by Majok Marier
We could not wait to leave Sudan. The government had declared sharia law in 1983, and years later it had reached our village and the rest of southern Sudan. Basically, that meant we had to accept Muslim law, and only believers in that faith have rights in that government. The attacks were meant to drive out all who did not accept the Islamic faith. All through this section of our country we saw only burned villages, and we’d walked with hundreds of people fleeing the scorched lands. It could only be better in Ethiopia.
When I think of the joys and sorrows aspect of our story, I can think of many sorrows, especially seeing my first dead person killed in fighting. But there were blessings, too: my uncle and his care, the fact that we’d narrowly missed what could have been a massacre of all of us if we’d arrived just an hour earlier at the pool. Instead of allowing me to be disheartened by what I saw, my uncle encouraged me to make myself strong and forget the bodies, and I learned to take action to overcome the problems of my surroundings, lessons that continue to help me. Despite the extreme hardships, I was learning a great deal, and becoming a strong Dinka.
“He is only sleeping.”
That’s what Matoc said as we passed a prone body there in the desert. He was saying what we told each other now when we saw a person lying by the side of the path. We were not sure if they were dead or alive. In fact, people did lie down to rest. Sometimes they peeled off from a group and said they were going to rest. But they never got up.
“Maybe he will feel better,” Dut Machoul said once when a sleeping figure appeared on the right side of the path.
He stopped in front of me and put his hand on my shoulder, my skin sweating even at this early hour in the desert.
“Never give in to bad thoughts, never give up hope,” he said. “You will die.”
My uncle, like most people among the Dinka, had no teeth on the lower level of his mouth. In my culture, the lower teeth are thought to be sources of infection, and so these are extracted when a boy or girl is about 10–12 years old. He looked at me in such a serious way. But I heard his lesson.
“Yes, Uncle,” I replied.
“You must harden yourself against the sad feelings that come when you see someone like that,” he said, motioning with long arms to the right side of the road.
I kept walking. Moving seemed to help with the feelings.
“If you cannot harden your feelings, you will die like him,” Dut Machoul said. I could sense my companions by my side at this point. I needed them to hear the message as well.
“Yes, Uncle.”
I did not want to die.
The threats we faced were wild animals, thirst, starvation, unfriendly natives, and loss of hope. These were the problems we faced on the walk; but there were human challenges later from places we did not expect: the refugee camp organizers. Later, I’ll tell how the humanitarian aid agencies often made things more complicated in our already difficult lives. Fortunately, despite being thrown into one bad situation, because we knew how to recognize dangerous animals, we were able to save ourselves.
While we were on the long journey to Ethiopia, the one that ended in this United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) camp, there were more challenges. In the desert, we had very little food, only the remains of small amounts of boiled corn and grain. There were times we wanted to lie down and not get up, and we took turns pushing each other to our feet to keep going.
My two friends and my uncle, Kau, and I learned to adapt to the dangers and hardships of our trip by distracting ourselves with games, usually guessing games, and with singing songs we remembered from our villages. Those were the joys among the sorrows of our situation. We could play “guess what the camp will look like,” “guess who we will see there,” “guess what we will eat”—we spent a lot of time talking about food. We guessed what we would do there. We guessed when we would see our families next. We tried to imagine what our families were doing without us. When those games got started, we quickly changed so we wouldn’t miss our families so much. We’d begin singing songs that we used to sing while watching the cattle. There were traditional songs about the cattle, and the village. The longest songs were those we made up as if we were courting a young lady in the village. It is traditional when wanting to marry a girl that a young man will make up songs to sing her that honor her, describe her beauty, and promise all sorts of things to her so she will select him as a husband. There is a great deal of teasing and making up songs that goes into the courtship process, so creating these songs took a lot of our walking time.
Mostly we learned to not think about the dead bodies we saw, and not to make ourselves unhappy thinking about family and the sustenance we lacked. Mostly we just kept walking and talking and singing.
Three
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Where Was the World While We Walked?
We struggled to gain the distance between the Akobo Desert and our next goal—the border between Sudan and Ethiopia. We knew we would be safer there, at least from attacks by the soldiers. We would still have to find the refugee camp, and we would still have to worry about food and carrying enough water until we got there. We had not had any food for the last few days, and we had no water.
The only lands I’d ever known were flat and almost unvarying in height or features. In my home area, there were some changes that occurred in the dry season—the few water sources dried up, and a river bed became a wide, long gully. Nevertheless, I’d never seen other geographic features like desert or mountains. This long journey changed all that. The desert had brought us hot sands and land that was not only flat, but had no trees at all. Trees were a food source for us on the first part of the journey, because we could exist on the pulp of the shea butter fruit, and we’d taken millet grain where we’d found it growing. We survived in the desert on grains of sorghum we’d stored in our gourds. Here there was nothing else to eat, nothing to drink. But we kept up our songs and our stories to keep hope going, as there was very little else between us and illness and death.
For the first time, we followed a road, one that would take us from the desert toward Akobo, the final Sudanese settlement before Ethiopia. We joined this road between Nasir and Akobo when we crossed it south of Nasir. I’m not sure why we felt safe enough to travel a road, a rarity in this part of Africa. Perhaps we felt the soldiers would not be there, as it was not near a town.
Our songs and stories were our means of taking our minds off our miseries. Also, while we walked, we asked questions of each other. Where was the rest of the world while we walked? Did the world know what was going on? Surely there had been news stories about the awful bombings and all these Sudanese in search of safety. While we didn’t have electricity and TV, our villages’ transistor radios would bring us news of other countries. We knew of the United States and Great Britain and South Africa and many other countries with many resources. Why weren’t they sending planes to bomb the Sudanese capital, where the enemy was coming from? Why weren’t they bringing food and medicine to us, trying to find us? They had many more ways of finding us than we did of locating the aid.
Along the way, my uncle would sometimes talk with some of the seven who were traveling the same road nearby. Now, we made a shift. Rather than going to the town of Akobo, we would make a left turn and go toward the Akobo River. We were going to avoid the town because there were soldiers. My uncle said he’d heard we were now about four or five hours from the town.
Suddenly, after we’ve turned left toward Ethiopia and walked for several hours, a bountiful water source, the Akobo River, was in front of us. At the river, we swam across, determined to reach Ethiopia. At least now we have water.
The river was easy to cross here; there was no current, and we reached the other side with little difficulty. I wondered at why this river is so calm when it took us so long to cross the White Nile and all its tributaries and swamps. But we were grateful to be across—wet, exhausted, but happy. I mentioned before how Dinka children are all ab
le to swim, a major help in our lives in the bush. We could have died had we not been able to swim across that day, because of the long journey and months of lack of water, food, and decent rest. We thought we could find food and water and safety if we could just get to Ethiopia and walk to the refugee camps. The hope of this is what kept us alive.
As we walked toward the town that was on the other side—Turgol, Ethiopia—I discovered that when I went to the side to pee, I peed blood. This frightened me. I told my uncle, and he said I would get better. I had bled from my feet lots of times, as most of us had. But this was a new worry.
At Turgol, we were able to get food—the villagers gave us maize, what Western people call corn. We boiled the grains, and then we took them with us on our journey. We had no salt, no oil, nothing. We just boiled our maize and went. The people that were here were Nuer, so they were not our tribe. We knew not to stay there. In Ethiopia, we were safe from the soldiers and tanks and guns, but we were not among people we knew there. So we kept walking.
We rose at 4 a.m. as we usually did when traveling, but we followed along the river for a long while. Our goal was a refugee camp we’d heard about, at Itang, in the north of a section of western Ethiopia that forms a thumb as it juts into Sudan. The thumb is created by a large curve in the Akobo River, and we were following that river, but now were in Ethiopia. We felt safer, because Ethiopia was friendly toward the SPLA and the southern Sudanese.
We were so glad to have water, to be in the sight of water after all the days struggling through the desert. My pee returned to normal. We could drink all the water we wanted, and store enough in our gourds for the road ahead. After about two hours, as dawn approached, we turned east toward Itang.
As we walked, I noticed that in this part of Ethiopia there were few trees. There was a thorn tree that does not produce anything. The only tree that they have here besides that is a palm tree. We have that tree in my village, but it is not the only thing we have. We have another called the thou tree, and you get it in dry season. We have another fruit called chum that grows in the dry season. We have a plum tree. During May, it would get fruit. It is different from plums you have in the United States. It will make three seeds, and then you beat it so you have juice and you put it in water and you can drink it. This is a good tree.
But in the area we were passing through, it was dry season, and even the palms were not so green. And there were few of them. When we eventually found villages—the villages were about a day apart—there were no tall trees. We just saw houses, and bushes, but there were no trees like back in my village. Also, there were few of the tall grasses like the ones we have. The areas we were walking through, they didn’t have that kind of thing.
Trees were important in our journey for safety. If a stranger came toward us, we could hide. Most important, we could rest during the afternoon, the hot part of the day, without someone traveling on the road seeing us, and us having the advantage of shade to cool us a little.
By this time, more people were traveling the road who were refugees. We did not speak to those we did not know, especially those who spoke a different language, as this was the way we protected ourselves. But more and more there were old men and women of all ages and young children and many boys. There were a few girls our age, as there would always be in the camp, but there were many more boys. The group swelled as we walked. We kept to ourselves, but during the walk through the villages of the western Ethiopian countryside on our way to Itang, our numbers were about 300 people.
Occasionally, we would see someone sleeping by the side of the road, but we did not disturb them. We were very tired. If someone fell down, they fell to sleep right away, and snored immediately. We knew that person would not wake up, so we went and woke the person up, saying, “Let’s go, you will get time to rest. You’ll get to sleep.”
I’ve been asked if we made up songs about food as we did about cows, or girls. It is the custom in my tribe to make up very elaborate songs about our cows, their color, their horns, and the sway of their walk. And our songs about a favorite girl and her attributes grow long and involved—practice for when we will sing to her in adolescence and begin the flirting and socializing that will eventually end in marriage. At the time of our marriage, there would be an exchange of our families’ choice cows.
We don’t sing in the same way about food, describing its flavors or colors or taste. There is a taboo about singing about food. In fact, in my culture, it is not polite to ask for food. To beg is to disgrace yourself. We are told that we will have enough. If we do not eat today, then we will have food tomorrow. We will always have enough.
I think it helps if other people know the way that we adapt; if they know what we do to deal with situations that threaten our lives, maybe they’ll get some ideas of how to deal with bad things in their lives. For us in our culture, when we were with our grandparents, they had to teach us everything that is learned from generation to generation. My grandparents would say, “If something happens to us or to your parents you have to be patient, make yourself to be strong, God will help you, and you can be a better person in the future.” The other thing that was impressive to me was my grandmother said, “If you are having problems, don’t think about the food we give you here. If you think about it too much, you are going to die.”
Food being such an important part of life, our grandparents and parents try to help us keep our expectations low so that we won’t die because food has become so important. In fact, that training turned out to be the difference between life and death for many of us, as we found later at Pinyudo.
But on our long and difficult journey, we did wonder about why we were having to go so far, to walk in foreign lands, to even go to another country, just to find enough to eat, to be safe, and to be able to have future lives. Where was the world while we walked?
Here in Ethiopia, we continued our way of walking in the night, stopping after midnight, sleeping for four hours, then rising and walking until midday when we could rest for a few hours when the sun was hottest. In Sudan, we would look for a tree to rest under, but there were few trees here. And we were in Nuer country, so while we did not have to worry about the Sudanese Army, we had to watch out for enemy tribes and unfriendly villagers.
Then we were in an Anwok area. We gathered maize from stacks of stalks that were left in the field to dry. These particular people cut their corn stalks down with corn inside, and they piled the stalks together. They eventually would store them inside their village storage areas, but while all dried, they were in the fields, so as we walked at night, we took corn from these piles, stopping to boil it later.
During the day we came upon villages, about one a day, and here the houses were made of grass, including the roof, and they were on one level. They did not have homes like ours made with mud and bamboo where families slept up on the second level off the ground and animals were below. Their grass homes were more like our rainy season camps where we went to escape the high waters for several months a year.
There was one thing more that was different about this area. About the third day, we saw a mountain on the horizon. We had never seen this, and it caused quite a lot of talking back and forth about it. As we drew nearer, it grew bigger. When we arrived, finally, in Itang, the mountain seemed to loom over the camp. Later we found out it was another two hours from the camp.
Numbers of people had already gathered at Itang. There were old and young, men and women, and children, many children. There were UN-provided tents, and there was food. But it was also near a river, and it was wet and swampy. We had daily rations that included some staples, like wheat flour, maize, beans, oil, sugar and salt, but there was never enough. Powdered milk was also distributed, but if we drank too much of this, we suffered from bloating. People actually died after eating too much; it was called “suffocating stomach.” One guy died—they kept us away from him. My uncle told me not to drink much of this.
We got used to sleeping at night—all the way th
rough—and rising early in the morning. We had activities to help keep the camp, but there were not other organized games or competitions. It was rainy, and it stayed muddy a lot of the time. So while we had enough water, maybe we had too much.
At this point, as I look back, I see my life began to change in big ways. For one, our small group—Laat, Matoc, my uncle Dut, Kau, and I—were separated. After walking 500 to 600 miles over several months, we were no longer together. This was because soon after I arrived at Itang, I met an elder, Akec Rang. My uncle knew a friend of his. He was Dinka, but from the Cic Dinka tribe. Still, he had connection to our people because he had married a lady from the Agar Dinka tribe like mine.
“You are supposed to go to school,” he told me. “At Itang you will not have anything.” So, after I was at Itang for about a month, he paid for a car to take me and two others, Malual and Bec, to Pinyudo, where he said we could have school. He accompanied us there.
Before I left, my uncle Dut left Itang and walked to Pinyudo. Laat followed me to Pinyudo three weeks after I’d left. Matoc stayed in Itang, but I found him at Pinyudo later, in a different group from mine. My uncle would be in an adult group in Pinyudo, although I would not see him there very much.
What we saw first at Pinyudo was a large number of houses, more than the usual number in the villages we passed while walking. Then, further away from the houses, we came to an area where people were gathered and they seemed to be staying, not moving on. We then learned that this was Pinyudo, and there was to be a refugee camp here, but there were no signs this was a camp. There were no tents. People were just staying on the ground there.