Riding in the back of the truck on that particular day also proved to be a grim business. As always, it was crammed with so many goods that I was forced to compete with my fellow passengers for the remaining space. Alieu took pity on us and jammed two sticks on either side of the door before closing and securing it to the bumper with some bits of rope, which allowed more air to flow through. Even so, I was drenched in sweat within minutes.
The next several days were a blur of rugged dirt roads interspersed with somber rest stops carved out of an increasingly thick junglelike environment. Two new men—both Chinese—took turns driving the truck. They were accompanied by an African man, who was relegated to sitting on the roof of the truck even though there was plenty of room in the cab. To my relief, all three men seemed disinterested in their human cargo beyond ensuring that we were alive and did not try to run away. But the environment itself discouraged any thought of escape; there was something sinister and primeval about the jungle that compelled everyone to stay close.
I kept to myself and made little attempt to reach out to the other girls. They were all new to me and spoke either French or a local language. The one girl who did speak English was so sick that she could barely utter a word. Most were transferred to another truck on the second day. On the third day, they picked up a new girl. And so it went.
The girl who joined us on day three spoke English and was able to tell me something about our general location. She said she was coming from Goma in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and believed we were still in that country near a town called Butembo. I was shocked to learn that the girl was not in the truck against her will. In fact, she claimed to have sold off the last of her goats to raise enough money for the ride. She told me that her husband had died of AIDS and she was now making her way to Juba in southern Sudan. She said her in-laws had blamed her for infecting her husband with the virus, accusing her of using witchcraft to kill him while managing herself to survive. But she denied the charge. “He was a wealthy man,” she said. “So he had many girlfriends. But I was always faithful to him.” After the funeral, her in-laws descended on the farm and took everything. She was forced to flee in the middle of the night with only a few goats. “I would have accepted an offer from my husband’s younger brother to be his second wife,” she said. “But he was scared away because of the witchcraft accusation.” She leaned against the wall of the truck and sighed dejectedly. “So I am going home now.”
All my life, I had heard similar stories of women whose husbands died and who had everything taken from them. I knew widows had little say over anything and few options available to them. So this girl’s story was nothing new to me. Yet in some strange way, I almost envied her; at least she could go home—she had that choice. She did not realize what a gift that was.
But I was most interested in the fact that the girl knew our current location and general destination. The only thing I knew about southern Sudan was that it had been at war for a very long time, but the circumstances surrounding that conflict were a mystery to me. I asked if there were many rich men in Juba, wondering if it was where the man who “ordered” me came from. But the girl only laughed in response, adding that there were few rich people in her country after so many decades of war. “There is only suffering,” she said. “And now hope.”
After another long day of relatively uneventful driving, the girl told me that we had entered Uganda, and later that evening, we crossed into southern Sudan. In both instances, the border crossing was so unremarkable that I would never have known it had happened. Emphasizing that we were traveling the main roads rather than taking detours, my traveling companion speculated that the Chinese drivers had bribed the border officials to let them pass. That was why they did not inspect the truck or open the door to check for anything out of the ordinary.
Eventually, we pulled into a small compound situated on the banks of a massive river. It cut into the earth like a living, breathing thing, a massive surge of water that was unlike anything I had ever seen before. I could not help but feel a little unnerved by its awesome power; it made the ground rumble beneath my feet.
“This is the Nile,” the girl said. “Juba is just on the other side.”
* * *
I spent a restless night in a decrepit shell of a building next to the Nile. I felt the massive surge of water hum and pulse beneath the ground; the vibrations seemed to flow through my body and kept me awake for much of the night. When I finally did manage to sleep, I was awoken almost immediately and told that I would be leaving within the hour. I was shocked to discover that I would be traveling by bus on the next leg of my journey. Despite being an old, rickety clunker, the bus had windows, which meant that for the first time I would be able to see where we were going.
When I climbed aboard, I was immediately confronted with two dozen pairs of eyes that barely peeked out above the seat backs. The bus was packed with small boys, all of whom appeared much younger than me, some even as young as three or four. As I walked down the aisle to the only vacant seat in back, I could not help but notice something else about my fellow passengers: they each had a disability or some kind of handicap. Some boys were missing arms, some legs, while others had shriveled limbs or bodies bent in different positions, whether from birth or an accident I couldn’t know. An assemblage of crutches and crude walking sticks poked out from above the seats like a small forest of flagless poles. I turned my head from side to side, meeting an array of wide-eyed stares with one of my own. I could never have imagined anything like this.
I took a seat next to a boy with one leg, the other ending in a dirty stump that barely stuck out from beneath his tattered shorts. He looked up and smiled. “Hello,” he said pleasantly.
“Do you speak English?” I asked.
“Yes,” he answered with another smile.
“Do you know where we are going?”
“Yes,” the boy responded in his easy manner. “We are going to Nairobi. You do not know where you are going?”
Absorbing this new information, I convinced myself that Nairobi was my final destination. From what I knew, it was a large city with plenty of rich and powerful people. Surely, this was the home of the mysterious man who had ordered a young Himba woman from Namibia.
Turning to the boy, I asked, “Why are you going to Nairobi?”
“For a better life,” the boy answered breezily. “In Juba, there is nothing for us.” He swept his arm to indicate the other boys. “Our families do not want us, people do not want to see us. We are a nuisance. We survive on the streets. All of us are the same. But Kenyans are generous people and much better off. They will help children like us to have a better life.”
“But where will you go?” I asked. “To a church?”
The boy shrugged and smiled. “I do not know. But any place is better than here.”
Considering this for a moment, I asked the boy, “Were you born in southern Sudan?”
“Yes,” he answered.
“Have you ever been out of southern Sudan before?”
“No.”
“Do you have a passport?”
“What is that?” the boy asked.
Looking around the bus, it dawned on me that these boys were in the same world I was. The only difference was that they did not know it. The “better life” they dreamed about did not seem possible.
Suddenly, a flatbed truck with military markings drove into the compound and skidded to a halt in front of the bus. Two soldiers dressed in military fatigues sat in back, smoking cigarettes and carrying large, treacherous-looking guns. Three men dressed similarly emerged from the cab and walked into a nearby building. After several minutes, they emerged and approached the bus. Another man hurried after them; he was clearly agitated and seemed to be pleading with them about something. He only stopped when one of the soldiers shoved him backward and pointed his gun at him threateningly. As the new arrivals climbed aboard the bus, my initial reaction was to marvel at how extraordinarily tall they wer
e. They shared other physical traits as well: high cheekbones with sharp, angular features and deeply set eyes. These men were clearly from the same tribe, I thought as I eyed their leader, whose military markings and general demeanor set him apart. To my dismay, the man, who was so tall that he was forced to bend forward to keep his head from smacking the roof of the bus, ignored the boys completely and focused his attention immediately on me. He had an intense, almost fierce look in his eyes. Towering above me, he flicked his wrist and motioned for me to rise. He appraised me for several moments before smiling coldly and saying, “You are now the property of the SPLA.”
* * *
The SPLA, as I quickly found out, was the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, the military wing of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), which in 2007 was in the midst of transitioning South Sudan from decades of civil war toward becoming the world’s newest country. But as I would come to discover, the SPLA was anything but a formal, disciplined army. From my experience, at least, it was little more than an organized crime ring permeated by a ragtag outfit of illiterate street thugs.
For the next several months, my home was a small compound of tin shacks and burned-out buildings squeezed in among the shantytown neighborhoods of Juba. Together with hundreds of other women and children who passed through what was generally known as the Hay Compound, I had in fact become the property of the SPLA. More specifically, I was the property of a Major Deng, a shadowy figure who, as far as I could tell, was in charge of the compound. Major Deng stayed at the compound only one or two nights per week, however, and entrusted day-to-day operations to Kuur, the tall man who’d pulled me from the bus on the banks of the Nile.
During my time there, I came to discover that the Hay Compound was an extensive human trafficking ring made up almost entirely of children. It was a kind of sorting center and temporary storehouse for young boys and girls from across southern Sudan, who were kept there for a few weeks before being shipped to various places across East Africa. Upon arrival, they were divided into three groups: boys, girls, and children with a handicap, usually a missing limb or some other obvious physical disability, which the region provided in bulk. I had arrived at a time when Deng and Kuur were transitioning their activities from a focus on young boys to the other two groups. As a result, few watoto wazima—a Swahili term meaning “whole boys”—passed through the compound. Apparently, this was in direct contrast to just a few years earlier, when, during the civil war, they had been in high demand by the SPLA. At that time, and after just a few weeks of training, they were given guns and shipped to frontline units in the north. But with the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2005, the demand for pliable, easily manipulated child soldiers was significantly reduced. As a result, Major Deng was now in the business of young girls, who were always needed as domestic workers in Juba and other major cities around the region. He also began trading in children with disabilities—both boys and girls—who were sent off to Kenya by the busload. I heard him joke once that disabled boys were “recycled child soldiers” who had been sent north years before when they were watoto wazima.
After my initial encounter with the boys on the bus, I wondered why they were such a valuable commodity to Kuur and Deng. So I developed a rapport with the Kenyan woman whose job it was to oversee this particular group. She was an open, talkative individual who actually seemed to enjoy her “job,” as she called it. Prior to coming to southern Sudan, she had been involved with the Kenyan side of things, so she had a good understanding of how the entire scheme played out. She not only was eager to tell me everything but also at times seemed to openly brag about her “many job responsibilities.”
It turned out that the entire operation involving children with disabilities was a means of banking on sympathy. At some point, someone must have run the numbers and discovered that a child with a severe disability begging on the busy streets of Nairobi brought in much more money than a child without a disability. That was why disabled children were almost always linked to what the Kenyan woman referred to as the “begging industry.”
Kuur and Deng sent busloads of these children from southern Sudan to East Africa’s major cities. Along the way, they made frequent detours to supply regional hubs with their precious cargo. Immigration officials and other authorities received regular payoffs so the buses could cross international boundaries without trouble. Nairobi was the major port of call, mostly because of the amount of money that circulated there, but also because Kenyans were believed to be more compassionate. Put another way, they were easy marks. Once there, groups of children were stashed together in cramped houses located in the informal settlements that proliferated on the outskirts of the city. Each morning, they were transported to strategic locations in the city center under the control of handlers, who often posed as a relative or an employee of a church or nonprofit organization. Handlers came equipped with elaborate stories, false identification, and extensive connections with city council members, police, and even senior officials in the Kenyan government.
Depending on the location, each child earned anywhere between thirty and fifty US dollars each day. Typically, it took twelve to fifteen hours to collect that kind of money, especially if handlers took full advantage of the peak earning hours during the morning and evening commutes. Over the course of the day, each child remained in the same spot with little if any respite from Nairobi’s scorching sun, not to mention the dust, exhaust fumes, and general filth of its busiest streets. In most cases, the handler hired someone—often an older street child—who watched over several disabled children from a safe distance, ensuring that their earnings were safe and nobody disrupted or interfered with their activities.
Few children were spared from the long hours and brutal work conditions. Handlers even “rented” the very youngest children to women who posed as their mothers, who in turn received a percentage of the daily haul. Phony mothers earned twice as much as they would begging on their own, which many did anyway.
Children were kept in line through a combination of threats and promises of a better life. But as far as I could tell, their lives in Nairobi were probably very similar to those they had left behind, only now any money they earned went to their handlers. The Kenyan woman described it as an ideal business model: the overhead required to maintain a begging operation was low, especially when compared to the daily profits, and she pointed out how the risks were minimal because the children did not speak the local language, did not know anybody, and were less likely to run away, given the nature of their disabilities. In fact, it was almost impossible for a child with a disability to disappear into Nairobi’s street scene since survival required joining a gang, and they had little chance of doing that because membership required certain skills they lacked—fighting, the ability to run away from dangerous situations, and cultural affiliations, to name a few.
After learning these details, described to me by the Kenyan woman in her strangely cheerful manner, I thought it best to keep my distance from my new acquaintance. To me, she was a strange combination of ruthlessness, ignorance, and moral depravity. Initially, and because she seemed to walk around the Hay Compound with more freedom than the rest of us, I had thought I could somehow leverage my relationship with her to improve my situation. But now my gut told me she was a person who would quickly and easily betray me.
* * *
In addition to myself, about a dozen other girls were more or less permanent residents at the Hay Compound. Together, we were responsible for taking care of the children as they passed through, a task that was very difficult given the overall conditions at the compound. Food was scarce and usually consisted of a giant vat of porridge made from cornmeal, which was so watered down that it looked like a pale, yellowish soup. Hunger and sickness were so common among the children that most seemed to have resigned themselves to it. Individuals were frequently taken away because they were too sick or starving to move or be of much use. Some were near death. Exactly where they w
ere taken was anybody’s guess.
My job was to help take care of the youngest girls. Our group was housed together in a simple one-room structure made from cement blocks and a tin roof that leaked badly. Large pools of stagnant, muddy water accumulated on the cement floor where we slept. The building lacked electricity and running water, and every window was either shattered or stripped out completely, which allowed swarms of mosquitoes to lay waste to us each night. Sleep was next to impossible.
As far as the girls in my care, the experience of one ten-year-old girl named Achor was typical. She was a member of the Ngok Dinka, a subgroup of the much larger Dinka tribe, whose members lived in Abyei, a small scrap of land on the fringe of the Sahel, which straddled the proposed boundary between the North and South. Ownership of the region had long been disputed, and it was a particularly contentious part of the negotiations leading up to South Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement. An agreement about Abyei was never reached, however, and the issue was left to a vaguely defined referendum process designated for some distant point in the future, which allowed the region to remain a no-man’s-land where roving bands of soldiers and militia could raid and plunder at will. Among the Ngok Dinka, the most feared militia group was the Messiria, a nomadic Arab people backed by the government in Khartoum who claimed Abyei as an important cattle grazing area during the dry season. The Messiria formed heavily armed, mounted raiding parties known as Murahaleen who regularly attacked Dinka villages, stealing cattle as well as children. Boys and girls were pressed into slavery in towns and villages throughout the North, a practice with a long history in the region and one that the civil war had only reinforced.
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