What it means to be a girl child in South Sudan🇸🇸 .

What it means to be a girl child in South Sudan🇸🇸 .

This is the reality I have seen most girls in South Sudan live through every single day.

Being a girl child in a South Sudanese household means constantly prioritizing everyone else before yourself. You learn early on that your existence is tied to fulfilling the expectations of your family, your society, and deeply ingrained cultural norms.

It means sacrificing your own education and school days so your siblings can attend classes, or staying home to cook so they can eat. It means dropping out of school entirely to be married off, sacrificing your future so that your parents and siblings can presumably have a better chance at life.

All in all, it means being entirely selfless — and suffering deeply without ever being appreciated, noticed, or heard.

The Unspoken Burden

But beneath the expectations, the heavy questions remain:

• Who notices my pain?
• When can I say no without the fear of being beaten?
• When will they see that I am still a child?

I am human, just like the rest of the family members I am sacrificing my life for. Don’t I deserve the exact same chance at a real life as them?

Who sees and feels my burden and pain when I can no longer contain it?

Am I only important as a tool, and never as a person?

Photo by Bryan Jesus De Los Santos Breton on Unsplash