SUDAN: Girls facing forced marriage in lieu of blood money are choosing to remain under guard in Kenya, reports Rob Crilly from Kakuma refugee camp
Rebecca Abau was 500 miles from home when her hand was offered in marriage.
The first she knew of it was when her uncle arrived from Sudan at Kakuma refugee camp, over the border in Kenya, to take the 14-year-old back.
"He said that I could not go back to my mother in the camp, I was going to Sudan," she says quietly in the language of her Dinka tribe. "He told me not to cry because there was nothing I could do." Her mother had already been beaten senseless in their cramped, mud hut. The terrified teenager was on a bus headed for the Sudanese border before she could resist.
A year later she is safe. Rebecca, now 15, lives in a guarded compound within the refugee camp.
Five months after southern rebels and government ministers signed a peace deal to end 21 years of civil war, she is one of 13 young women filled with fear at the prospect of returning home.
They cannot walk around the vast camp alone, but must be accompanied by a security guard to protect them from abduction.
Rebecca furrows her brow and trembles as she tells her story. Her troubles began when her father, who remains in their home of Western Equatoria, shot a neighbour. She doesn't know how or why - perhaps it was an accident while he was training with the Southern rebels, or maybe it was a dispute over cattle. All she knows is that according to Dinka tradition he was obliged to compensate the neighbour's family with cows.
But he could not spare any cows and offered his daughter's hand instead; he sent his brother and an accomplice to snatch her.
Rebecca managed to escape during the journey to the Sudanese border. The bus was crowded so she had to stand while her uncle took the last spare seat and she managed to slip off at a bus stop in the Kenyan town of Lokichoggio before he could react.
Today she lives in a safe haven run by the Jesuit Refugee Service.
"I feel OK while I live here, but I cannot go to school, I cannot leave the compound. I cannot learn here. But going back would be worse," she says.
The girls spend their days cooking and cleaning for the other residents of the fenced compound, mostly young adults with learning difficulties.
There is Jane Achiro, now 19, who hunches her shoulders every time she speaks. She fled Sudan for the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, when she was 14. Her father killed an eight-year-old girl while he was training with the Sudanese People's Liberation Army. He offered his daughter to the girl's 55-year-old father.
And there is Mary Anyieth (28) who stays in the compound so that her two brothers cannot exchange her for cows. She still feels pain in her chest and back from a beating she endured at their hands almost a year ago.
Kakuma is home to 67,000 refugees who fled the war in southern Sudan.
By the time peace was agreed in January, two million people had lost their lives. Another four million had left their homes.
Refugee agencies have spent the past months planning how to send the Kakuma residents home. Many do not want to return to a country with a shattered infrastructure and where famine stalks the land.
Rebecca Horn, counselling co-ordinator with the Jesuit Refugee Service, said the girls' experience was common among Sudanese families.
Girls are offered as compensation in lieu of blood money. In other cases, widows are married off to relatives of their husband so that their children remain within the family.
"But what is changing is that the girls don't want it. Maybe they never wanted it, but now they are resisting it," she said.
"They have grown up here to learn that there are certain things that you have a right not to expect."
The camp is dotted with signs proclaiming, "Women's rights are human rights", and "Human rights protect all equally".
The result is a clash of cultures, says Horn, with many young adults unwilling to return to Sudan and accept traditional practices or a society where only 500 girls finish eight grades of education each year. The United Nations' refugee agency is already grappling with the issue.
George Okoth-Obbo, UNHCR Kenya country representative said his organisation was working with local authorities to ensure that female refugees would be guaranteed basic rights.
"Not only are women concerned about forced marriages as a reality that is happening now, but they are also concerned with the broader question about how will rights that they have now become familiar with, be secured on their return?" he asked.
Back in the guarded compound, Rebecca is planning her future, making sure she has the means to escape the country she was born in. "I cannot go to Sudan. I want to get an education here so that if I have to go there at least I know that I can get away from my husband, and look after my children," she says.
"I want to have my own life".