Fourteen thousand. This is the estimated number of Sudanese men, women and children who were kidnapped and enslaved between 1986 and 2002. (Agnes Scott College, http://prww.agnesscott.edu/alumnae/p_maineventsarticle.asp ?id=260) Mende Nazer is one of these 14,000 people. What sets her apart is that she escaped and had the courage to tell her story to the world. Slave: My True Story, the memoir of Mende Nazer, describes how courage and the will to live can triumph over oppression and slavery by showing the world that slavery did not end in 1865, but that it remains a global problem. Nazer gives a personal and vivid account of his life, which began in the Nuba Mountains of southern Sudan. His childhood within the Karko tribe, in a rural and isolated area, was very simple and happy. Nazer grew up in a family that was, by Nuba standards, considerably well-off. She was the youngest of five children, with two brothers and two sisters. Nazer, along with his brothers and a sister, attended a government-run Arab school. She led what was described as an "idyllic childhood" with little concern for food, shelter or social comfort. But in the spring of 1993, everything changed. At the age of twelve or thirteen (the Nouba do not keep records of birth dates), Nazer was kidnapped during a raid on her village. neck… He pulled me to my feet and started walking me through the village… We arrived at the edge of the forest, there were around thirty other children huddled together” (Nazer 97). Nazer, with the other children. were taken to a converted military base run by Arab militiamen loyal to Sudan's Islamist government. “…a camp – consisting of twenty or more khaki green tents, arranged in rows. We approached the camp in line and at the gates we were greeted by a group of men in military uniform” (Nazer 105). She was then sold to a wealthy Arab family in Khartoum, Sudan's capital, for the equivalent of $150. (estimated). She worked as a slave for the family for seven years, from 1993 to 1999, then was sent to London, England, to work for the family's relatives. She had been a slave in London since 1999-2000.