Soldiers came by. “You boys clean out that building and you can sleep there.” They gave us pails and a few rags and we headed to the building.
“Ew! Ew!” The boys ahead stopped outside the door. I smelled it too. The rebel soldiers had been stranded inside while they fought. Feces, urine, and dirt slimed the floor, like a hundred dogs had been locked inside for a month. All we had were pails of water and a few old rags. Just standing outside made me gag. We had to do as we were told so we held our noses and began.
“I don’t like Torit,” I told Joseph.
He didn’t answer, he just looked at me as though whether I liked someplace or not was only a silly thought.
Inside the building a large dark board covered one wall. “What is this?” I asked.
“Blackboard,” said an older boy.
White markings of short lines and patterns looked like someone had made a design.
“What are these?”
“That is writing.”
“How do they make it?”
“They make it with chalk.”
“What is this chalk?”
“A white stick like dried lizard poop.”
“I want to see a chalk.”
“The chalk is gone,” the boy said. “All of the schools were destroyed by the war.”
I looked around the room again. I couldn’t believe this dirty old building was a school. Nothing seemed magical here. I ran my finger over one of the markings. The writing went away. Oh no, had I destroyed some magic? I stared at the board. I wanted that magic power to go into me like it had gone into Yier.
GUNNA
Judy
When I spoke with the boys in person or on the phone, our conversations had grown more fluid. I still exaggerated my enunciation and spoke slowly, but I no longer dropped contractions or limited my vocabulary as much as I had in the beginning. I had begun to use words that were unfamiliar to them because they always asked the meaning, especially Alepho, who generally had a dictionary in his pocket. They’d tell me they were getting to know our American accents but when they watched British films it was much easier to understand the English.
I was getting used to their accents too. Through conversations, observations, their writings, and our interactions, I’d learned much more about the Dinka culture as well. My job was to teach them our culture and traditions, but I’d discovered to do that effectively I needed to know something about theirs, because otherwise it wasn’t obvious what they needed to learn about ours. An unexpected twist was taking place. I was learning more about my own culture, too.
Some of our greatest misunderstandings had revolved around common expressions. I’d mentioned to Alepho that I thought Joseph Jok at IRC had a “big heart” because of the way he’d devoted himself to helping the Sudanese community.
That angry look came over Alepho’s face. “I don’t think so,” he said.
I wondered if there was something about Joseph that I didn’t know, perhaps something that Alepho didn’t respect him for.
“Look at all the things he does,” I argued back. “He has boys to his house for dinner almost every Sunday night. They stop by all hours of the day to use his computer. He works as a caseworker for refugees when he’s actually a trained veterinarian. He could be doing that instead and making much more money. I think he is very bighearted.”
Alepho looked me in the eye. “With Dinka, big heart means he is greedy man.”
“Oh.” I wouldn’t use that term again, or even think of it in the same way.
I’d also learned that the Dinka were terrible at gossiping. They wouldn’t do it. In fact, they wouldn’t discuss each other at all. If I called on the phone and asked Benson, “How is Lino?” the answer would be, “Lino is fine,” regardless.
If I pushed further, “Is he feeling good? What has he been doing?” the answer would still be, “He is good.”
How did people avoid these blunders doing international business or in foreign relations? An innocent remark could be so easily misconstrued. Just knowing the language was not enough, interpreters needed to know the culture nearly as well as a native.
I realized that my discussion with Alepho about Joseph, even though entirely complimentary, was not only misunderstood because of my use of the expression “bighearted,” it was a transgression just to talk about him in the first place. Alepho must have been uncomfortable throughout, feeling as though he was betraying the very caseworker who’d done so much for him.
I imagined this no-gossip policy avoided a lot of unnecessary hurt and conflict in their small communities, where getting along meant life or death and one couldn’t hide under anonymity—like some people in our society who create fake internet names and say cruel things to others, feeling free to do so because they do not risk being confronted in person.
Mostly, I stumbled upon our differences accidentally and occasionally with embarrassment. Between errands one day, I drove through a fast-food place and ordered cheeseburgers for all of us. I parked the car in a shady spot and began consuming my burger. James was next to me in the front seat.
“What is this ‘gunna’?” James asked.
“Gunna?”
“Americans say ‘gunna’?”
“You mean Ghana, the country?”
“No. Americans say, ‘I gunna go work. I gunna go home.’ Very bad slang.”
Daniel laughed from the back seat. “Isn’t it supposed to be ‘I am going to go to the store’? I don’t understand what Americans say when I first come here.”
Learning British English first sometimes made them sound a little bit like snobs.
I noticed James just sat there with the cheeseburger growing cold in the sack. “Aren’t you going to try it?” I mumbled, mouth half full. After all, he’d just said he’d never had one when we ordered it. “They’re much better hot.”
He gave me an uncomfortable look. “Maybe I go outside.”
“Of course, but you can eat in here with the air-conditioning. You don’t need to go outside. It’s hot.” Maybe he’d overheard me admonishing Cliff about not dropping fries in the seat cracks.
“It’s okay outside,” he said. “No girls there.”
“No girls. Are they going to take it or something?”
He didn’t move or answer. From the back seat Daniel said, “In our culture we do not eat when there are girls around.”
Oh, I was the girl. And women probably didn’t eat around them. But I’d had many meals with the others.
Later, Alepho explained to me that James and Daniel were from a different tribe. “They are Dinka, but Dinka Bor. Benson and Lino and I are Dinka Rek. They have some different customs.”
I wondered how relaxed James would be on his first dinner date in America, seated across from a young lady, forced to eat in front of her. The thought made me smile, right in front of the boys.
HEAD OF THE CAT
Alepho
The soldiers led us from Torit. They said we were going to a camp with a missionary school. A thousand joyous boys stretched out like a trail of ants headed for Palataka camp, singing and marching, so happy to leave Torit behind.
Our joy had a short life. The rainy season was upon us. Nights were so cold that I shivered until morning. Each day my feet dragged me from one place to another place, like a homeless insect. No dry, warm, safe place to sleep in months. If I talked of going home, everyone said, “No, the war is still there.” Palataka was now my hope.
Stories kept me going. If two days of walking lay ahead, I imagined that in an hour people would be waiting with water, porridge, and a bed. Even if the destination was six hours ahead, I pretended just to that tree or that hill, and a beautiful village and school would greet me. The stories I told myself saved me.
After each mountain, no school or village greeted me, just mountains higher than any I’d se
en in my life, and more rain and less food. The view from a tall peak revealed more mountains rolling out before us. We rested on a hilltop. Whispers traveled through the group. “Palataka has chiggers and no food. We’re running away tonight.”
A few boys disappeared.
“What shall we do?” I asked Joseph.
“Let them go. We’re going to Palataka. There’s a school and we can find food.”
“What about chiggers? They’ll go in our skin.”
“We’ve faced lions and snakes. Chiggers are smaller than ants. We can deal with them.”
Chiggers or not, Palataka had a school.
At last we climbed a long, steep hill and stopped to rest at the top. A rumble ran through the crowd. “Palataka, Palataka,” drifted from mouth to mouth. On a distant plateau, buildings with red roofs clustered together under huge trees with sparkling green leaves. The towns we’d passed had been destroyed and covered in gray ash. Palataka looked alive, like my village before the attack. Tears of joy burst from my eyes. Who cared about chiggers? The closest thing I’d had to a home was only an hour’s walk away.
Thousands of boys lined the trail going into Palataka. They watched our exhausted group straggle in and yelled things in languages I couldn’t understand. I watched them, swiveling my head back and forth, trying to see every face. I still had hope that my brother Benson could be alive.
We flowed into an area at the center of the buildings that we’d seen from the plateau. Massive fig trees with branches thicker than my body swept close to the ground. We lounged in the python roots, making ourselves comfortable like chiefs.
A tall, uniformed soldier with a shaved head shouted to us in Dinka. “Welcome to Palataka. Boys from all over southern Sudan are here together. The war has exposed all the people to each other. Your languages and tribes won’t separate you. You’re no longer Nubian, Dinka, or Nuer. You are the new South Sudan. One people, one cause. We’re united as one.”
We cheered. The new Sudan. United together. No more war and fighting. Palataka was a dream come true. That night we slept there on the ground, nestled together in the arms of the tree.
“Clean out the buildings,” the soldiers ordered the next morning. “Those will be your sleeping quarters.”
The stink from the buildings told the usual story. Like Torit, but worse. The rebel soldiers had slimed the floor with every kind of waste. Rats, adding their own fresh waste, scattered to the far corner. We settled into our buildings and looked forward to starting school.
In Palataka camp, the commanders liked to gather all the boys and tell us things. Those tellings were long boring days sitting in the sun. One day, as the commander lectured us about our duty to obey, I was about to nod into a nap when the commander said, “You have a new duty.”
Those words snapped me from my daydreaming. “This duty will give you strength and South Sudan strength. It is the only way you will understand these things and have the power to build this new country. More teachers have arrived and you must go to school now.”
School. Magic power. I’d fulfill that duty anytime. When could I start?
The following week they lined us up first thing in the morning.
“School begins today.”
We paraded through the camp, skipping and chattering like a bunch of excited monkeys.
Joseph went off with the taller boys. My group was mostly from the Nuba Mountains and spoke Arabic. They sat us in rows on the floor. The cement was hard as a rock, but I didn’t care, I was in school. Best of all, a blackboard hung on the front wall. I couldn’t wait to see a real chalk and for the magic markings to appear on the board.
A man entered and laid his stick on the table. Silence spread over us like fog. He began to speak but it was in Arabic. I didn’t understand Arabic.
I asked a Dinka boy near me, “How can we learn if we don’t understand Arabic?” The teacher stopped talking and looked straight at me. Oh no. Was speaking not allowed in school? I didn’t know that.
The teacher went to the blackboard and made markings with the white chalk. What was it?
More Arabic talking. The teacher tapped the board. “A-B-C.”
Some of the students parroted, “A-B-C.”
“A-B-C,” the teacher repeated, hitting the board harder.
I joined in. “A-B-C.”
“What is this A-B-C?” I asked the boy beside me.
“That is English.”
“What does it mean?”
“Those are letters.”
“They teach us English in Arabic language. I don’t understand.”
“Just say it over and over. They will ask you the next day. It is a test.”
“A-B-C. A-B-C.”
I didn’t know what we had learned, but I said A-B-C in my head for the rest of that day. It became easier to remember and say. Maybe this was the beginning of magic power. The starting was slow.
We learned more over the next few days. The teacher made the letters into a song. By the end of the first week we sang together: “A-B-C-D-E-F-G …” I just sang with the others, not knowing what it meant but happy to learn. By the time we rose from class each day, the hot sun was straight up in the sky, and my behind was numb. I couldn’t wait to return each morning to receive more magic power.
By the end of the month the teacher would point to a boy and instruct him to say the whole alphabet. If he couldn’t complete the task, he got a beating with that stick. I feared that stick and learned the whole alphabet.
Math classes began, taught by Mr. Boldit, who never put his stick down. I only spoke Dinka, making it difficult to understand the math taught in Arabic and English. Addition and subtraction made sense to me, but I became lost when we started the many steps of multiplication and division.
I was afraid to look at Mr. Boldit for fear that he would call upon me. One day my turn came anyway.
“Stand, Alepho.” He wrote fifty-four and nine on the board. “What is …?”
I didn’t understand the rest of the question, so I couldn’t know the answer. Was it better to guess and get it wrong or not answer at all? I’d seen the consequences for other boys. A wrong answer meant a whack on the hand. Mr. Boldit liked his stick. I froze.
“You don’t know?”
I waited for my whack. No whack came. He went to the blackboard, picked up a piece of chalk and drew a circle. Relief swept over me. I wasn’t getting whacked; he was going to explain it to me.
He drew two triangles at the top of the circle. A few boys chuckled. He added eyes and whiskers. “Lamonga. Head of cat.”
The whole class broke into laughter.
His lesson was that I was as stupid as a cat. My body heated like I’d been in the hot sun. My humiliation was hilarious to everyone. Ten whacks would have been better.
I left school that day not wanting to ever go back. Of course, I didn’t have that choice. This was my new duty.
Mr. Boldit took pleasure in calling on me frequently after that. My hands were whipped so many times they became swollen. Fear of his stick stopped my mind from working. I couldn’t think and I didn’t learn.
When exam time came, a student said to me, “We know you’re not going to pass even if we give you the answers.” They called me dumb and stupid. The only happy person was the one who had been last place in class before me.
There was no magic power in school for me anymore.
JU DEE
Judy
One day, while in the area, I decided to stop by the guys’ apartment unannounced. Climbing the stairs, it felt strange, dropping in like that, but they’d assured me over and over that it wasn’t rude to just come by. Other boys came and went without fanfare. Apparently, the policy was that all guests were always welcomed or invited to any activities—I never knew who might end up joining us for an out
ing or need a ride—and the host continued with whatever they had been doing. Except for a glass of juice. Guests were always offered juice, served on a tray, and usually a very sweet red or orange variety. I expected them to try new things from my culture. I could at least try theirs. The detours from my plans had often led to delightful experiences and discoveries. Things that needed to get done somehow did anyway. For someone who regimented her life like a German train engineer, the new spontaneity hadn’t hurt me a bit.
I stood at the door and knocked. Lino answered, and I was met with a round of hugs and greeted as though they’d been waiting for me. That was before they noticed the photos and albums in my arms. One of my favorite things was to arrive at their apartment with a package of newly developed photos. I always ordered four copies, one for each of us. Besides new photos, I had brought three photo albums. We gathered on the couch and looked through the ones I’d taken when they visited our house.
Benson kept running into the kitchen to tend something on the stove. It smelled delicious.
“What are you cooking?”
“Beef and pasta. Would you like juice?”
“No, I just had some water, but thank you for offering.” Daniel was on the computer, surfing websites. “What are you looking up?”
“News from Sudan. I go on Sudan.net. They say that the government drop bombs on a food line in a displacement camp. Eighteen people die from that.”
“Why would they bomb a food line?”
“They say SPLA are there and they want to kill them.”
“Did that ever happen when you were in a camp?”
“Many time,” Alepho interjected emphatically. His brow knit and that serious expression clouded his face like too many bad recollections had just cluttered his mind and he wasn’t sure what to do with them all.
“Did you run?”
“No!” they all shouted in unison as though I desperately needed this vital information. “No running.”
Disturbed in Their Nests Page 19