To our Honorable and Distinguished Guests

To our Great Artists of 21 Century

To our Youth and many members of our youth organizations

To our Beauty Queens, 2007 contestants

To Bol Tem, the President of Miss South Sudan Organization and its respected management crew

To you young Ladies and Gentlemen and to you my fellow men and women

I salute you and I have the pleasure and honor to be among you, especially the youth of our home-country, the Sudan in general and Southern Sudan in particular. You are the future of this great nation to be.

You are our pride and through you we’ll define our identity, and destiny. In you we foresee a bright and everlasting future for many generations to come. While the concerns of our Diaspora youth is challenging, it is of great concern to our government. Therefore, our government through its mission office in DC has picked great interest in this project in order to support, promote and empower young women for leadership and other developmental prospects. Dr. Kwegyir Aggrey, a Ghanaian Scholar once said, “If you educate a man you educate an individual, but if you educate a woman you educate a whole nation”. We have started slow and small yet it does not mean we will not grow and do better in the near future.

I would like to take this great opportunity to register our “Thank You” to our artists for their unconditional vigor to use music to promote peace, mollify broken hearts from the long consequences of war in our country and to educate the public about our struggles and the need for a reconcilable Sudan when we choose to be one country in 2011 referendum (if Unity is made attractive) or be good neighbors whenever the south chooses to go (if Unity is made unattractive). 

To our Veteran Emmanuel Kembe, and all musicians, your music is up-lifting and gives us reasons to still exist in order to positively contribute in the national building in order to make the Sudan a better place, and for all to coexist without any form of discrimination. Many revolutions were fought and worn through music. You are our soldiers in your own rights. Through music you have demoralized the enemy, empowered citizens, promoted optimism and positive thinking, culture and traditions etc. and can still do so until victory is worn in 2011.

To our youth (the Lost Boys and Girls students and all), your active contribution and participation in the front-lines during the liberation struggle both in the Sudan and here in Diaspora have contributed to the successful attainment of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. We are constantly reminded of those who could not make it, nonetheless, their ultimate sacrifices are written down in our hearts in special ink drawn from their own veins.  We are indebted to them and we’ll always honor them as long as we live. They are our heroes/heroines forever and their memories will live on where they will be enlisted in the history books for many to read and admire their bravery.  Your collective and individual participation is more needed now during this transitional period than ever before. I would like to acknowledge the active roles our youth play in many different developmental projects here in Diaspora and back home through their individual organizations. Thank you.

Having said that I would like go straight to the main purpose to which we are gathered here which is obviously to witness our Beauty Queens compete for the title of Ms South Sudan USA. The intriguing question to us all is:

What is Miss South Sudan Beauty Pageant?

To be quite honest with you, this is a challenging question to me and if I am not mistaken to many of you both young and old. The fact of the matter is that “Beauty is always in the eyes of the beholder”.  Beauty the abstract word is associated with female persona thus all women strive for beauty and beautiful possessions regardless where they come from, their cultural back-grounds, nationalities and race. For those who grew up in 70s, 80s and 90s, they have no recollection of beauty competitions. But our great grandmothers, grandmothers and our mothers had some tails of beauty shows at their time.

Beauty Pageant sounds foreign to us and to our traditions today not because our women did not have beauty shows back then but due to the lost of traditional values during the upheaval time since the Anyanya I movement to recent. Women were more occupied with challenging responsibilities of caring for their needy families, attending to the wounded and other emergency situation that were life threatening rather than focusing on their physical beauty. That even did not deprive women of their affinity to beauty. On such difficult moments, women tend to internalize beauty and have always sought ways to look beautiful at all occasions more or so for their own self esteem.   Although beauty Pageant sounds foreign, the concept of beauty shows is universal.

To our young women, I would like to say you all look beautiful. Due to our diverse ethnic and cultural nature of our society, we Southern Sudanese women are rich in beauty stamina.  Our foremothers underwent tremendous and painful body decorations, tattooing and cuts to make them look attractive and beautiful. My mother one time told me that during their time, beads were woven in distinct ways to make ornaments and other traditional accessories to mark developmental stages of a young woman’s maturity within the social settings of each ethnic clans or group. The most beautiful woman was one who would wear the best piece of traditional attire accompanied by the bead-work and other make-ups. The young women would wear these beauty accessories and display them on the dance floor. The woman, who could graciously dance to the lyrics with a beautiful body framework, body markings and woven beads, all eyes would be blued on her. She would be identified and acknowledged by the community and renowned as the Beauty Queen of that village. The next thing you know the richest man in the village would come and woo her parents for marriage to a family of extra ten other wives (village of beauty queens) and she would labor to feed her children and the other extra family members. That would be the definitive price women paid for being beauty. That was then but today life has change extensively. The questions still remains,

“What is Ms South Sudan Beauty Pageant all about”?

We spend 1/3 of the day sleeping, 1/3 of the day working and the other 1/3 of the day running about trying to keep up with school work, home affairs, help your mothers with children, driving, cooking, exercising, watching TV or playing computer games. There is near to nothing time for art, entertainment and social life. We need art because it is uplifting visual and emotional expression. We need entertainment to relax and restock our entire being with fresh ideas and positive feelings. We need social life to laugh, share opinions, and stimulate our minds and to relieve ourselves from stress.

Besides entertainment what else is Ms. South Sudan Beauty Pageant?

I guess some of you would answer “A big show for guys to salivate over amazingly beautiful women. To some, “It is a show where young Southern Sudanese ladies show their external less internal beauty”. In America, Beauty Pageants are ideally big cooperative ways of sponsoring such civic and community and social activities so that the winners market their products in return. In the process these Pageants and they loss their original objectives and intended purposes. It is our hope that this is not going to be the case in this program. 

Let the leaders of this organization be flexible to criticism, learn from their past and present mistakes to organize and do better tomorrow and tomorrow next. It is a learning process and we always learn from our mistakes.

To the management:

It is also our great hope that the founders/ managers of this great organization be prudent to the contestants. You must deliver your services to satisfy your clients that shows you are committed and honesty in your promises.  To the male partners, we hope you possess the integrity to working with these young women while respecting their personal space and boundaries, individualism and dignity. While we continue to redefine Ms. South Sudan Beauty Pageant to fit our ideal southern Sudanese women social and cultural values, my personal remarks are as follows:

Ms. South Sudan Beauty Pageant is about both external and internal beauty ideally a woman’s characteristics; it is about advocacy and activism thus giving back to your community; it is self actualization, appreciation, confidence, maturity of both the mind and body and emotional control; it is setting ones priorities suit and straight; it is self management and leadership. Above all, it must be looked at as an opportunity for community and cultural orientation, expectation, self fulfillment and community support. To all, let us support our youth and help them find pleasure and meaning in fulfilling their dreams.

Integrity is the virtue we long to embrace here. What is integrity? To me integrity