Lillian gives out certificates to graduates at a TfS
award ceremony in 2006
In Cairo, where my husband Alan Goulty was Deputy Head of Mission in the
early 1990s, I found myself with time on my hands when the manuscript of my
book about China’s relations with the Middle East was at last sent off to
the London publisher. Seeking a sabbatical from intellectual activities, I
decided to do something which would be stimulating but entirely different.
But what? At lunch a couple weeks later, two British women friends gave me
marching orders.
“Start the Samaritans here in Cairo,” they said, pointing to the evident
need and to my past experiences in London. Befrienders Cairo began in early
1992. Within a short while we had several score Egyptian, British, American,
and other volunteers and by telephone and face to face were helping people
hold on to hope through use of “listening therapy”. By the time I left Cairo
two years later, I was exhausted and exhilarated and had turned my back
forever on academic endeavours.
Although I still sometimes mourn the loss of a professional identity, it was
the beginning of a journey which would enrich my life. I had become a member
of that vast group of unpaid workers whose efforts around the world save
lives, safeguard the future, fight poverty, protect the environment, empower
women – just to point out what immediately comes to mind. In short, I am no
longer a China historian. Since then, although I have written other books,
they are about suffering and injustice.
In 1995 we moved on to Sudan. Emboldened by becoming an ambassador’s wife
(if people persist in assigning rights and privileges to you, use them for
good!), I decided to educate myself about displaced Sudanese women. But the
wives of government officials warned me off at one of the first dinners we
gave in Khartoum.
"Don't go there"
“Don’t go there,” they advised sternly when I asked about the miserable
squatter settlements inhabited by some two million people on Khartoum’s
outskirts. “Those people are dirty thieves, diseased, ignorant, drunken and
immoral. You can do nothing for them.” Nonetheless, shortly therefore in the
company of a Catholic priest I visited Jaborona camp where in hovel after
hovel we came upon emaciated, hungry, even dying, people. It was another
step in my introduction to suffering, a journey which has enriched, enraged
and empowered me.
At first it did indeed seem that there was nothing which I could do to help.
What could one person do for thousands of people who urgently needed clean
water, food, medical care, education, and hope to hold on until somehow
peace was arranged and they could go home to southern and western Sudan? I
backed off for I had yet to learn that if we look long enough and with
compassion on the suffering of others, eventually we will “see” God and a
way forward will be found. But a seed had been planted in my heart.
Some months later when Alan and I were travelling in the Nuba Mountains with
a visiting British bishop, other women helped me begin to put pieces of the
puzzle together. In the first incident the mother of a girl who had,
unusually for a Nuba, completed secondary school, asked if I could possibly
help pay her daughter’s university fees. Having been helped through
university by others when my parents were unable to do so, I had long
thought of doing the same for one or two other needy women. So I agreed to
help for at least a year. Easy enough, I thought.
The second incident occurred during the same trip. The Episcopal Church of
Sudan bishop in whose diocese we were travelling took us to Delami, a
village whose people had experienced death and devastation in many forms
over more than 20 years due to the ongoing civil war. There, in a flimsy
shelter used as a church, Bishop Mubarak asked me to speak to the women. I
refused. What could I presume to say to these emaciated, seemingly hopeless
women who held up their sick and dying children to me in expectation? No, I
said. There is nothing I can say which will help. But as others among the
visitors spoke words of recognition and comfort, I realised that I, too,
must reach back.
So I told them that when I was a child and a Taiwanese woman asked my mother
who was her favourite among the six children, my mother replied without
hesitation that the sick child, the hungry child, the troubled child was
always her favourite, always had her attention. God, I said, to the Nuba
women is like that mother. Then the woman began to hug me and to weep with
me. There would be no turning back. I had stepped, all unknowing, into a new
world of spiritual enrichment and fundraising exhaustion.
Lillian receives a plaque of appreciation from Nancy Osman of
the TfS Graduates society in July 2006
In following weeks before I could say, “Hold on! I can’t possibly manage all
this,” not only were other Nuba mothers signing up their daughters for
university but the mothers were organising literacy classes for themselves
and expecting me to pay the teachers. The Bishop Mubarak Fund, known today
as Together for Sudan, was born in 1996. Meanwhile, I had shocked the
Khartoum Rotarians who, when they asked me to be Lady Speaker of the Year,
were told yes provided I could discuss suicide. Befrienders Khartoum opened
its doors in 1997.
About that time a group of well educated Sudanese Muslim women asked if I
would find some Christian women to whom they could talk about the need for
peace and reconciliation. Although the Christians were initially reluctant,
being in the minority, the group quickly bonded through the use of listening
therapy and then began to hold outreaches into the IDP camps. Everyone was
allowed to tell her story.
“Men want power,” the women told me, “But women want peace.” The British
Residence seemed to the women a neutral and safe venue and soon the Women’s
Action Group was born. As facilitator I was expected not to take sides, to
make certain everyone was allowed to speak, to settle the rare arguments.
And I learned more than I had ever hoped to know about women’s lives in
modern Sudan.
A WAG women’s centre was established before Alan and I were withdrawn from
Sudan in the aftermath of the American cruise missile attack on Khartoum in
August 1998. During the next nine months of waiting to return to Sudan to
collect our heavy baggage and our dogs, I went back to Khartoum once.
Shortly after return my visa was cancelled and I was expelled. Both
Befrienders Khartoum and the Women’s Action Group collapsed after five or
six years as the result of poor management and the changing political
climate. But Together for Sudan has been a registered English charity since
2000 and as director I now visit Sudan two or three times a year.
Words cannot express.............
During this past year we had over 240 women at university in Sudan, some 50
women’s literacy classes, a scholarship project for AIDS orphans, and a
teacher training and support project involving 25 schools for displaced and
marginalised children. Our AIDS Awareness and Eye Care projects reach close
to 40,000 people each year. And this summer Together for Sudan began women’s
literacy training in Darfur.
“Speak for us,” Sudanese women told me when I was forced to leave in 1998.
“Don’t let us be forgotten.” I owe them more than I can say. Someday they
shall live in peace.
Your support for the work of Together for Sudan
is a contribution towards peace building!