived in Kakuma, Kenya. Now Lokwang is making a new life in the Denver area. Her goal is to obtain a college degree and eventually attend medical school.

Lokwang and 14 other young women in Colorado are part of a group of refugees known as the Lost Girls of Sudan—young women who lost family members while fleeing the Sudanese civil war. Years of violence created a generation of youth who have spent more time in refugee camps than in their home communities. Relief workers named these children the Lost Boys and Girls after the orphan characters in Peter Pan. The label overlooks the resilience of these young people and is not accurate for those who are now adults, but the Sudanese refugees themselves use the term because of its popular recognition.

Though the plight of Sudan’s Lost Boys has been documented widely and for years, a series of bureaucratic decisions left the Lost Girls virtually forgotten. “Girls have been marginalized totally, given no opportunity to do anything,” says Micklina Pia Peter, the first Lost Girl to arrive in Colorado.

Refugee agencies initially bypassed the Lost Girls while nearly 4,000 of their brothers and male cousins became part of the largest group of unaccompanied minors in U.S. history. When State Department officials visited Kakuma in the late 1990s, the Lost Boys—who were living together—were a visible presence, but the girls were not.

Due to a UN policy of placing orphaned girls with foster families in the refugee camp, the Lost Girls were ineligible for resettlement as “unaccompanied minors.” Foster placement often amounted to indentured servitude. Moreover, foster parents frequently pushed girls into marriage so the foster family would receive bridewealth—cash and cattle—from the groom.

Lokwang, Peter and dozens of other Lost Girls escaped the brutal conditions in Kakuma and made their way to a compound in Nairobi, Kenya, where a Dominican nun sheltered Sudanese refugees and helped them obtain a secondary school education. To save money for matatu fare—the East Africa minibus from Kakuma to Nairobi—girls sold embroidery. Then they braved a perilous ride through the desert, past hostile Turkana warriors and corrupt police who demanded kitu kidogo, small bribes, at each checkpoint.

Eventually, Lokwang was accepted for resettlement, arriving at the Denver International Airport in mid December 2006 shortly before two dramatic blizzards crippled the region. Thousands of miles from home, living in a foreign country blanketed in white, Lokwang maintained her calm demeanor and within weeks had even learned to cross country ski.

In pursuit of her dream, Lokwang, who works 32 hours a week, plans to complete 15 community college credits in spring 2008 and then enroll at the University of Colorado. “Time is a problem,” she says. “Traveling between work and school takes one hour by bus.” Balancing work with schooling is a challenge faced by many of the Sudanese Lost Girls. “Work, work, work is the expectation in America,” says Omunu Abalu, a board member for a group serving Sudanese refugees. Lokwang hopes to follow in the footsteps of Micklina Peter, who will graduate in May 2008.

Peter has started a non-profit to help Lost Girls get an education so they can contribute to women’s empowerment back in Sudan, a goal of Julia Aker Duany, undersecretary for the Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs in the Government of Southern Sudan. “Once they acquire a skill, the Lost Girls will be in a position to assist those in Sudan,” says Duany, the top-ranking woman in a government that must rebuild itself from the bottom up. When equipped with her medical degree, Lokwang plans to do her part.



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