the Lost Girls of Sudan

Getting through the second third of the book was harder than expected mostly due to thin pages and small text, but I decided to focus on something I noticed very early on in the 2nd 3rd. That was the Lost Girls. Valentino describes a woman from Kansas talking about the undervalue of the suffering of the Lost Girls on page 180-181. This is because there were so many more Lost Boys than girls, as the girls were mostly abducted along with their sisters and mothers. They must've met a fate far worse than those who traveled. But even so, there were about 3,000 girls who made it to the Refugee camp in Kenya out of about 20,000 children (Slate News). The camp was Kakuma, the camp Valentino meets Tabitha in and spends a lot of time in. One reason that there were so many more boys than girls who escaped was because the boys and men were usually out and about and when they saw a fire starting or murahaleen coming, they fled or ran into the forest. Meanwhile the women and girls were inside cooking or cleaning and were either killed or kidnapped. Another odd phenomenon is that out of the amount of Sudanese settled in the U.S. which is approximately 3,700, only 89 were female. That means that hundreds or thousands of girls are still in Kakuma. Maybe helping the young ones, or maybe not bearing to leave for fear of a new country. 

Even though the camp is a refugee camp and is now supervised (for the most part) by a US official, girls in Kakuma are still raped and married off to those who can afford it. The population of Kakuma has a large population (for a camp) but can only actually take care of a small portion of those there. There are a lot of diseases present and violence. Why have people forgotten about the other whole gender of the incident? One reason is that most boys who came to America were put in group housing (a more "rough" condition) and were giving psychological care and treatment, but girls were almost all put into foster homes (for "nurture") and were expected to be taken care of mentally by their foster parents, but no foster parents actually looked into that kind of care for their new child. The lack of psychological care in women made it much harder for them to be officially resettled in the US, and people choosing who to resettle chose those who were more mentally stable. This error was committed by the UNHCR, and it was brought up to them many times but they haven't done anything to change it. I believe that everyone deserves to be given the opportunity to start over, and that won't be able to happen when the Lost Girls are being ignored.