by Charles London

07/09/2003

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Walking through Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, Patience (not her real name) points out the house of a girl who has been forced to marry.

“We cannot visit her,” she tells me. “We may cause trouble and she would be beaten.”

I am in Kakuma with the advocacy organization, Refugees International, looking into the fate of the so-called “Lost Girls of Sudan.” In the first article, Patience described her harrowing journey from the war in Sudan to the alleged sanctuary of Kakuma. But in Kakuma, she — like countless women and girls in the camp of almost 100,000 refugees from various conflicts in Africa — has not found the safety she sought.

Speaking with the Sudanese women who arrived at the same time as their brothers, the “Lost Boys,” the girls’ fears of beatings, abductions, and forced marriages emerged. Patience lost her mother in The Sudan and her father died in 1999. Since then she has been the head of her household, caring for her younger siblings while trying to finish school. She is 18 years old.

“Many of the girls were taken in by foster parents, but they do not care for them. The interest is always wealth,” she says. She is referring to the practice of the dowry a family receives when a daughter marries, which, since the traditional age for a daughter to get married is 15, looms over the heads of young women on their own in the camp. Patience, herself, lives in fear of forced marriage because her young brothers would be left with no one to care for them. Wealthy men offer between 20 and 100 cattle to a family in exchange for a girl of marrying age. Amidst the deprivations of life in the camp, this offer is hard to resist especially when the girl is a foster child. The welfare of the bride becomes a much lower priority. If the girl resists, she is beaten.

“The family may not tell the girl what is happening,” Patience explains. “They make an arrangement with the man and then send you to fetch some water. While you are there, the man will come and take you by force, whether you cry or not, and that’s where your life ends.”

Young women who have no parents fear being forced into marriage. In an ideal Sudanese marriage, the woman’s father and brothers would act as a line of defense against abuse. The bride could go to her father if she suffered physical abuse from her husband, who is supposed to take over the role of protector. Without parents, the woman has no options at all.

“If you want to go to school, your husband can say ‘no,’ ‘fetch water now‚’ ‘or wash the clothes‚’ and you must. If you complain you are beaten. You must do what you are told if you are a woman. You must keep quiet,” Patience says.

In pre-school, the ratio of boys to girls enrolled, according to figures provided by Lutheran World Federation is roughly one to one. By Secondary School, when girls are of marrying age, the ratio is seven boys to every girl. Girls at school often suffer harassment from the boys and from the male teachers, said an official from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the organization responsible for protection of the refugee population. Yet, when asked about the dangers of rape and abduction for girls who have no parents in the camp another officer of UNHCR responded that the threat to girls is lessened by marriage.

However, for a select population in the camp the women and girls separated from their parents and brothers, marriage is the most fearful thing of all.

A 17-year-old girl, call her Hope, arrived with her aunt in Kakuma in 1994. Her extended family cared for her because her parents had died, she said. She went to school and did the usual chores for the family: cooking, cleaning and fetching wood and water. But when the time came for her to go to secondary school, her aunt was not pleased. She wanted Hope to continue helping with the substantial amount of housework. Their relationship deteriorated. Two years ago, her aunt made an arrangement with a Sudanese man for an amount of cattle in exchange for Hope. She resisted and her aunt hired a man to abduct her and take her to the border. She escaped at the border with the help of a local Kenyan.

“A good man took pity on me,” Hope said, “and brought me back here. Now I live with another relative. I miss much school to do work for him, so that he does not force me to this [older Sudanese man].”

Abduction is one of the biggest problems facing Sudanese girls, a protection officer with UNHCR acknowledges. The girls who arrived at the same time as the “Lost Boys” were not included as a priority in the major resettlement effort at the time and have been languishing without attention in the camp since then. There is much debate about how many of them there are and what can be done for them. “What about other women in the same position? Who do we put in as a Lost Girl?” the protection officer wonders. Which opens up the question: Why are the Lost Boys offered the opportunity to come to the States, while the Lost Girls are offered resettlement only as a protection measure?