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 Re: قصة نجاح رائعة لمحامية سودانية في أمريكا... كانت نزيلة في مخيمات اللاجئين (Re: حيدر حسن ميرغني)
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With her education, intellect and grace, Aduei Riak blends in seamlessly at the law firm of Ropes & Gray, where she is one of 10 new paralegals. But the story of how she got here is most unlikely.
You would never know that as a young girl, she walked 1,000 miles to flee a civil war in her homeland of Sudan. Or that Riak, now 23, came of age in a refugee camp, and until last summer had not seen her mother since she was 6.
"I've seen a lot of things that a person of my age should not have been exposed to," Riak says. "The (memories) tend to be very dark and gray. I don't like talking about them, because for me talking about them is living them again."
Her story mirrors the odyssey of thousands of Sudanese children who were resettled in the USA nearly a decade ago, refugees from a civil war that preceded today's conflict in Sudan's western region of Darfur. In May, the current Darfur crisis — which has killed 200,000 people and left 2.5 million homeless since 2003 — prompted President Bush to impose new economic sanctions against Sudan to end what his administration calls genocide.
Riak represents a largely overlooked side to the Sudanese refugee saga from the earlier civil war: the struggles of the few "lost girls" who managed to survive the dangers of their homeland and eventually make it to America.
FIND MORE STORIES IN: Sudan | Kenya | Sudanese | United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
Numerous articles, books and documentaries such as God Grew Tired Of Us have chronicled the exodus and resettlement of a group known as the "lost boys," Sudanese children who were orphaned or separated from their families by the civil war in the late 1980s. They were forced to embark upon a harrowing journey from southern Sudan to neighboring Ethiopia and ultimately to a refugee camp in Kenya.
In 1999, the U.S. State Department, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other advocates launched a program that resettled about 4,000 boys in cities across the USA. Only 89 girls came as part of that effort. Riak was among them.
She arrived in the Boston suburb of Belmont when she was 16 and lived with various families. In 2002 she moved in with Garrett Parker and Helen Peters, the foster parents with whom she remains close.
Since coming to America, Riak has gone against Sudanese tradition by putting her career and education before marriage. She is now a graduate of Brandeis University but recalls that she could barely speak English when she reached America. As a teenager, she mastered her new tongue by watching cartoons.
"I would sit alone in the dark and repeat whatever they were saying," Riak says of the characters in Sesame Street and Dora the Explorer.
Besides her animated tutors,Riak credits her foster family and friends with helping her adapt to a new culture. "I am where I am right now, sitting in this office at Ropes & Gray, because a lot of people have invested in me."
Often when people learn that she is from Sudan, she says, they ask whether she knows the "lost boys." They are surprised to know that she is part of their group.
"They think that war only affected the men," she says. "They do have sisters. … We do exist."
A success story
The "lost" boys and girls, resettled over an 18-month period that ended in 2001, are just one group of African refugees brought to the USA during the past decade because they were in danger of persecution in their homeland.
More than 18,000 African refugees came to the USA in 2006 alone, from countries as varied as Angola, Uganda and Zimbabwe, the State Department says. The largest group of African refugees to be resettled in the USA is Somalian; nearly 70,000 have come since the early 1990s.Riak's success is recounted by many who have worked with the roughly 200 Sudanese children who were resettled in the Boston area.
She received a full scholarship to Brandeis from the university and graduated this year with degrees in international and global studies and anthropology. She plans to attend law school after fulfilling a two-year commitment to work at Ropes & Gray, one of Boston's largest and most prestigious legal firms.
"The background that she's come from, growing up without parents, in the harshest environments and going on to succeed so extraordinarily … elevates her to a super role-model status," says Sasha Chanoff, executive director of Mapendo International, an organization that assists refugees from war-torn regions of Africa who are in imminent danger.
"I'm amazed," says Garrett Parker, Riak's foster father. "I think everybody that meets her is amazed at what she's been able to do. She came here with a lot of drive. … She had always wanted to be more than what her culture wanted for her."
Riak's past is ever-present.
"The sad thing is it's happening again in Darfur," Riak says. "There are children experiencing exactly what I've gone through. The hurtful thing is knowing it's happening … and not being able to do anything."
She is reminded of her childhood when she looks in the face of 13-year-old Adut Ayuel, the younger sister of another "lost girl" and close friend of Riak's, whom she has taken under her wing.
"I see myself in her," says Riak of Adut, who arrived in April with no formal education but an intense curiosity about her new home.
"She was born in a refugee camp and grew up in a refugee camp, which reminds me of my own self," Riak says.
The young girl has suffered her own tragedies. When her mother died in the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya from a snake bite, Adut and an older sister were alone and in danger of being forced into marriage by distant relatives, says Chanoff, whose organization ultimately helped get the girls out of the camp and into a protected safe house in Nairobi, Kenya, before their arrival in the USA.
Now Riak tutors Adut in English. They share stories and laughter in Riak's suburban apartment. They walk the streets of Boston, window shopping at Saks Fifth Avenue along the way.
If she had to distill the advice she gives Adut, Riak says it is simple: "It's normal to feel like no matter what you do … you will never fit in. But it will be OK."
Riak's optimism, like that of many other "lost" boys and girls who have rebuilt their lives in the USA, is particularly surprising given their almost unimaginable journey.
"What we see occurring in Darfur now (happened) to these people 20 years ago," says Ralph Serpico, executive director of the AZ Lost Boys Center in Phoenix, where more than 500 "lost" boys and girls live. "There wasn't the focus of the press and the public as there is today, but their stories nevertheless are as horrific, and tragic, and in many ways uplifting as any of the others."
Attacks by government forces on villages in southern Sudan led 17,000 to 30,000 children to flee Sudan in the late 1980s, but gender roles and cultural strictures winnowed the number of "lost girls" from the very beginning. Left at home while boys went to tend cattle, many girls were kidnapped or killed during the violence. Only a few thousand were able to escape.
Riak was about 3 when her family was forced to flee their home in Juba, the capital of southern Sudan. Her father had joined rebel forces fighting the military of the central government in Khartoum. Riak, her mother and several relatives made it to a refugee camp in Ethiopia. But when they were forced to leave there in 1991, they were separated on the journey back to Sudan.
Except for a 7-year-old cousin, who trekked with her, "I was pretty much on my own," remembers Riak, then 6. "There was bombing, shooting everywhere. No food, and a lot of walking day and night."
As many as 2,000 children are believed to have drowned, were shot or eaten by crocodiles as they tried to cross the Gilo River back to Sudan, according to Mapendo International. Once back in their homeland, they remained on the run. Constant bombing forced the children to flee from town to town. More than 10,000 made it to the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya.
There, many of the girls vanished into the fabric of camp life because cultural tradition dictated that they live with surrogate families. Most of the boys lived together in large groups. Some resettlement officials say that they initially were unaware that there were girls in the camp who had endured the same experiences as the boys.
"They had somewhat disappeared into the general refugee population, so they were less easy to identify as needing attention and services," says Julianne Duncan, who traveled to the camp in 2000 for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.
Girls' situation more complex
The State Department and the U.N. group contended that the boys were potential targets for forcible recruitment by rebel forces. "The reason for the resettlement (of the boys) was the vulnerability in the camp, particularly in this group setting," says Larry Yungk, senior resettlement officer for the UNHCR Washington, though he added that eventually workers sought girls for resettlement as well.
Girls, traditionally married off as teens, also were a source of wealth, with the groom's family required to offer a dowry. Resettlement officials say that some surrogate families forced girls to marry against their will, and such concerns also factored into why so few young women initially were resettled.
"With the girls' situations so much more complex, we agreed with UNHCR that each should be considered and referred individually," says Peter Eisenhauer, spokesman for the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration. He says some resettlement officials also did not want to separate girls who had bonded with their foster families.
Some members of the Sudanese-American community as well as some refugee workers say more could have been done to help the girls.
"Very arguably these girls were much more at risk in this camp than the boys were," says Chanoff, who has asked Riak for help in identifying other young women in Kenya who need help. "It was a good thing that the U.S. initiated this resettlement, because it's offered good opportunities for all those who came here, but it was really very negligent not to try and find girls as well."
A plan to return
At the Kakuma camp, children had limited schooling. Riak recalls that the youngest students had no paper or crayons. They sat under a tree and scrawled the ABCs in the sand with their fingers. As they got older they received pencils, broken in half, and notebooks torn into pieces to be shared. "Finally, in fourth grade, you get to have a whole notebook," she says, "and it's the greatest feeling."
She recalls how her education began in Sudan — in a classroom, and then a park where her mother took her to play. "All that was taken away," she says of the war. "We went from sitting in a classroom … and coming home and having a nice meal, to being under a tree."
After the fourth grade, Riak won a scholarship that allowed her to attend a Kenyan boarding school, and she returned to Kakuma only for the holidays. When her cousin, still in the camp, was identified as a "lost boy," their shared food ration card brought her to the attention of resettlement officials. The two came to Massachusetts in 2000.
Like many of the refugee boys, the girls who have come to the USA have slowly adjusted to life here, vigorously pursuing higher education, raising families and working to support themselves and often others back home.
The girls have also had some distinct challenges. Many arrived with less education than the boys and little or no ability to speak English. Some also had been sexually abused in the camp or during their treacherous journeys.
Upon arriving in the USA, "they didn't all of a sudden feel completely safe and confident," Duncan says. "Naturally their fears remained with them, so they've had to overcome those kinds of emotional issues."
Many of the young women also struggle to reconcile cultural traditions with the more varied roles women can play in the USA.
Despite her accomplishments, Riak's single status is what resonates most with some in her community. "I have my own apartment," she says. "I pay my own rent, and I have a roommate. That's just insane in my culture."
Her desire to complete college and go to law school was born in Kakuma, when she says there was no chance that either could happen. "It was this wild dream in my head," she says. "Anything else that didn't fit in the picture that I had framed in my mind was out of the question."
Unlike many Sudanese families, Riak says, her parents and five brothers (now scattered from Sudan to Australia) support her ambitions. Still, this latest journey, from one culture to another, has been difficult.
"It's definitely a lonely path to take … to do something totally new," she says. "There are some parts of my culture that I really like and that I would never want to give up because they define some values that I believe in," she says of the community's emphasis on family and respect for elders. "But there are certain aspects of it that conflict with my individual interests. The question is how to balance that."
Right now, the scales tip toward independence. Last year, on the Fourth of July, Riak became a U.S. citizen. Six days later she returned to Sudan and saw her mother and father for the first time since she was a young girl.
Once she has her law degree and the experience she feels is necessary, she will go back for good and help build up her people, she says.
"If I went back today, I'd be useless," she says, adding she wants to use her legal skills to help women and children. "When the time is appropriate, I will definitely go back and be part of the community. … There's nothing special about us. We just got lucky to get to the U.S. We owe it to those who are still there."
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-07-23-lost-girls_N.htm?csp=34
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حيدر حسن ميرغني
فيس بوك
تويتر
انستقرام
يوتيوب
بنتيريست