Researcher finds ‘work of my heart’ helping Sudanese women in KC

When Rebecca Mabior left her native Sudan 14 years ago, she was running for her life and the lives of her brothers, sisters and parents.

Like other women who fled during Sudan’s brutal 22-year civil war and eventually settled in the United States, there wasn’t time — what with raising a family and working — to think about the impact on her health.

That changed, though, when she met Martha Baird, who came to Mabior for help meeting other refugee women from southern Sudan in Kansas City.

At first, Mabior was skeptical. “We have been betrayed many times by people who don’t look like us, so I was not sure what she was up to,” Mabior said.

Baird was immersing herself in Kansas City’s Sudanese community, forging friendships while working to assess the mental health and well-being of the Sudanese women as they struggled to find their place here.

“I went to their churches and prayed with them, had tea in their homes, went to their baby showers, met their children,” said Baird, a teaching psychiatric nurse and researcher at the University of Kansas Hospital.

Her intent was to identify some of the psychological troubles that the women and their families faced.

She wants to see “lay counselors” emerge from within the community and ultimately build a network of women helping women to live healthy.

Some women, including Mabior, already have formed discussion groups and persuaded friends to go for checkups even when they aren’t sick — a concept that is foreign in their culture.

Baird, 61, of Leawood, last month received a $20,000 grant to continue her work of promoting refugee women’s mental health.

“It is the work of my heart,” she said.

Baird knew she couldn’t root out those at risk of mental sickness simply by talking across a desk or drawing blood in a lab.

“These people are never coming into a lab,” Baird said. “We have to go to them. You have to get out of the ivory tower and be people with people. Dealing with suffering is not clean work.”

Baird identified inner struggles being endured by some of the women within the patriarchal culture they carried from the African nation many fled between the late 1980s and 2005.

“I want to document the strength, the resilience of these South Sudanese women,” Baird said. “These are the strongest people I know.”

Much has been written about the 4,000 “lost boys” who crossed Sudan to neighboring Ethiopia, surviving armed militia and wild animals. Girls were kidnapped, raped, enslaved or killed during the unrest. But hundreds walked with the boys. Today, they are women with families.

“They are some of our newest citizens,” Baird said.

Nearly 42,250 people from Sudan and South Sudan, which became independent in 2011, have settled in the United States since the early 1990s. Many are women and children.

Nearly 3,000 from Sudan’s south live in the Kansas City region, clustered in Olathe, North Kansas City and St. Joseph. But most settled first in a neighborhood north of Independence Avenue in Kansas City’s Northeast area. Baird said they work hard to move up and away from that neighborhood.

Mabior, with her husband, John Akuei, and their three children, live in North Kansas City. The couple met at the former Sudanese Community Church on Benton Boulevard. John, one of the lost boys, has shared the narrative of his journey many times. Few outside their community have heard his wife’s story.

Mabior, 37, her parents and nine siblings were from Sudan’s south but lived in the north. Her father, an engineer, sent all his children to college. At 23, Mabior was a new nursing school graduate from Upper Nile University. She and her classmates were ordered by the Sudanese government to go south to care for its soldiers.

“These were the same soldiers committing genocide in the south. They killed my cousins, my grandparents. I refused,” Mabior said. “They said if I did not go, they would kill my parents and my siblings.”

When her father heard of her predicament, he was quiet, not wanting to appear selfish by telling her to obey.

“I was daddy’s girl. He was my hero. I knew the world had collapsed around me because even my hero could not handle this.”

Mabior hid for three months and then fled for Egypt in 2000. Two years later, Catholic Charities brought her to Minnesota. She didn’t speak English. America was confusing.

She moved to Kansas City in 2002 to be with a sister who has since moved away. In 2003, Mabior married and a year later her first son was born. In 2009, twins came.

Last month, Mabior earned her American nursing degree, putting her at the same professional level she’d held in Sudan. It took her 10 years.

“I recognize that I have post-traumatic stress,” said Mabior, an interpreter for Samuel U. Rodgers Health Center. “I get depressed. Then I feel ashamed, embarrassed about it.

“Ninety percent of the people who are here escaped death. So many other women saw the war. They saw people killed in front of them. None of that happened to me.”

Mabior is but one woman helped in Baird’s project.

“When I have any problem, I call Martha and she always has an answer,” Mabior said. “We talk probably every day. Even about things like what’s for dinner. She’s my very best friend here.”

The women were put together by Jewish Vocational Services’ refugee resettlement program, where Baird looked for a translator.

Baird, collaborating with Mabior, began with 10 women, talking about family, children and basic women’s health issues such as regular mammograms.

“We sent 10 women for their first mammograms and three ended up having to get treatment,” Mabior said.

The group’s number has tripled since it started.

Mabior said that once they’ve mustered the courage to see a doctor, the women begin feeling empowered, stronger.

Mabior knows the feeling.

“I’m an individual. I have my dreams. I have my accomplishments. I need to have my power, too. We are women changing this community.”

This story was originally published March 10, 2014 at 10:27 PM with the headline "Researcher finds ‘work of my heart’ helping Sudanese women in KC."