Fourth in a six-part series

» Photo galleries: Refugees reborn

Back in his own country, Mr. R. says, his wife never would have left him. After all, he paid 32 cows for her. If she left him, her family would have to give the cows back.

Mr. R. shakes his head at the way things have changed since he arrived in Salt Lake City six years ago. It is a rainy morning and the two smallest of his six children are watching TV; in the background, as Mr. R. begins his story, Barney is singing, "we are a happy family."

Mr. R. is a single father now. He works the graveyard shift, hopes to buy a house someday, is thrilled to be in America — but also wonders if maybe women like his wife are thinking more about their own freedom than about their families. He says he knows eight other Sudanese men whose wives have left them since arriving in the United States.

For Utah's newest refugee arrivals, life in America can be as unsettling as it is promising, as husbands and wives struggle to understand new roles and dizzying options. Most of these families are still intact, and some are thriving. But, at the same time, hundreds of refugee women — abandoned by husbands, widowed in their home country by repressive regimes, forced to come to this country by themselves while their husbands fight wars at home, or sometimes choosing to leave their husbands once they arrive here — are making their way in Utah on their own.

Hilda Sasa, from Sudan, left her husband after a 15-year marriage that had survived a war, exile in four countries and then three years in a refugee camp in Ghana.

In Sudanese culture, she says, "Women are nothing. They have to be under the husband all the time." Her own husband, she says, would tell her, "You have to do what I say." Finally, a couple of years after they were resettled in Salt Lake City, she says she got "tired and fed up."