February 4, 2005 (Washington Post) At 14, Mary Achok Marial knows how to handle an AK-47 assault rifle, but she can barely read. She knows how to forage for food to survive, but when she needs to buy salt in the market, she has trouble doing the math. "I need education," said the barefoot girl under the mango tree, tough and muscular from her years with a rebel group. Her left ankle is still scarred from a bullet wound.

"I was born during Sudan's war," she said, adjusting her cracked plastic headband over a clump of matted braids. "I am a child of war."

Mary is one of two female students at a crumbling school for former child fighters in this southern Sudanese town about 350 miles from the Kenyan border. Her education was interrupted by Africa's longest war, a 21-year conflict between the Islamic and Arab government in the north and the Sudan People's Liberation Army, a largely animist and Christian rebel group in the south.

Orphaned at age 7, she went to live with the rebels, mostly cooking and washing for troops in garrison towns, but also picking up a rifle and fighting alongside boys and men when the need arose.

Now, with a peace deal signed Jan. 9, the guns have fallen silent in one of Sudan's two civil wars; the second, in the western region of Darfur, continues to rage. In the south, the local populace is already starting to return, and children -- including hundreds of ex-soldiers -- are trickling back into schools. They sit under trees or in grass huts, learning without books, uniforms, writing tablets or chalk.

Soon, U.N. officials predict, the demand for education will soar. A spontaneous human cascade is expected to bring back about 3 million displaced Sudanese, both from other parts of the country and from refuges in Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda. As southern Sudan struggles to rebuild, the rebel movement, which controls much of the vast, undeveloped region, says it wants to make girls' education a top priority. But the obstacles are enormous in a region where 1.5 million children, many of them girls, are out of school.

According to UNICEF, a girl here is more likely to die in childbirth than complete primary school. The region has one of the highest female illiteracy rates on Earth, which means most girls have mothers who can't help them learn. And there are few qualified teachers, let alone female educators to serve as role models. On top of that, cultural traditions pressure girls to perform domestic tasks and marry young.

While Mary is determined to become literate and dreams of being a physician, her brother is dreaming of the dowry she could bring as a young bride. Even a girl who once fought for the "new Sudan" is now expected to wed at 14 and start producing its children.

'I Knew How to Fight'

Mary Marial's formal education ended the same year it began. She was 7, living with her parents and siblings in Aweil, a town close to the border with the north. She had just started attending class when the town was attacked. Her mother told her to hide in the thick bushes behind their huts. In the chaos, with people stumbling in all directions, she lost her parents. "I was small and I couldn't keep up," she said.

That night she saw their bodies lying in the dirt, bloated and silent. "They looked asleep, but I could tell what happened," she said. "Some neighbors were screaming and tugging at me to leave." Crying, she started walking with hundreds of others to a safer place. They hurried through thick and prickly grassland, without light or water. Mosquitoes kept biting her.

"There was no one to take care of me," she recalled. "I had no blanket and it was cold at night. We were seeing so many people dead."

Mary started sweating and feeling queasy. A rebel soldier picked her up and carried her. She woke up in a hospital in a town called Yei and found her older brother, Eziekel, standing over her. He was dressed as a soldier, and he told her he wanted to avenge their parents' deaths.

She said she wanted to be a fighter, too, but her brother said no. He enrolled her in a small school under a tree. The schoolhouse had been bombed earlier that year. But with thousands of displaced people squeezing into town, food became scarce and students stopped going to school. Mary and her brother had little more than wild fruit and small amounts of grain to eat.

"When hunger came, you threw your books on the ground," she said. The boys in her school gathered to listen to her tale, laughing softly in agreement. "When you are hungry you may eat any tree, and then your head aches and feels tight. You can't study when you have to spend your time finding what to eat."

A few months later, Yei came under attack. Bombs fell and bullets flew. One struck Mary in the ankle; she still limps from the wound. Soon afterward, Eziekel went off to fight with the Sudan People's Liberation Army, and she stayed behind in the garrison town, essentially becoming a servant at rebel camps.

"I was very small, but I wanted revenge," she said. "I was proud because I felt my parents would be happy that I was defending their memory. I wasn't having schooling. But I knew how to fight."

Most of the time, her job was to fetch firewood and water, to cook and clean. But she said she received training with an AK-47, and she fought alongside the older boys if attackers came. Sometimes they urged her to quit, but she refused. She killed, she said, and she saw people die.

"I wasn't scared. I wasn't going to run," she said. "I was fighting for a new Sudan. I wanted to fight like my brother. I was proud to be a shooter."

It would be another three years until she was reunited with Eziekel in Rumbek. He made her join a demobilization program, and her weapon was taken away. She was not yet 13.

Pressure to Wed

At the Deng Nihal primary school for former soldiers, Mary likes to roughhouse with her male classmates. There are 31 of them, mostly older than she. Mary is strong, with thick arms and hands, and she walks like a boy, with her arms swinging straight out.

One recent morning, she got into a playful fistfight. Her friend Moses Deng pulled her away. He's 19, still a fighter, but also a second-grader. Moses brought out his gun, a large AK-47 he keeps in a room behind the school. Mary was impressed. Deng said she should skip school and hang out with him. He punched her in the arm. She punched back. Another boy stepped on her foot, and she shoved him to the ground. He was smaller, and he started crying.

Later in the day, Mary confided that she had been trying to attract a certain boy by painting her nails purple. But the polish keeps peeling off, her clothes are always dirty and her headband never seems to be in the right place.

"I have never grown up with a mother," she said, shrugging. "Maybe that's why I am so tough."

Mary's main concern, though, is that her brother will marry her off. She is a member of the Dinka tribe, and according to its traditions, a bride in peacetime brings a dowry of at least 50 cows, which the groom's family gives to her closest living male relative. Mary, who is learning to read and write, said she would like to be a doctor. Eziekel, who was listening to the conversation, said that idea sounded "very strange."

"You just want the cows," she retorted. "You are always wanting my dowry now to sponsor your life."

"The war is over now," he responded. Mary, he said, "should be a caretaker and soon a mother."

In Sudan, where the average age at death is 42, a girl who remains unmarried after 16 is considered a "lonely one," or old maid. Parents also worry that sending girls to school will take them away from domestic chores, such as helping with washing, cleaning and fetching water. After the first few years of school, dropout rates for girls are staggering. At Rumbek Girls Primary School, there are 30 girls in each of the lower grades, but only six in the top class.

Since Mary is without parents, she can make more decisions for herself, but she said Eziekel has been pestering her to marry ever since she turned 14. As she trudged off to market to buy sugar and flour, he called her over to be inspected by a group of friends. "Girl-child, come here," he called. "She is strong," one friend remarked with a laugh. "I say, 100 cows." Mary gave him a fierce look as she strutted off.

Female Role Models

Inside a dark classroom, 100 teachers squeezed together in front of blackboard. They were attending a UNICEF training session in the nearby town of Marial Bay. Only seven were women. Mary Abuk, 18, soft-spoken and wearing a torn pink dress, said she wanted to help "my younger sisters all across Sudan." Abuk and the others believe the way to change the bias against educating girls is by acting as role models. They talk to reluctant parents, telling them educated girls can take better financial care of them one day.

"Educated girls can do math at the market and can teach their children hygiene," Abuk said. "They can also check their children's workbooks. It's better when a mother knows how to read."

But Jok Awil Jok, a local education administrator, said many parents would rather pay for their sons to be sent to school. They also may resist sending their daughters to distant schools, partly out of fear for their safety. To solve this problem, UNICEF has helped start all-girl schools close to villages, though they have few resources. In one such school, 28 girls sit on plastic bags and share 18 textbooks among them.

But lately, Jok said he has noticed that families who were wartime refugees in Kenyan camps, where girls' schools were set up by aid agencies, have been returning and telling other parents that educating girls is a good idea.

"In a strange way, the war opened some people up to new experiences," Jok said. "I think that influence will change things in Sudan.

Tradition Intrudes

One recent Friday, Mary's brother Eziekel began pestering her again. The weekend had arrived, and he was broke. He said she should leave school, and while they were in the market, he dragged over a pimple-faced man and said she should marry him. Mary rolled her eyes and started to shove her brother. Then she fell silent with her arms crossed, thinking about something she had heard at school: that educated girls bring a better dowry.

"How many cows am I worth now?" she asked her brother.

"Maybe 70," he murmured, getting her point.

"Please, if I stay in school like the girls from Kenya and wait, I will be worth more soon," she promised, reminding him that a friend recently fetched a price of 200 cows because she had earned a secondary-school diploma in Uganda. Eziekel nodded, and Mary trudged back to school, where the science lesson on hygiene was about to start. It was her favorite subject. But when she arrived, the teacher asked her to
make lunch. According to Dinka culture, when an older man asks a woman to fix a meal, she
must obey. Mary sighed but complied without protest.

"One quarrel is enough for this day," she remarked as she padded off to fetch water from the village well, a deep borehole. Dozens of older women were gathered around it, most with babies on their backs or toddlers tugging on their dresses. Deep in thought, Mary suddenly said that perhaps becoming a doctor would be "too much for a woman" with so many other chores to do. Maybe becoming a "girl-teacher" would be a better idea, she said with a shrug.

Then she returned to the school and cooked porridge over a charcoal fire. The boys came bounding toward her, fresh from their science lesson. As she served their lunch, she asked what they had learned in class.

From: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61933-2005Feb3.html