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Speaker 1: Hi, this is new due to the virus. I'm recording from home, so you may notice a difference in audio quality. On this episode of News World, we're really going to talk about the daring adventures of Sister Tracy, who is our guest and a great friend of both Callista and me, and we admire so much what she's done to give you a sense of how different her world is. As I welcome sister Orla, who is actually brown cow with a white face, and she can tell you what my name would be, Indinca, and then we're going to talk about why cows are so important and work our way back to what she's doing at the school. Is wonderful to have you with us, sister brown cow with a white face. Hi, you bull with the white hair, ma boor if that's okay, if I can call you that news at this stage, it's lovely to be with you. I live in South Sudan and I work among the Dinka community, and we love our cows and our bulls, and we name ourselves after the cows and bulls. So given your beautiful white hair, if you come to Rumbek, we would probably call you Maboor. If you go further afield in the Dinka land, you could do Mabior. So you're also welcome abore to South Sudan. We'll greet you from South Sudan. It's lovely to be with you as well. And you're in Rumbek, South Sudan. Right in the town of Rumbek. We're right in the center of the country of South Sudan. Nice town. We're living about eight kilometers from the town, so we would consider ourselves villagers that we're living in village life. There is a town beside us of Rumbek, but we live in a nice community. You've been there amazingly since two thousand and six. Heaven, things changed significantly in that fourteen year parade. I don't think salth No, it's true. As a congregation where Laretto Sisters otherwise known as the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and we had a very daring adventure in two thousand and three two thousand and four. Our leadership called it the Courage to Move, and they invited our sisters in the different countries to reclaim our missionary spirit and to refound new missions in new countries. So sisters went to different countries, and the Irish sisters accepted the invitation to come to what was then known as Southern Sudan and Southern Sudan. When we arrived, they had just ended the Second and Yanya two, which was another twenty years of war, and they had signed a peace agreement. It was none of the comprehensive peace agreement, and we just came in at the beginning of that peace agreement. It was very exciting because part of the peace agreement was to look at the possibility of independence. Would South Sudan look for independence or now? I remember the President Salvikir coming to visit us and run back in two thousand and seven and saying, we're not rebuilding South Sudan, We're building it. Sometimes when you see pictures of Syria and Afghanistan, you see cities being rebuilt after war. We were never built. So we were starting from the ground up and it was full of hope. Two and eleven, it was fantastic. Over ninety nine percent of the population voted for independence. But sadly in twenty thirteen we went back into a new civil war, which has created a different environment in a different spirit for us. But people are still very strong people are still very courageous and ambitious for wanting a new spirit in a new land. And you've been a part of that beauty. And the time you got there, didn't you develop both of school and to some extent a medical system. We live in a beautiful village here, mccarquay, and we've a very persuasive chief and elders. They're really wonderful people, but they like encouraging us to more. We're also an ignation congregation, so that idea of magus and more is profeably buys into it for us a little bit. It was very clear when we came the bishop had invited us in the diocese to begin a girl's boarding secondary school. Now, in two thousand and six, there were four girls in our state in secondary school. So when we arrived, the people thought we were mad. They were wondering why we had come to educate girls when girls weren't even going to primary school. But we had a great foundress four hundred years ago, and she used to say women in time will do great things. And she also suffered a lot of her own injustices and challenges in life, so we were not to be put off. We started a boarding school for girls. Thirty five girls came in the beginning. Half of them were nearly gone by the end of the first year. But we have been very blessed. The school has prospered. And then as the school was settling down, the chiefs knocked on the door and said, now you have a secondary school, but what about our own children in the village. They're not even going to primary school. We started a simple primary school under the tree with some of the locally teachers. The primary school now is actually our bigger project. We have one thousand, two hundred boys and girls, whereas the secondary school is three hundred girls. And then, of course the chief not happy with it enough. He came back for more and he said, what about a clinic? We need healthcare, And it's true one of the challenges in South Sudan, aside from education, is healthcare. So in twenty sixteen we started a clinic for the local community and that's been a great outreach to the community as well. He has come back looking for a university, so we've told him to relax that we've mowefully done enough and hopefully the graduates will be who wants to do more As time goes on. You know, we have that traditional Catholic model of missionaries. We come start, educate and healthcare, and I think that's been very important in South Sudan where our literacy, I think we're amongst some of the worst in the world. And girl child education is also a very sadly lacking as well. They would say statistically, over fifty two percent of girls are married by the age of eighteen, so it's very hard for a girl to go to school. It's extremely hard for a girl to finish school. But thank god, our girls are prospered. Many of them are going on to university and we're seeing the fruits of it now because the first graduates are back working with us. We have three of our graduates and I'm working with us after finishing university, so that's been great to live through the whole process with them as well. So you were really startling impact in terms of Dinka culture, weren't you. The Ato Dinka is the dominant tribe in your area. Yeah, and I consider myself a Dinka as well. In all of this, strong, brave, courageous, determined would be some of the words I would probably use. But in the last years, even along with the noware tribe. They've probably suffered the most of the tribes because of the recent wars. So if I go around the village, I'm forty seven. If I go around the village, I won't find an adult male or female educated within ten or twenty years of me. It's the young generation now that they're getting a chance to be educated. Because the last war, it was the Nowhere Dinka let me say, war against the North, so a lot of the communities would have suffered within those tribal areas, but the recovery is there. They're very ambitious people. Our girls are really strong and determined what might make us give up. It's almost like an energy for the girls to keep going. If they know that there is an obstacle, they will want to face it and they will want to challenge it. And that's probably one of the reasons why they have done so well despite all of the trauma and the challenges as well. So can you explain a little bit, because I was fascinated the first time we had a chance to have dinner and talk about this the central importance of cows two dincers and of the girls to the cow economy, and why that posed a unique challenge for you in getting young girls to be able to go to school. Can you just walk through that entire culture. Yeah, we love cows. I think I have seen pictures of American cows and ranches, but you have no idea. Even Irish, we love our cows, but nothing like specifically. I'll talk about the Dinka how we love our cows. Young men will room their cows. They will name their children after their favorite bulls. They will sing songs about their bulls. Their whole life revolves are and the care of their animals. They will sleep with them in what we call cattle camps where pastoralists so we move with the cows where there's water. The cow is the defining identity for the young man. And when a young man comes to marry, he must have cows. If he doesn't have cows, he doesn't marry. That's the greatest insult you can call. A man is a man without cows. That's the big curse word for us. When a young man marries work electivist community, so his uncles, his family is an extended family. All the males will join together and contribute for the bride wealth, and then they will approach the girl's family displaying the cows and the bulls that they have to offer, and the girl's family again. The male members of the family will agree or disagree, depending on what they see and how they talk with one another. Once the marriage is sealed, the girl is brought into his family. She becomes the property of his family and his extended family. So when they give birth their daughter, particularly their firstborn daughter, she's very precious because I suppose in Western terminology we would say she's a return on the investment. Her bride price will now compensate the uncles for the money that they had given years earlier. So very often we all welcome a girl into our school, we'll often ask the girl in which position are you born in your family? Are you the firstborn girl or the second born girl, because if she the first born girl, it will be very hard for her to finish her education unless her father has independent means, because his uncles paid for his wedding. Those uncles in turn want their cows back, So if they say the girl is mature enough, they will insist that the girl be married, and if he can compensate them with a few cows, they may be satisfied. But if he can't, then he is really vulnerable to them. So it's a big challenge in the culture. I know our girls, as they get more educated, they get a little bit more challenged by this because one of their common debates is we're not property, we're not objects to be sold. But it's more than that, I think, you know, if we understand in that way, we're limited. It's a bigger vision of a collective as system that has worked for generations and for centuries. So again, you been Mabire, you would be called after the favorite bull of the family. You were born maybe with white hair. Let me just give you the example, and the family decided that this is our favorite at the moment, and you're the latest baby, so you get the name a bore. For me, I'm called Yom. I'm seeing as a brown and a white faced cow. So our whole social life, let me say, revolves around our cows and our bulls. What would a typical bride price be? I mean, how many cows would be in a typical bride price. Now in Rumbek we're probably more into this than other Dinka areas. So in Rumbek, your average is probably fifty to one hundred exceptional case, we've had a few students married for over two hundred and fifty cows, and then we've had other cases where girls were married for twenty or thirty cows. Interestingly, it's a huge economy, but we don't translate into a cash economy. It's very interesting. It's very hard for a brother to sell a cow for his sister's education. It's very hard for someone to sell a cow for healthcare because this is more than their pension fund. This is like their whole identity, and their social identity and their cultural identity and generations of it mixed in together. So it's quite a challenge for them. So when you first started the high school, wasn't that almost a direct challenge to their culture. Oh? Yeah, we got into a lot of trouble. I seem to get into trouble all the time. I don't know how. You know how I do it. Even when I try not to get into trouble. I get into trouble by virtue of educating girls in a culture where girls are not educated, it is already a challenge to the culture. There were a few challenges in the beginning. First of all, we were foreigners. We knew very little, even though we had come and we had to spend two years trying to learn the culture. I think that the longer you live in a culture, the more you realize you don't know about a culture, or you have to learn. So the first challenge I had was we used to have a visiting day in a Sunday, and you would expect a nuclear family coming from the West. You'd expect maybe two or three brothers, maybe maybe a sister or whatever. But here, after six or seven weeks, I was discovering students were having visits from different brothers every week, and one girl in particular, I had a visit from twelve different brothers. So I called her aside one day and I said her, think it's really your brothers are what is it? And she said, you know, sister. There were two answers to the question. She said, in our culture, everybody is my brother. If he's my cousin, my first cousin, my second cousin, my third cousin, we call him brother. But he said, you know, we're polygamusts in this culture. So my father actually has fifty wives and I have one hundred and ninety two brothers and sisters. I thought the Mother of God. That was the first eye opener that I got. Needless to say, we stopped visiting Sundays and we reintroduced a different system to facilitate family visits. But the other challenge was we realized that the father could bring the girl to school. The father could say he wanted the girl educated, but the uncles were the ones to come to take her out of school, and this became a big challenge to us. Initially, we didn't understand what was happening, so the girls used to go home and then we two they were married. But after a few years we realized that actually this is the first marriage. We talk about the marriage situation. It's the uncles that are coming looking for the girl to be taken out of school. Though the father has committed to us that she can stay, the uncles want the cows, so it becomes a big family challenge. Now we've got to the stage we have a legal document. When the girl comes to the school, a male member of her family has to sign a legal document and he's held to it. We had a case last year where one of the guys was arrested by his extended family because he was the guaranteur for the girl, but the extended family had not agreed for the girl to go to school, so the family arrested him. But good enough, we had the legal document. The case went to the governor's office, the guy was released and the girl was allowed to continue with their education. So things are changing. The girls themselves are also challenging it, and they are wanting education, and they are wanting a future because they believe that's the only way they're going to help their families in the long term. And from their standpoint, though, when you talk about girls coming back from college, you have really change dramatically the core nature of their experience, haven't you. I wouldn't say that we would take the credit because these are girls that are pretty determined that this is what they want, that they want to be the change. I think their argument is that the bride prices paid their cows. Those cows get sick, they die, or they are given away. Who is going to support the children, Who is going to support the family long term? And they're realizing that education is a long term investment and that education generates an income for life. So a lot of the girls are beginning to see this. They're seeing the older graduates graduating, they're getting good jobs. I mean, South Sudan is running on NGOs, so there are opportunities for women the government at twenty five percent. There's talk of forty percent jobs for women. But we don't have an educated class of women yet. So our girls are being snacked up when they get educations and the families are beginning to realize this is another way, this is another investment into the family and into the future. So they're radical, they're cheeky, they're brazen as well, and wonderful that they have the courage to do it, because really it takes a lot of courage for a girl to last that long in education. I guess I should mention. In two and fifteen there was declared one of the worst health emergencies in the world. In two seventeen there was a genuine famine. How do you function with that? Many different things going on and unfortunately continues in different ways. I think the latest statistics were a country about the size of Texas with eleven million people, but we have seven million who are food dependent or in need of food support, and we have four million that are displaced. That's two million in the country and two million outside the country. Those challenges continue. I kind of have a cynical answer in one sense and say that the people that we are working with have come through war, They've been born through war. They each generation has experienced a few years of peace. But they are real people of perseverance, and they are real people that can cope under severe conditions. You and I wouldn't cope because we haven't been born into that, but they can. For us, our programs keep extending. We have a lovely program now with interns. We have now thirty interns working with us. They're male and female who are finished secondary school and they come back to work for a year or two before going to university. We found during coronavirus this year, many of the ones that we had sent off to university all came back and we sat down. The schools had been closed by the government, and we sat down with the clinic team and we asked the clinic team what do you want to do, and they said, you know, coronavirus is only one challenge to us in this environment. Hunger, malnutrition, and malaria are there all the time. So they said, what about we continue we support them. So the graduates came back themselves and every day the clinic team with the graduates used to go out to the village and talk to the people. We gave some food support. We got a lot of support from our partners, American partners we have Sudan Relief Fund CRS as well, and our own sisters in America as well. They partnered with us and we were able to get food support the community. But our fundamental point is it's not just about food, it's about education. So the grants were going at teaching handwashing, they were teaching about coronavirus, they were teaching about malaria, and they were teaching about malnutrition and better nutrition. Because for us, we believe that you can feed a person for the day, but next week they're going to keep coming back for more, and you just create a dependency. So the idea for us is educated, let's find new ways and creative ways of helping the local community so that they're not dependent, that they're not coming to us all the time. But it is challenging, and they are people who have suffered much in these years. That one is very obvious to me. They're surrounded by courage. You were born and grew up in Ireland there anything, and that a super age prepared you for this. I have four older brothers. I have four older brothers who prepared to me plenty. We came from a very good home. My mother in particular, was very involved in social groups and in welfare groups, and she would have been very aware of people who were in need. So I would say from a young age that message was clear that if you have, you share, and that was a value that probably has continued with me, that if we have something, we can share it with others who are close to us, and remember that it's not just about our own selves but about others as well well. And if I remember, Craig, when you talk about sharing and about having courage, weren't you at one point threatened while helping deliver a baby. There were many times when we've been threatened. I don't like to focus on myself when I talk about these things, because I think what our students experiences more than what we've ever experienced. When you do something against a culture, or when people perceive that you're acting against a culture, there can be a threat to that. And the one thing I love about the INCA culture is that we can be enemies today and tomorrow we will sit and make peace and be friends. There was one story of one of our students who just arrived into first year. She was sixteen, and again our students can be a bit older because of the war. She was sixteen, she went home for her first home visit, and when she went home, she was taken by her family to the village to be married. She knew she didn't want to be married. At sixteen, she was the only female in her extended family to be educated. She ran away and she tried to escape back into school. Now you can imagine that in western world, where kids are escaping into school. She was on the road trying to get back into school, and unfortunately a relative of hers was a policeman who was working the checkpoints and he found her. So she was taken back to the home and the family eat her and tied her up, and again they threatened her, but again she didn't give up. The next night, when she could find a quiet moment, she got a sister to help her and she escaped again back to school, and this time she hid for a few days in an unknown place. She has never revealed where she was until she came back to school, and when she came back to school, she said to me, I'm never going home again. I said her, how can you say that? And she said, because I see the suffering of my people. She comes from a part of our area where there is no secondary school and where it's difficult to find educated men, let alone educated women. She said, the only way I'm going to help my extended family is by education. And she said, though I stay here for four years, she said, I don't mind. And she stayed and she continues to stay. Now. The tragic part of that story is she made peace with her father. About three months ago. Her father eventually came to the school and we had a very good meeting with the father and he accepted that this was going to be her way. She's now eighteen. He accepted that there was pressure on him. She is his firstborn daughter. He accepted there was pressure on him. But now he realizes that she is doing well in school, she's looking well, she's talking well, and she can do something for the community according to the local culture. He handled her over to us and we had a very beautiful moment with him. That man sadly was killed in his home three weeks later, so the girl went back into the whole spiral of why am I here and what did I do? But after another few weeks she has come back. Now she is the person to try and advise her mother and to advise her followers to live in peace, because one of the problems of our culture is revenge. We tend to be people of revenge, and if someone is killed, we want to revenge for that person. But she is saying to the family, what is the value in revenging? She said, if we revenge, somebody else is going to revenge. So for me, people like her are extraordinary examples of courage and adversity in the face of whatever small things I might have experienced. We have families coming with guns, We have families coming to try and beat us, but you know, we have staff who support us, so we're never really in the firing line. But they are. The girls are. They're beaten at home, they're threatened, and they have to sneak away to go to school. I love telling that story to students in western world who don't want to be in school. I have students who sneak into school so that they can learn. It is amazing, isn't it? And also shining something we've no longer able to get across to our own young people. They education is the future, absolutely extraority. I mean, the latest statistics in South Sudan is I think thirty seven percent of girls may go to primary school, but about seventeen percent may finish primary school. About four percent of girls may go to secondary school, but maybe one to two percent may finish secondary school. So it's a privilege. It's an absolute privilege for girls. I think the UN had a statistic a few years ago, and I don't know if it's still true, but it was certainly true about five years ago. A fifteen year old girls South Sudan is more likely to die in child than to finish secondary school. I mean, that's a very stark reality for the life that we're living here. But I thank God for the girls that we work with because they're absolutely determined, headstrong that they are going to be educated and that they are going to make a change for their country, for their families, for themselves, because they see that that's the only way to improve things into the future. You know, listening to you on the courage that you give to your students, but you also obviously live I remember in twenty nineteen, you've got the State Department International Women of Courage Award sitting down there in round it. What was your first thought when you heard you were going to receive that award in Washington. I actually thought it was a joke. That was my first thought, and then I thought, no, it's right, but it's not right for me to accept it. It's right for the girls to accept it because when I see what they've enjoyed, hands up to them. I've experienced nothing to what they have experienced. When you live in a culture that is set a particular way and you come along as a young person at fifteen and sixteen years of age and say I want to do something different and I am ready to sacrifice everything for that. I mean that to me is absolute courage, the epitomey of courage, and they are ready to do absolutely anything for it. As sisters. I suppose the joke of it all was our moving. Hugh was known as the courage to move. And yes, in many ways people might say that we were courageous and brave and whatever, but you know I was a young sister and I was adventurous, and I was only dying to get to South Sudan. I had looked at the map and it was part of Sudan. By then. I looked at all these countries Kenya, Uganda, Congo. I won't say about some of the other neighboring countries like Eritrea and Libya, because they were more challenging at the time, but I was all excited. I thought, this is great, I'm going to see the world. I never thought of a personal cost to me, but I see that personal cost every day with our girls and the challenges that they have within their own families and within the culture that in order for them to be educated, they have to stand against their local culture. I know that when closely both nominate you, and then when you and she were in Washington the other she really thought it was an honor both to know you and through you, to know the girls and to realize what you are trying to accomplish. And it's really been a remarkable commitment on your part. Do you have any regrets about having spent this much of your life in South Sudan. Absolutely not. My regret might have been that I didn't come when I was younger. I came when I was thirty four, but already. I think thirty four is hard to learn new culture and new languages. No, never, there's never a day when I would regret. Absolutely not. I have loved it, and I pray God that I will continue for many more years here because for me it's a great mission. But more than a great mission, I have just loved it. Every day I have loved it. That said, you see the worst of yourself and the best of yourself in a mission like this. It is very humbling to work with the people that I work with every day, very very humbling, and I realize often how selfish I am or how self centered I am. But then you're out to work with young people and you see these young women of vision and courage and ambition, and it's just wonderful. Every day I can listeners help you with your mission in life. I always say to people, there are a number of ways you can help. The first way I would say to people is learn about South Sudan. Don't forget about South Sudan. And I don't mean just learn about the bad things of Suzudan. Learn about the good things of South Sudan. I think many of us in Western world we consider Africa and we lump it into one ball. South Sudan is so rich. It has sixty four different ethnic groups and as I said, it's the size of Texas, so it's a hugely rich environment. And I would encourage people to learn more about these countries. The second thing I would say is pray we do have challenges still in the country, and pray for our young people in particular because really they need a lot of support. And the third way always I love saying, is we need your money. Please dig deep and give your money. Am I allowed to say that? Maybe your yes, I'd like you to tell them, Okay. We have a website. It's www dot Loretto Rumbeck. That's l O or et o or umbek dot ie. It's an Irish server, Loretta Rumbeck. If you google it you'll find the website and on it we have a link to donations and we have a link to emails as well, so you can contact directly as well. We would be very great for any support, Joan, and we will put that on our show page so people can find it and can get in touch with you directly. Now, will you be celebrating Christmas? Yes, so we put the Christmas tree up here only the other day, two days ago. Definitely celebrating Christmas. We do it differently. Goat is our festive meat. So we have actually twenty five students with us for Christmas. These are girls that live far or because of the threat of marriage, they are not able to go home. So we have twenty five girls for Christmas, and we hope to kill a fatted goat and to celebrate nicely with that. That's great in mind, stand very to you, but we just love the thought of us. Oh, I think that's terrific. Now, I think it's wonderful. So all I can say, Brown Cow with a white face, is that you have a remarkable mission. You are doing amazing work. Every time I talk with you, I'm humbled by your courage and by your generosity and focusing on others, not being focused on your own ego, but rather on helping the people that you serve and that you work with. And I hope that our listeners will take seriously the opportunity to make this a slightly better Christmas by providing help. I can assure them, having known you and talk with you many times now, that you will use the resources wisely and that people's lives will be better because of their generosity. So thank you very very much for sharing with us new Thanks to you, I should call him a bore now that you have your new Jinka name. And also greetings to our ambassador Enrich and to all of you wherever you are. We wish you all a very Christmas from all of us in Sudan. Thank you so much. News World is produced by Gingwich three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Debbie Myers, our producer is Garnsey Sloan, and our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was created by Steve Kendley. Special thanks to the team at Gingwich three sixty. If you've been enjoying news World, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcasts and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about. I'm new Gangwich. This is newts World.