Resilience

In 1992, two hours after she gave birth to her first daughter in Juba, Sudan, bombs began falling on the city. Like thousands of her fellow citizens, author Kiden Jonathan was forced to flee. Kiden, her husband, and their growing family spent the next seven years in refugee camps in Kenya and Uganda before they were granted the opportunity to immigrate to Canada. But Kiden’s problems weren’t over yet.

Despite having finally escaped the ravages of war and the poverty and uncertainty of life in the refugee camps, Kiden now faced another battle on a much more personal front: her marriage. She and her husband had had a rocky relationship from the start, with him seeking to control her every move. Conditioned by the norms of her culture, which placed women in a subservient role, she tolerated his behaviour for years—until she couldn’t. After twenty-two years of mental and physical abuse, she finally worked up the courage to leave him, taking the couple’s three children with her.

Since then, Kiden has been in the process of rebuilding her life and her sense of self, tapping into inner resilience that she always knew was there but which she was afraid to embrace for so many years. This is her story.