Dividing Sudan into two countries in 2011 was supposed to help the region calm down, but that hasn’t been the case. As women and children continue to be the victims of war, an Alabama-based ministry is rescuing them from the terror in which they live.
South Sudan gained its independence from Sudan in 2011, but two years later it erupted into another civil war. South Sudanese President Salva Kiir, a member of the Dinka tribe, accused Vice President Riek Machar, of the Neur tribe, of trying to overthrow him. The two have started fighting against each other, and both sides have given their soldiers free reign to rape and kill women of the opposing tribe.
This is where Kimberly Smith comes in. Smith, who lives in Hoover, is the founder and president of Make Way Partners, and her organization has been helping rescue Sudanese women and get them out of the country.
“The new government is providing funding for rape camps, encouraging the soldiers to rape women, saying we don’t have funds to pay you, these are side benefits,” Smith said. “Most of the women I speak with that we rescued from South Sudan, they were raped by so many men at different times.”
Smith founded Make Way Partners in 2002 and started working in Sudan in 2004. On her first trip to Sudan, Smith was heartbroken by all the starving orphans she saw, so she opened her first orphanage and school in the area in 2005. Make Way Partners now runs three orphanages, three elementary schools, and a high school throughout the region, and they are in the process of building a hospital that will open later this year. Make Way Partners has only recently expanded into rescuing rape victims.
Two of the women Smith rescued were recently featured in Time magazine. One of the women, named Mary, described her experience at the hands of Dinka soldiers. The soldiers told her, “we don’t kill the women and the girls.”
“They said they would only rape us. As if rape were different than death,” Mary explained.
The soldiers killed Mary’s husband and sons, and then she was forced to watch as three soldiers raped her 10-year-old daughter before they turned their attention to her. Mary’s daughter died, but Mary escaped to a U.N. camp for refugees. The camp was supposed to be a safe haven, but soldiers from both sides of the civil war were able to sneak in to the camp and rape the women staying there. Make Way Partners came in and rescued Mary and a few other women from the camp. Now they are helping these women rebuild their lives.
“We want to provide emotional and spiritual support for the rape victims with job training and reading programs,” said Smith. “We have 1,500 children, unadoptable orphans in three locations, 300 employees. The orphans are unadoptable because of lack of documentation, no birth certificate, no passport, we can barely get a visa for our workers to leave the country for additional training.”
The orphanages and schools are now run by Sudanese workers who were trained by Make Way Partners. This year, the program will graduate its first senior class, many of whom will go on to medical school or teach the younger children. Having this access to education is life changing for these women and children, Smith says.
“People are learning for the first time after six generations of civil war. No one alive in South Sudan was not born into war. There’s no frame of reference for what peace looks like. Our children are learning another way.”
(h/t al.com)
