by Majok Tulba
Then the impossible happens.
I see Nyanbuot. I see my sister. I blink, not sure I can trust my eyes. But it is her! She’s filthy and her face is scratched and her hair is wild, but it’s Nyanbuot.
I run to her and she jumps up and flies at me like a human missile, straight into my arms. And right behind her comes Mama.
We just stand there hugging each other for the longest time. Both of them are crying, their arms tight around me. I want to cry too but I don’t let myself.
Then comes even more happiness. Thiko’s mother is here too. ‘I knew you would find me,’ she says, over and over again as she clasps her daughter. ‘I knew you would find me . . .’
When we finally let go of each other I look Mama over. She is thin. She has grey hairs I don’t remember, her face is lined and weary. But none of that matters. She’s alive. She and Nyanbuot. We are together again.
Thiko and her mother move away to greet others. ‘Where’s Thon?’ I ask, looking around the group.
Mama doesn’t answer. Nyanbuot clings to me as though I’m a ghost that will disappear any moment. Mama takes my hand.
My stomach goes cold.
‘Sit,’ Mama says and I obey, Nyanbuot still holding onto me.
‘He was innocent, our Thon,’ Mama begins. ‘A child. Impetuous, lazy most of the time, but these things we forgive. He is in a better place now.’
I can hardly take this in. My little brother. We’ve already lost Deng, and my father, and now Thon is dead too? A part of me seems to die as well. I’ve gone from being unbelievably happy to the very opposite. I’m the only male left in our family and I know I must be strong for Mama, for my sister, but it’s so hard.
I put my arm around Mama’s shoulders.
‘We walked for many days,’ she says. ‘We looked for you everywhere. We asked everyone we came across if they’d seen you or Grandpa or Momo.’
I can’t stop my tears now. I nod, and say nothing about Grandpa or Momo. Not yet.
‘Thon did his best to entertain us,’ Mama continues, ‘to try to keep our spirits up. He made his funny faces – you know how he was. And he minded himself very well. When we had to hide from soldiers he was still as a mouse. He’d run ahead to look for water. Do you know what he’d say? “I’m going to be as fast a runner as Juba one day. If he was here now, he would run ahead. I’m a big boy now, I will do it too.” And he’d take off. And sometimes he did find water. He even found an abandoned canteen once and filled it at a waterhole.’
Now I’m smiling while I’m crying. I had always known that Thon looked up to me, even if he rarely showed it.
‘How did he die?’ I ask Mama.
‘He fell sick, we don’t know what from, and the poor child just got weaker and weaker,’ she says. ‘We carried him, but there was nothing else we could do for him. Then one morning . . . he just didn’t wake up.’
By the time I stop crying I’m so exhausted it’s all I can do to make up a rough sleeping place before I fall instantly asleep. I lie next to Nyanbuot and Mama and I sleep better than I have for days.
In the morning, Mama stares at me oddly. ‘Juba,’ she says, ‘why are you wearing a skirt?’
‘Oh,’ I say, ‘I’m so used to it now I’ve forgotten about it.’ And I tell her and Nyanbuot what happened. Then, to make them laugh, I prance around, swirling Thiko’s tattered old skirt this way and that. They burst into giggles and it’s beautiful music.
I keep hamming it up until finally Mama brings out her pack.
‘Look inside,’ she says.
I do, and find a pair of my own pants and a shirt. I can’t keep the grin off my face as I hold them up.
‘Mama! How did you manage to pack these?’ I pull them on and it feels so good to be in clean clothes. And I’m a boy again.
Mama can’t stop smiling now either. ‘I knew we would find each other. That’s why I have those clothes. I never gave up hope that we would find you.’
I give her a long hug. ‘Thank you, Mama.’
Thiko runs up and grabs my hands. ‘You have pants!’ she exclaims. ‘And see, I’m wearing a clean skirt.’ We jump up and down. We laugh. We dance in a circle. ‘I found my mother and you found your family,’ she sings.
Then she stops suddenly and turns sad. ‘Except for Thon. My mother told me. Oh Juba, I’m so sorry.’ She goes to speak to Mama, to offer condolences. And we’re all silent for a long time. I’ve never felt so sad and so happy at the same time.
There are a lot more people in this group than the last one. I know many of their faces, but there are many more I’ve never seen before. No one seems to be talking much. They speak with their eyes or nod their heads. I don’t know if it’s because they’re tired, or grieving for what they’ve lost, or fearful of their unknown future. I remember those days in school when I wanted the class to be quiet and let me think in peace. How I long for that noisy classroom now.
There’s movement as everyone gets ready for the day’s walk. And there’s more good news: it seems we are not far from the refugee camp. We may even reach it today.
We set off, and as we walk, more people join us. I look for Chieng, and for Majok. Maybe they’re already at the camp. It’s almost too exciting to think about.
It’s strange to be back among so many people. We’re like the Israelites roaming the desert, seeking the land of milk and honey.
Towards midday Thiko, who’s gone on ahead of us, comes racing back down the path, her face illuminated. ‘Juba!’ she shouts. ‘Look who I found!’
Behind her come Chieng and Majok, both grinning from ear to ear. We grip each other by the shoulders and I can’t wipe the grin off my own face. I don’t even care that Chieng abandoned Thiko and me – we’re together now, we’ve made it this far, and if we can do that we can make it all the way. It feels like nothing bad will happen to us again.
‘I found Majok after I left you,’ Chieng says, ‘and we went back to get you both.’ He’s breathless, his words spilling out in haste. ‘But we couldn’t find you anywhere. We looked and looked, and then we had to go back or we’d lose our group.’
I don’t know if this is true or not but I nod. ‘It’s alright. We must have taken different paths.’
‘That brought us all to the same place,’ Thiko says happily.
Majok doesn’t look too bad, although like all of us he’s filthy and thin. And sad around the eyes. He tells me his father didn’t make it out of Pacong and he’s not hopeful about his mother either, because one of her legs is shorter than the other and she limps. He’s praying his sister is alive and already in the camp.
Mama roughs up his hair, as she does with mine sometimes. ‘It’s good to see both of you boys,’ she says. ‘Have you found any of your own family, Chieng?’
‘Two cousins. But maybe my mother and the others will be at the camp. They say we’ll be there today if we walk fast, and there’ll be food and fresh water for everyone.’
Hearing these words puts a spring in our step. Food and fresh water. A safe place to sleep. It’s all any of us want right now. Apart from our missing family members.
‘You’ll find your family, Chieng,’ I say. ‘They’ll be waiting for you in the camp.’
We march on. A giraffe stands tall and proud with its long neck in an acacia tree, a pure animal spirit alive under the sun. A couple of hours later I look ahead and see dark fences stretching before us.
From behind someone shouts, ‘It’s the camp!’
We stand on the hill and stare down at the rows of white tents below. Countless of them. I’ve never seen anything like this. I wonder how many people are living here and what their life is like. What my life will be like. I marvel at the fact that we’ve made it. Despite everything, here we are, after walking on our aching feet for such a long way. We’ve travelled 450 miles, someone in our group says.
I can feel the fear and worry fall away. It is the promised land after all. Mama looks as if she can hardly believe her eyes either. She too
has suddenly relaxed.
Beside me are Chieng and Majok and Thiko, as happy as I am. And then, even though we’ve just walked so far, and our bodies and feet are full of pain, I can’t resist. ‘Race you!’ I shout, and we tear away, kicking up dust.
It’s like we’re back in the village, like this is any old day and we’re racing home from school. The bombings never happened, everyone is still alive. Thiko and Majok fall behind, leaving Chieng and me neck and neck. Little by little I pull ahead. Then I remember that he’s not yet found any family and I pretend to stumble, slowing enough for him to overtake me.
‘Beat you!’ he says, grinning madly when we reach the gates. ‘That’s a first.’
We pant as we wait for the others to join us. We want to go through together.
At the gate are five men in uniform, with blue helmets that look like Mama’s soup bowl. They’re UN soldiers, I learn. The camp is protected by a barbed-wire fence but it’s falling apart in places, with shreds of plastic bags clinging to it. We peer through it into the camp.
Every inch of ground is covered, with tents, people, belongings. And garbage, I can now see. Garbage seems to be strewn all through the camp. Further inside, people are waiting in line for something. There are several lines and they’re long. I can’t see their end or their beginning. Other people are putting up makeshift shelters of bark and twigs. Some are just sitting on the ground and staring at nothing, it seems.
Now that I’m up close I suddenly feel differently about the camp. And I can see Thiko thinking the same. Then Nyanbuot reaches us and she doesn’t appear to like the look of it either.
Thiko gives me a slight nod as if to say, We can do this. So I smile and pat Nyanbuot’s head and try to look confident as the rest of our group join us.
When everyone is there, one of the UN soldiers motions us through the double gates. He seems to have no energy in his arm, as if he’s tired of doing this for the whole day. Some people hurry through eagerly, others hang back warily, but once inside we all end up moving like a shoal of fish. There’s nobody to tell us where we should go, we just walk through never-ending rows of tents that look as flimsy as cardboard. There are children chasing each other and squealing with laughter, but other children are lethargic, sitting in groups with flies clustering around their eyes and nostrils. We pass a little boy lying on the ground just as he vomits, and a girl, maybe his sister, tries to get him to sit up.
The sun burns down. People squeeze into the shade cast by the tents, some watching their children play, some just staring into space. I wonder nervously if I will like living here.
I walk with Mama and Nyanbuot and eventually our group comes across someone who leads us to an office building, where a white man comes out to meet us. The concrete wall of the building looks like it’s just been painted, in yellow and brown. There are more UN soldiers outside the building.
The white man talks quickly in English. He sounds like he has a lot to do. ‘We’ve been trying to get everyone to register,’ he tells us, ‘but we’re filling up quickly.’
My stomach drops. Are they going to turn us away?
‘But there’s still space available,’ he goes on. ‘Can you form a line, please, over there by that table.’ He points to where we should go. ‘Once you’re done you can get settled in.’
The table is a long rickety thing with a number of African people and three white people sitting behind it and a long line standing in front of it. Many of them look like they’ve been waiting for some time. We shuffle away to take our place at the end of the line and the white man goes back inside.
No one is sure what the registration involves but whatever it is it must be complicated, because the line doesn’t appear to move at all. Several people give up and wander off. Mama sees me watching them and shakes her head.
‘We’ll wait our turn,’ she says. ‘We’ll do this the right way.’
The right way means waiting several hours. When we finally reach the table the woman asks our names and what village we are from and writes them on a form, then she tells us to stand to one side with a group of others and wait for a UN worker to show us where we can set up.
We can hardly believe it. We waited all this time just for it to be done so quick? I wonder why all those people before us were at the table for so long, but before we can ask any questions the woman has already moved on to the people behind us.
When the UN man arrives, our group, which includes my family, Chieng, Majok, Thiko and her mother, follows him through the maze of tents. Nathan was the only white man I ever saw up close before, but I don’t want to think about him just now. I must help out where I can as we settle into this new home, if that’s what it is.
We pass more piles of garbage and the air is thick with unpleasant smells. Along the paths between the rows of tents are signs, but I don’t know what they mean and the rows don’t seem to be in any order. We go down one row after another and I see a few more UN soldiers as we walk. I can hear moaning coming from some of the tents, where people must be sick. We come upon an old man sitting on the ground who’s so skinny you can see his bones. He seems to be looking at me but I realise he’s not. His face is hard, like the bark of a dead tree. He blinks, so I know he’s alive, but it’s like his life has moved on and left him just sitting there.
Mama grabs my arm and pulls me close. ‘Stay near me,’ she says. ‘I don’t want to lose you. I don’t know how people find their way through here, every row looks the same.’ She asks the man leading us how many people there are in this camp and he tells her eight hundred thousand. At first we think he’s got it wrong, or we haven’t heard right, but when we ask again he repeats it.
‘There are people here from every tribe in South Sudan,’ he says. ‘This war . . .’ He shakes his head. Then he tells us there are just under a thousand aid workers here, from twenty-two different organisations.
Mama holds my hand tightly and I can feel her thinking the same thing. How can there be enough food and water for so many people? I wonder whether they will place us in different tents, and what will happen with Thiko and the others.
Finally we stop at the end of a row of tents. ‘Here we are,’ says the UN man. ‘Zone D.’ Then he tells us they’ve run out of tents and will bring us one when they get more. ‘In the meantime,’ he says, ‘if you could build yourselves a shelter just here.’ He points to a bare patch of ground.
‘But where will we sleep?’ Thiko’s mother asks.
‘Don’t worry,’ he says, ‘we’re working on getting more tents as soon as possible. We’ll have them to you as soon as they come in. Just hang tight for now.’
‘What about food?’ I ask. ‘And water?’
He scratches his chin as if he’s not sure what to tell us. ‘We’re working on the food too. There are two wells in this zone. You need to be prepared to wait a while for water.
Later we discover that waiting a while often means hours at a time.
It will soon be dark. We start work immediately on a shelter. Chieng and I go to ask our neighbours if anyone has tools and eventually we have four machetes. We set off with some others to look for support sticks. About a hundred yards from where we’ve been told to make our shelter there are shrubs, and beyond that, jungle. The trees close in have been stripped of suitable branches and we must walk further in.
By the time we find what we need we’re all exhausted, but we manage to construct a basic shelter. It’s thin and surely won’t keep out rain, but it’s something over our heads and it isn’t raining now.
We drag our meagre belongings under it, Chieng, Majok, Mama, Nyanbuot and I, along with Thiko and her mother and the rest of our little group, and fall immediately asleep.
Early next morning, Mama, Thiko’s mother and some other adults are taken to the office to collect emergency rations, while Thiko and I go to look for teeth-brushing sticks. We bring handfuls back and distribute them to our group. Mama returns carrying a bundle on her head and another in her arms. When she
puts them down I see that she has a scoop of maize flour, some salt and split lentils. Also a jerry can for water, a bucket and basin for washing, a solar lamp, a saucepan, some soap and sanitary pads. These are the things with which we’re to start building our new life.
Thiko and Nyanbuot set off to the well and Mama and the other women look for firewood. They don’t need a lot because there’s not much to cook. I am appointed guard of our few precious belongings while they’re gone. After we’ve eaten, the women collect our dirty clothes and walk the half a mile to the stream to wash them.
With nothing else to do I sit outside the shelter and watch a couple of little boys at play. A girl follows gamely behind them. She has big round eyes and a stump instead of a left arm. A grimy bandage trails from the stump like a flag of defeat but she’s smiling as if she owns the world. I’m wondering if she really feels that way, when someone runs up to me. An older boy. I tense involuntarily as I recognise him. It’s Bol.
But just as suddenly I realise that I’m not afraid of him anymore. I don’t want to fight with him but I won’t back down from him.
Bol is wearing only shorts and they are riddled with holes. He’s smiling broadly. Maybe he’s changed.
‘Hey! It’s really you, Juba!’
Part of me thinks this could be a trick and he will try to knock me down any second, but another part of me hopes we can get along. That we can put our differences behind us after everything that’s happened. Those fights at school seem so pointless now.
‘Bol, I’m so glad to see you!’ I say. ‘How are you?’
‘For today I am alright,’ he grins. ‘I can’t tell you about tomorrow, though. Tomorrow is a gift here.’
I’m not quite sure what he means by this but I don’t ask. ‘Well,’ I say, ‘I’m happy you’re alright today.’
‘Thanks,’ he says, and just then Chieng and Majok appear. There are more greetings and smiles and Bol says how happy he is that we all made it here. He sounds sincere, like we’ve never been anything other than friends. I struggle to think whether he was as mean to me as I’m remembering.