Jun 13, 2017
In Women of Sudan Part Two, five Sudanese mothers talk with remarkable honesty about the struggles of learning to raise children in a society radically different to where they themselves grew up.
From a village lifestyle, without money and surrounded by people who know you and step in to help, to a Western city, where teenagers have debit cards and are not accountable to most of the people around them, these parents encounter problems they have never seen before.
Recognising that many of the techniques they knew in their homeland are not appropriate here, such as corporal punishment, and tired from the seemingly endless tasks of learning to integrate into a new country, such as learning the language, understanding the housing system and finding somewhere affordable to live, training for and finding work, learning to use public transport, all underpinned by the trauma which they carry from the civil war in Sudan, it is little wonder that the task of learning an entirely new approach to parenting sometimes feels impossible.
In a life where they no longer have an extended family network to turn to, these mothers often feel quite lonely and isolated, sometimes to the point of wanting to give up. Their resilience comes, in part, from gathering together, from the solace of friends.