Josephine Bakhita

Darfur has suffered before. In 1877 Sudanese slave traders kidnapped Josephine Bakhita from her family's home in Darfur. Then as now there was a large market for domestic and sexual slavery, and the region's young women bore the brunt of the system. An Italian politician purchased Josephine and took her to Italy in 1885, where she was treated better as a nanny and as a convert to Catholicism. In 1896 Josephine joined the Canossian Daughters of Charity in Verona, where she spent the rest of her life serving the city's large urban underclass. In 2000 John Paul II canonized Josephine at St. Peter' s Basilica. Her surname, Bakhita, means "the lucky one," and today she is the patron saint of Darfur and the Sudan.

Sources: http://www.catholic-forum.com/saints/saintj84.htm