Indy woman provides help for vulnerable
Nonprofit empowers, protects young African women via education
Sabina Santana rescues girls.
As the founder and director of an Indianapolis-based nonprofit called Shifting Ideas Through Educating African Women, Inc. (SitEAW), Santana works with volunteers and raises money to help vulnerable young women and girls in Uganda and Kenya.
Because of harmful traditions in their own tribes and poverty, some have been or face being forced into female circumcision and early marriage. Others are at risk of being raped, trafficked or sold into slavery.
Since 2004, Santana’s program has helped over 600 girls and women, providing educational opportunities and teaching them skills to improve their lives. She’s also working to curtail the acceptance of oppressive gender-based cultural practices by future generations.
Santana — a nun, humanitarian, Ugandan immigrant, and advocate for women and girls — rejects the idea that her gender should confine her existence or determine her destiny. Santana wants other girls to believe that as well, but she doesn’t consider herself a hero.
“I’m a person who is trying, not to be a hero, but trying to help another human being,” she said. “That’s all I want.”
Connecting girls to education
On a chilly Sunday in mid-October, Santana led a drum circle inside Robertson Hall on the Butler University campus.
Participants pounded drums in unison, sending rhythmic beats down the building’s halls. There were smiles, laughter and dancing. A drum circle is communication in rhythm, explained Santana, who ululated in joy.
“That was a touching rhythm,” she said as a round of drumming ended.
The drum circle is Santana’s way to giving back to her adopted community of Indianapolis and sharing her Ugandan culture. It also serves to raise awareness of the plight of girls and women vulnerable to harmful genderbased traditions.
At the October gathering, colorful headbands were on display with a picture of a young woman SitEAW sponsors. Proceeds for the headbands, sewn by the young woman, help cover her school fees. According to the nonprofit’s website, it cost $550 a year to sponsor a girl in primary school, $1,000 for high school and $3,500 for college.
Gordon Mendenhall, a friend of Santana who spoke during the October drum circle, credits her with saving girls like the one in the picture from a lifetime of slavery. “She works with families where the daughters in those families are very, very likely to be sold in certain circumstances and sold in slavery, and she’s been successful,” Mendenhall, who has traveled to Uganda with Santana, told the drum circle.
SitEAW, formerly called Break the Chains of Tradition, promotes freedom through education. The nonprofit sponsors girls from poverty-stricken Ugandan and Kenyan tribes where the practice of female circumcision and early marriage persists. SitEAW intercedes for the girls and young women by connecting them with sponsors who help them enroll in boarding schools or places them with foster parents so they can finish school away from their communities.
“If you’re in school, they don’t touch you because they don’t want to pay school fees for you,” Santana said. “If somebody else is paying for you, you can stay there for a while and buy time and grow older.”
The World Health Organization says more than 200 million girls and women in 30 countries have undergone female circumcision, also known as female genital mutilation. In some cultures, the practice is conducted on girls from infancy to 15 years old to make them suitable for marriage, according to UNICEF.
There are no health benefits — only harm, the WHO warns. The procedure involves the partial or total removal of external female genitalia and can include the narrowing of the vaginal opening. Women and girls who’ve undergone the procedure feel pain during sex, menstruation and childbirth. They are susceptible to infections, can bleed to death, and, if sewn narrow, women and babies can even die during childbirth.
If girls are not in school, the likelihood increases that the they could be circumcised and married off to an older man since their families are unable to financially care of them, said Santana, who’s spent a lifetime researching the tradition and working to eradicate it. Most of the girls she works with are in Uganda, but some live in Kenya. She has secretly worked with people within tribes to identify candidates — often the girls become eligible at age 8 — for circumcision, lives modestly and uses her own resources to support the girls, launched fundraisers, and cultivated friendships in Indiana, Colorado and other places for help.
“What I’ve come to (believe) is, is it’s men’s pleasure to keep the women subordinate to them so they may not go around because sex is painful after they put you in that situation,” she said. “It’s about men and they brainwash the women. The women are the ones doing it. They say they are making their children marriageable. How?”
In addition to covering school fees and essentials such as uniforms, SitEAW opened a building to house young women in December 2022. Roughly 14 young women were living there as of mid-October, Santana said. Her team of African and U.S. volunteers are fundraising to keep them in school. She’s helped friends write books and the proceeds have helped to advance SitEAW’s mission.
Once they get them to a point where they care for themselves, SitEAW begins the work to change how they view the cultural and their place in the world.
“If you have an idea which is embroiled in you and it’s terrorizing you, you just have to shift it a little bit and you see the difference,” she said.
Planting seeds for the future
Female circumcision is not a tradition that Santana grew up with. Instead, she first learned about it in a school run by nuns. She had roughly 600 classmates. They were from different parts of the country, from tribes, had different cultures and traditions.
One day, word spread like fire that a female classmate had been circumcised. Santana and her classmates were shocked to hear such a thing. The tradition wasn’t widespread as only a few tribes practiced it. “For men, it’s understandable, but for women, what do they do to them?” she said.
After classes closed on evening, the students, curious about what had been done to the girl, chased the girl and sought to undress her. The girl hid in her dormitory and locked the door. “We kept banging the door,” Santana said. Rather than educate the students about the tradition, the teachers punished them. Humiliated, the girl left the school and never came back.
The experience never left her. “I never found her,” Santana said. “And every time I thought about it, even if I didn’t find her, I had to do something. I have to do something at least help another girl. So that is what challenged me. That is what pushed.”
The girl stayed on her heart. Santana would be confronted with the tradition again as she got older, continuing her studies at college in Kenya and returning home to Uganda. She pondered how she could help other girls subjected to similar practices.
Human rights groups also are tackling the issue. Female circumcision is now illegal in Uganda. Fewer procedures take place. And while she takes joy in that, Santana has learned one important thing.
“When you take away something, which you think is harmful, you have to replace it with something you think will help,” Santana said, adding that poverty is still an issue. “If you don’t, then something worse will happen.”
Her work now includes rescuing girls and young women from being trafficked and sold into slavery in the Middle East. She started a Basket Balancing Race fundraiser to provide additional support for girls. Once a girl SitEAW put in school disappeared. Santana spent three months working day and night with others to help the girl escape.
Her work isn’t done, but Santana said she can die happy because her work will go on. The young woman currently leading SitEAW’s center in Uganda benefitted from Santana’s advocacy. Santana said she’s proud that the seeds she’s planted in other young women are germinating.
“The few we touch, if they touch others, we feel our work is done,” she said.