This article describes the hardships of rural life encountered and witnessed by the students at the Ahfad University for Women as they participate in the university's Rural Extension Program which is required of all fourth-year students. The program involves traveling in groups to impoverished communities across Sudan to share their knowledge, with local people, and experience firsthand the hard ships rural citizens endure. In a country marred by deeply rooted, interlocking wars and tightly controlled by an authoritarian, Islamic-fundamentalist government, the university, with its unique mission of educating women to respond to the needs of society, as well as confront societal boundaries, has paradoxically flourished. Ahfad was established as an elementary school in 1907 by a broad-minded soldier-turned-merchant named Sheikh Babiker Badri, who wanted to educate his 13 daughters at a time when most considered the idea deeply shameful. The institution has pioneered women's education in Sudan for a century, weathering successive military coups and resisting vigorous state clampdowns on higher education. Now, as war rages in Western Darfur, and a fragile peace hangs in the balance in southern Sudan, the university's mission to train Sudanese women from all walks of life as leaders, peacemakers, and women's-rights advocates has taken on a new urgency. The university, which is financed largely by tuition and private donations, now has six schools: family sciences; health sciences; pharmacy; rural extension, education, and development; management studies; and psychology and preschool education. It offers graduate programs in nutrition and gender studies. Many of its academic programs are regarded as the best in the country, and a number of the lecturers are Ahfad graduates.