Forty-year old Elizabeth Aluel is a vibrant woman with a strong personality, quick to anger, quick to laughter. She tells me in Dinka, “My life is divided; before the struggle and after the struggle. But I know that God is one, people are one and hearts are one. Even after the struggle, we are still one.”

Elizabeth says her childhood in Warrap, South Sudan, was happy, with ample food and fresh milk. She married a good man and mothered five children. During the war, she says, happiness ended. There was no medicine, no doctor; she watched two daughters die of sickness. One afternoon her village heard that an enemy attack was imminent, so two of her sons ran into the tall grasses to hide. The soldiers came and burned all the grasses and killed her two sons that day.

Elizabeth was a police woman during the war. She carried a gun and was told to shoot it, but she could not kill. Elizabeth says she would point the gun and pretend, because her superiors would be furious if they knew she did not shoot.

In 2003 Elizabeth’s husband was killed on his way to work on a farm. Elizabeth then came to Rumbek and found Sr. Mary Mumu and St. Monica’s Women’s Group. “I came to St. Monica’s, and Sr. Mumu became my mother, my brother, my husband, my child. At St. Monica’s if you are sick you can get medicine, if you are hungry you can have food. We go to class; we study English; we learn to sew. At St. Monica’s you are a person. Even if you have nothing, you are a person.”

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