One day in the spring of 2000 seventeen year old Rebecca Madut came back to her hut in Kenya's Kakuma refugee camp to find that her younger sister Amina had disappeared. Rebecca searched the neighborhood, her anxiety mounting. She asked neighbors and friends, but no one had seen her, or at least they didn't or wouldn't say. But even as she searched, in her heart Rebecca knew what had happened. Amina had been taken back to Sudan to be married off.

A week earlier a man who said he was their uncle had come for both of them. Rebecca had never seen him before. But then she only had dim memories of much of her family. She was a small child when she fled from her burning South Sudanese town of Rumbek as it was being attacked by Northern army troops and Arab militias. In the chaos of gunfire and explosions she had gotten separated from her parents. She didn't know what had happened to them, whether they were alive or dead. She had grave doubts about this so called "uncle" who had come to take her and Amina away. But she did know she was not going to let him or anyone else drag her off into an unwanted marriage.

Rebecca is telling her story sitting with her legs tucked under her on the deep leather sofa in the living room of the modest apartment she shares with her husband Mayen in Everett, Mass. With her ebony skin and elegant features, she looks like she could be a displaced African Princess. She laughs easily, even when the narrative of her life as a refugee gets very hard. And her laugh is contagious. Hearing it, you want to laugh along with her. These things happened, it seems to be saying, but there's no reason to get too depressed about them.

Rebecca and Mayen belong to a unique group, the Lost Boys and Girls of Sudan, parentlesss children who in the late 1980s trekked a thousand miles through Sudan and Ethiopia and survived traumas horrifying even by contemporary African standards. But for Rebecca that's hardly something to dwell on. It's just a fact, part of a life's journey that has led her at the age of twenty two to Everett by way of Natick, to admission to the University of Massachusetts, and to marriage last June with Mayen, whom she chose for herself because she loved him and he loved her.

Five years ago, afraid of being carried off like her sister into a forced marriage, Rebecca hid with friends and persuaded the UN to put her on an emergency resettlement list. That was how she found herself on a 747 packed with young Sudanese flying from Nairobi to New York and from there to new homes across the United States. "I knew coming here was a good opportunity," she says, "I could go to school and have a good life. Not people dying and all that."

But whatever Rebecca's fantasies about the good life she was about to enjoy, Boston in winter was a rude shock. It was December 22nd when she arrived, and the city was locked in a deep freeze. She was met at the airport by social workers from Lutheran Social Services and by the woman who would be her foster mother, Pam Goloski of Natick. Her new mother had a warm smile and a warm coat for her, but the wintry landscape chilled Rebecca's heart. In the car heading west on the Turnpike she felt sick and dizzy. "There was just white everywhere," she remembers. "No people at all. The trees were all dead, everything was dead. The place looked . . . not good. I wanted to go back."

Her case manager, Franco Majok of Lutheran Social Services, was also from South Sudan. He had arrived here years earlier as a refugee himself and he understood what Rebecca was going through. "You'll get used to it," he said. "It will get warmer and people will come outside. Things will look better to you."

But as time passed it didn't seem to Rebecca that anything was getting better. A lost boy who had been on her plane wrote to a friend from his new home in Philadelphia that even the sun didn't seem to be in its correct position in the sky. "Here in Philadelphia now everything is strange. Very strange!" In Natick, that was how Rebecca felt too.

Pam, her foster mom, was a single, professional woman who at the time had a new job as a data base manager in Boston, which meant she left the house early and came back late. Pam had also taken in Rebecca's friend Helen and her younger brother, John. But even their presence didn't keep Rebecca from feeling lonely and frightened. "I couldn't sleep at night," she recalls. "I was scared something was going to come. My friend was also scared. It was a strange country, we'd never been here. We had no idea what was going on."

Food was a problem too. There was plenty of it, unlike the one scant meal a day she had survived on for years in camp. Pam cooked a lot of different things, but they were all unfamiliar; they didn't look right and they didn't taste right. "We tried," Rebecca laughs. "Our case manager told us that if somebody does something for you, you can't say no. You have to try to like it, even if you don't really. So we tried, but we couldn't eat. Instead we ate cookies and drank tea, lots of tea."

Buying clothes also turned out to be more difficult than Pam expected. At Natick Mall Banana Republic, Old Navy, and The Gap beckoned with the latest young styles. But Rebecca would look at the window displays and say uh uh, not for me. "She was looking for the traditional long skirts and modest tops," Pam says. She could hardly find anything that was even acceptable. And those horrible, ugly winter coats were just baffling."

Although more than a hundred and fifty South Sudanese had resettled in the Boston area, only five of them were girls. Young Sudanese men and women have their own way of relating, but they don't mix in the casual way American youngsters do. And Rebecca's few Sudanese girl friends, her natural allies, lived with their own foster families in tough to get to places like Belmont and Brockton. Rebecca felt isolated. She was lonely all the time and school didn't do much to improve matters.

At Natick High School she found that her refugee camp English wasn't just inadequate for schoolwork, it also made it hard for her to relate to the American kids. "Their English was different," she says. " I knew a little, but not enough to let me talk to them. When I said something once I had to repeat it. I couldn't talk to anyone." It was the same in class. "I had to be quiet because I didn't know what to do. If I wanted to say something I was always afraid I'd say it wrong. So even when the teacher asked me I'd just be quiet." She felt constricted, her naturally ebullient personality locked into a straight jacket with no way for it to even peek out.

Her teachers sensed that they were dealing with a strong person, that underneath the quietness there was a determined, courageous individual. In their notes they said she was "tenacious," "independent." They also realized that the transition to American life was making her deeply disoriented.

As Rebecca tried to make sense of her new surroundings, one custom she found especially puzzling was the easy way American boys and girls got along with each other. "It was everything they did," she recalls, "the way they talked, the way they dressed. They were always together, boys and girls mixed. And we don't do that. Boyfriends and girlfriends holding their hands, kissing. Going everywhere like that. It seemed very strange. I didn't know if they should be doing that."

Even after her English improved and she became more comfortable with school Rebecca wasn't tempted to go out with American boys. Finding a way to understand them seemed a mountain much too high. Besides, there were plenty of South Sudanese young men around, and with so few girls, the boys were importunate, even demanding. In traditional South Sudanese life, a young man only becomes fully adult when he marries. Many of the lost boys were four or five years past high school age, so wives were getting to be a priority. And at 18, 19, 20 years old, the girls were intensely marriageable.

Rebecca was finding that by and large the mysteries of American life revealed their secrets slowly and grudgingly. But one of the things Americans did caught her attention fast and kept it. Pam, her foster mom, was not at home as much as Rebecca might have wished; instead she was out working. Pam had been a nurse for ten years, then had gone back to school to get a graduate degree in information systems. She had a car, her own house, her own money, her own life. She was an independent, single, modern American woman.

"At first it was a challenge because I think Rebecca expected me to be this woman who did all the traditional things, cooking and cleaning and so on," Pam remembers. "She had set ideas about what women and men did, what their roles were, and she really didn't understand that I was out there full time to provide an income and pay for the house and the other expenses. But then she began to see a more liberating aspect to it, that I was able to go where I wanted and do what I wanted, that there were other possibilities than staying at home and doing the traditional female things."

Pam's parents reinforced the message. They told Rebecca that men and women were equal, that men could cook and do laundry as well as women. Pam's brother would come over, prepare a meal and serve it to everyone. "That was mind-blowing," says Pam, "especially given the culture Rebecca was coming from, that a man would take pride in cooking and think it was a good thing, and the rest of the family would be praising him for it.

"We talked about it very openly, how things were back home and how they are here, and I would say, Well, that's a valid way of doing things in another country, but in this country this is why it doesn't work out that well. But I'd also emphasize that to have an equal relationship you have to be an equal. You have to get an education. You have to work. If you expect equality, there are two sides to it."

This very American notion of equality got Rebecca thinking. Back in the camp she dreamed she would be a lawyer, even though there was zero possibility of such a thing ever happening. "I didn't even know what a lawyer was," she says, "I just liked the sound of it. What I meant was that I wanted to be educated." She saw young women getting married and having babies immediately. She saw the subordination of wives to their husbands. She didn't think the women's lives were happy, and she wanted something different for herself. "If I was married back in Africa there'd be no school for me. Just babies and taking care of things at home." She had run away from exactly that.

And now she was with Pam, who was a living example of the ideas she had had back then. It made a huge impression. "I wanted to be like her," Rebecca says. "Even now I have that dream. I'll go to school, make a career. I'll have my own house."

But then reality intervened in the person of Mayen Deng, a tall, handsome lost boy she had known in camp. Neither had felt any particular spark then, but here something happened. Mayen and Rebecca starting courting, and before long things got serious. Which was a potential problem if his expectations were different from Rebecca's.

Quite a few of the Lost Boys had left girlfriends back in the camp. Several years after their resettlement in the United States many now have green cards or other travel documents. They can visit Africa and return. A growing number are heading back to get married, and most of these marriages are of a traditional sort. "In our culture, says Mayen, a student at Bunker Hill Community College, the man is responsible for every decision." But like Rebecca, Mayen was also absorbing American values. "When we got to America," he says, "we started a new life. Here everybody has the right to make a family together the way they want. It depends on how the girl and the boy understand each other. I told Rebecca, I want my wife to be educated. Like other American women."

America was working its influence on both Mayen and Rebecca. But they were also still very Sudanese, with roots planted in the traditional culture. Two years after she arrived in the United States, Rebecca got a call from her younger sister Amina, who had been spirited off to an unwanted marriage. Amina had managed to leave Sudan and was now in Canada. Then came even bigger news: their mother was alive and living in Nairobi.

Ecstatic, Rebecca found a way to call and talk to her mother, for the first time in more than fifteen years. In all Rebecca's rush of news, Mayen figured large. Rebecca wanted to get married. She needed her mother's approval, and she asked her to arrange the marriage with Mayen's relatives.

In the accepted South Sudanese way, Rebecca's mother needed a male spokesman, another of Rebecca's brothers who had managed to survive the war. Mayen's parents had not, but he had an uncle, also in Nairobi. When Rebecca's brother and Mayen's uncle had finished talking a deal had been struck. The traditional bride price Mayen would pay Rebecca's relatives was set. The marriage could now go ahead, and on June 12, 2004 Mayen and Rebecca were married at the First Lutheran Church in Lynn. Rebecca was given away by Pam Goloski's parents, and the church was crowded with both Sudanese and American friends.

It was a mixed affair in more ways than one. A young Sudanese couple was starting out their married life in America. Back in Africa their families had negotiated and come to agreement. A bride price had been set and paid. But it was in America that the bride and groom had been brought together, by love, with no involvement of elders or agemates, as there would have been back home. In their new life they saw each other as equals and they knew that to make it they both would have to work hard and study hard. And in this Rebecca's education was every bit as important as Mayen's.

It was complicated and maybe a little confusing "I can't take all of American culture, and I can't forget my Sudanese culture," Rebecca says. "I have to keep them both together, and that's kind of difficult. But am I managing," she asks, her contagious laugh breaking in, "yes I am."