Before civil war robbed Abang Othow of her childhood, she lived among mango trees near the river Nile in Sudan where the smell of her mother’s cooking laced the air and “life was surreal”.
Those are the memories she desperately clung to when, at age five, she was left “alone” to flee between the nations of northeast Africa as they were being engulfed by unspeakable violence.
Her young mind developed a colour-coded coping strategy during this time, based on the brightly coloured buckets her family used to carry.
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And as she compartmentalised her trauma, memories, and skills into red, green and yellow, she learnt that resilience, too, comes in buckets.
More than a decade later, Othow was 18 when she landed in Sydney as a refugee and began a four-year mission to track down a family she could barely recall.
Her father had been a university professor and her mother a secretary before “things changed”, Othow, now 42, told 7NEWS.com.au.
When the second Sudanese Civil War broke out in 1983, Othow’s peaceful life along the river was turned upside-down
One of her brothers was taken and forced to become a child soldier, while another brother died of cholera and malaria.
She herself contracted both malaria and the moniker “the child who would die”.
Her father perilously shifted into politics “to make a difference in the life of Sudanese people who were really suffering, he was advocating for minorities and for women and against the use of child soldiers,” Othow said.
He was posted to the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, where Othow’s mother soon also took her “to get more treatment” for the parasitic disease that was killing her. “I was actually dying,” Othow said.
Her mother dropped her off with her father and planned to return but the war escalated and she never did.
Her father escaped with five-year-old Othow to Ethiopia before he, too, left her in the care of someone else, and returned to Sudan to rally for his people.
“That was the last time I saw my father,” Othow said.
‘Terrible things were happening’
Othow would learn almost a decade later, as a young teenage girl, that her father had been captured and brutally murdered.
But before that information would reach her, she’d survive a “harrowing” years-long journey with her cousin.
The small girls had both become separated from the so-called carers their parents had left them with, before Ethiopia’s own civil war broke out just over a year after they arrived.
“We had each other but we were children … the people who were meant to look after us didn’t,” Othow said.
“Some of them were really bad … we were neglected children, abandoned.”
The girls managed to flee back to their home country — not the Sudan of Othow’s earliest memories “but this horrendous place called Kapoeta”.
“Heavy, heavy shelling” rained down around them during their five years in Kapoeta, which was the heart of the war zone at the time.
“So many terrible things were happening,” Othow said. “I had to try to survive.”
And survival for the two girls was as much a mental task as a physical one.
Buckets of resilience
For Othow’s cousin, who had polio and could only crawl from place to place, Othow said it was learning to cook that gave her a sense of power and freedom: “She could use her hands, she could use her eyes.”
For Othow it was the disciplined strength of a “powerful mind”.
Throughout the myriad horrors, she soothed herself by recalling the bright colours of those plastic buckets that her mother, grandmother and aunties would carry “joyously” as water sloshed within.
“I used to tell my cousin, ‘Remember the colours and the water?’ And my cousin just couldn’t. She would reply, ‘What are you talking about? We’re going to die’.”
As Othow spoke to 7NEW.com.au, she wore a bright yellow dress — the colour she has long associated with happiness.
“Now I always think in colours,” she said.
“The yellow bucket for me was for happy memories of my mum, the mango trees … I held on to that to try to stay alive.”
She recalled the green bucket, which she knew to carry food and so symbolised helping others. The red bucket was called to mind as a warning, “reading people, reading the environment, and being present,” Othow said. “The black bucket was resilience.”
From conflict to catwalks
Help came at age 11, when the girls were rescued and taken to Kenya — there, Othow managed to get just a few years of school under her belt, but it was enough for her to realise she may one day be able to define herself with words other than “war”.
“My world just opened up through books … and I realised how my life was so narrowed by war. I was thinking at that moment, oh my gosh, I’m not just a refugee, I can actually be somebody.”
Othow’s life went from conflict to catwalks when she landed in Sydney just before her 18th birthday and, after finding her feet in a St Vincent de Paul women’s shelter in Randwick, was approached to do modelling.
She modelled around the world, before quitting and training to become a school teacher, and then becoming a mother. Those roles each required their own form of resilience, Othow said with a laugh.
“The world of fashion can be glamorous … but it can also be predatory, and it can also be harmful for young girls,” she said.
“I gave up modelling because it felt like I could make an impact and really empower other people through education … I realised that what kept me alive for all these years was my mind.”
Othow said the lessons of resilience she learnt navigating war zones as a young child alone are not just applicable to those who have endured such extreme trauma, but for anyone moving through struggles in life.
She’s made it her mission to share her coping strategies, both in the classroom and as a public speaker, and soon with an interactive app currently in development.
Tracing distant links
The Australian Red Cross and the Red Crescent Movement’s Restoring Family Links program helped Othow to track down her family when she knew very little about them or where they might be.
“I had a gut feeling they were still in Sudan because I knew that my father had been killed, and it would be very difficult for women to escape,” she said.
They couldn’t locate her mother using her name alone but, because her father was a renowned and respected leader in Sudan, they eventually traced others from his tribe and, through local organisations, found Othow’s surviving relatives.
But the reunion at Sydney Airport was not what Othow had expected. “They arrived here as different people,” she said.
“It was quite emotional … there was nothing that (my mother) could recall of me.”
Then, Othow’s mother recognised her daughter’s eyes, which were large enough to have landed her a nickname in her native tongue.
She asked to see Othow’s left hand where a large, distinctive birthmark remained. “Yep, that’s it! You’re my daughter,” Othow recalls her mother saying.
Othow also discovered the memories of her “constantly joyous” mother with her “amazing voice” who was “always cooking” were not, in fact, memories of her mother but her grandmother.
Her mother, who had been busy with work in those early years, told Othow: “She used to look after you, that’s why you held on to her.”
Othow brought 10 family members to Australia including her siblings and their families, taking on the financial responsibility of doing so even after she was advised by some people “not to waste my resources”.
“I just knew within me that I could find them,” she said.
‘Half a million messages’
In the two years to 2023, the Restoring Family Links program has located more than 38,000 people, facilitated “more than six million unifying phone calls and delivered over half a million messages of connection”.
But within that timeframe, more than 177,000 new cases have been registered globally — with 2700 of those registered by people in Australia.
That represents a 20 per cent increase in cases from 2021 to 2023, which Red Cross Australia said is due to a rise in armed conflict.
“In the chaos of armed conflict, disaster or violence, families can become separated in a matter of minutes,” Australian Red Cross head of migration development Nicole Batch said.
For “outgoing cases” such as Othow’s, it takes an average of one and a half years to reach an outcome, she said, but that isn’t possible for everyone.
“It can take years for some people to find out the fate of their children, spouses, parents or other family members. Even more upsetting is that some never reunite — the impact of which can be devastating.”
The program — which has been running since 1915 — currently has a total of 653 active tracing cases in Australia, which represents 1449 people being sought on behalf of families.