Elizabeth

When Elizabeth was eight, she lived with her parents and several siblings in a remote village in South Sudan with no school. Her parents are seasonal farmers who plant sorghum when the rains come. When the rains fail, the family depends on drought-resistant plants that grow wild in the forest. During the dry season, Elizabeth and her two sisters spent hours gathering these plants for the family to eat.

For years, a local education advocate had encouraged families in remote villages to send their children to school. In 2022, Elizabeth’s community finally agreed to let some of its youngest children go. Elizabeth joined six other girls on a four-day walk to Narus, where they enrolled at St. Bakhita Girls’ Primary School—MBB’s flagship project and South Sudan’s only all-girls primary school.

Elizabeth was the only child from her family to make the journey. She had never attended school and had no idea what awaited her. Her greatest hope was simply that the school would not send her back to the bush.

At St. Bakhita, MBB donors help provide Elizabeth with an education, daily meals, a safe place to live, and the support she needs to remain in school. Instead of spending her days searching for food, she now has the opportunity to learn alongside other girls, many of whom also traveled from isolated villages where education was previously beyond their reach.