by Majok Marier
The scene was very disorganized. The car left, and Akec left, and we were there, three boys who did not know each other well. We were Dinka, but we spoke different dialects. We sat on the ground there. We had shorts and shirts on. We were not naked, as there had been some food and clothes at Itang. Most of the other boys were naked. Many of the others were in rags.
More and more people arrived at the camp area. There were many languages. It was difficult to tell who was going to help us. There was no food, and there was no other support.
Finally after about a month, we were told to gather in certain areas, and they created several large groups: boys, girls, and then adults, including adults who had young children with them. We were considered “unaccompanied minors,” as we had no adults with us. My uncle I could not see, but later I understood he was in a group with the adults.
As many as 300 people at a time came to the camp, but they could not stay together—the organizers wanted to mingle the tribes among themselves so that they would have better cooperation. This way we had to live with people who were not like us, but we learned to work out how we communicated and got tasks done.
Group leaders, many of whom later became our teachers, were selected to be in charge of each subgroup of minors. We were organized into groups based on our age. Among the unaccompanied minors, there were 12 groups, and I was in Group 9. Further designations were made so that each subgroup leader looked after 10 boys.
In this area there were more trees, and we camped under these. We did not have blankets, we did not have food, and there were snakes and scorpions to look out for. The young children were not able to survive that way—no food or blankets, and their stomachs were empty all the time.
By this time it was the rainy season, and we heard trucks of aid could not get through because of the deep mud caused by rains on roads from their headquarters in Gambela, Ethiopia. The aid was to come from the United Nations through its aid agency, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). We were aware of UNHCR personnel in the camp from the beginning. Their compound was being constructed and they were erecting a big tent to distribute the food.
People in the camp began dying of starvation, or disease, or exposure. They had walked, like us, for hundreds of miles, through the desert and hostile lands where some were killed by native tribes afraid they were coming to take their territory. They’d run from areas where soldiers were, but some fell to soldiers’ bullets when they went too close to a town. They’d escaped wild animal attacks, snakes, and poisonous bites. They kept walking without food and water until their feet were bloody. They’d lost companions, their families. Their hope was the refugee camps in Ethiopia. Now that they had arrived, it was safe, and they didn’t have to walk; there were not soldiers or hostile people that would kill people. But there was great hunger, there was no food, they were naked, and there weren’t even blankets on which to lie on the ground.
Finally, a truck arrived, but by this time there were thousands of people lying or sitting under trees and all over the camp. Our large groups of unaccompanied minors were in one area, adults in another, but there were so many.
The one truck that got through came with 20 bags of corn or maize, but that cannot feed 15,000 children. It was really bad because when they came to distribute that corn, some people ended up with one kernel of corn and that’s all the person had to eat. Now children were thinking about their mothers and how they served them with their food, thinking that if they were back home, they could get food anytime. So that is the reason people died—loss of hope.
This is the only reason I can think that I did not die. I remembered my grandmother’s lesson from long ago: not to long for the food that she used to feed me and that my mother used to feed me. There was no food. People had to hope there would be food the next day. Many could not do that.
Many boys were dying because of lack of food, cold weather, and diseases. Many boys used to collect maize that dropped on the floor during distribution, and that’s all they got. We were naked because UNHCR did not provide clothes. The young children were not able to survive under the trees without food and blankets. We lived under trees for six months, and in that time we lost more boys because of these lacks.
I remembered three boys who died at night because of starvation. It was one day that we had received a small amount of food in the distribution and some people decided to keep it for the following morning so they would have enough food until the next food arrived. When we woke up in the morning, the three had died while they slept. They had not eaten for two days and probably they’d had even less over the months. The UNHCR official came to see what happened to those children, and some of the other boys were selected to go and bury them. We used to bury our friends, and this was unjust to have a child bury another child at our age.
There was no regular food available for five to six months. In that time, hundreds of children died. The children also had malaria, malnourishment, diarrhea and dysentery. If you have some corn and you don’t even boil it, and you have a long time not eating anything, it can have a reaction on your stomach. And if you drink a lot of water, that can also bring diarrhea. Diarrhea killed a lot of people. Also, chicken pox started coming out on the bodies. Nobody got immunizations when they were young, so those were the other things that people had.
We would go to the cemetery for the burial of a person in our group, and we would see another child we knew being buried. It seems like those burials happened every day.
Where was the world while this happened? Couldn’t the UNHCR have acted faster to bring food and shelter to prevent the deaths of these children? They are supposed to be looking out for disasters like this, thousands and thousands of children and refugee families—couldn’t the countries of the world have moved faster to help us? Those are questions I still have.
How did we deal with these desperate conditions? Older Sudanese refugees in the camp came up with the idea of organizing games and dances. There were dances for children that involved a series of moves like a couple of girls would dance and then they would select a boy to dance with them, and then two of those would dance together while the second girl would then select another partner. Other children clapped their hands to provide the music. Children took turns selecting each other as partners until everyone was dancing. These kinds of games and dances were entertaining.
I’ve mentioned before that there were many languages among all the people on the long walk to Ethiopia. In camp, this was true as well. We found people who could speak our language by hearing someone saying words we recognized. There was a connection, and we did things together. In Group 9, I found some others who spoke the same Agar Dinka language. Then, as we did on our journey, where we had different words for the same thing, we would agree on words we would all use in common to help us understand each other.
While these were necessary distractions, life continued to be hard in Pinyudo. One incident shows how just trying to provide for shelter had life-and-death consequences. I think there should have been a better way to watch over the many, many children in the camp and provide for their safety. This day ended up with some children becoming lost, and probably they died. We do not know.
At the time of this trip into the bush, it was six months after we arrived at Pinyudo. Food deliveries had become more regular. Some adult refugees were identified who could become our teachers. We were still sleeping under trees.
In our group, Group 9, we were ages six, seven, eight, and nine. Our group leaders and teachers had organized a trip to find our shelter and bedding material in the forest. We were told the night before that tomorrow we were going to find material for our houses and beds. We were excited because we didn’t know how bad it was in the forest. In the morning we woke up early, at 4 a.m., and we went together before the others, proud to know that we were going to the forest first. We were about one thousand children that morning walking to find the materials—large sticks and grasses mostly. We stayed with every
one until 7 a.m., and then at 8 o’clock, we left the group, because we knew each other and we thought we could gather our materials together. By 10 o’clock we had all our grasses and sticks of wood. And then we tried to return back to the group, but we had lost our way back home.
We were lost for the whole day. We were trying to go back home early, but we just went deeper inside the dark forest. The big problem was that, because of tall grass, we could not see anything, no familiar natural markers, to help us find our way home. We climbed up on a tree to see if we could tell which way to go, but we couldn’t. We were very thirsty because there was no water to drink for the whole day, not to mention no food.
From the trees around us came the frightened screeches of monkeys—calling to alarm other monkeys. This is the sound they make when there are wild animals around. I was very used to paying attention to animals’ alarm sounds back in my home village. We had gone a long way from home—not one of the trees in that place had any cuts on them from humans taking limbs from trees. When we heard the cries of the monkeys, we made the decision immediately to go back and follow the way that we came from. After about a three-hour walk, we ended up getting back to camp that night at 9 p.m. We’d been gone on our own since 8 a.m. Teachers and group leaders were preparing to search for us in the morning, but we arrived safely, and everybody was happy to see us.
I keep remembering that day. I don’t think I’ll forget that hard day in my whole life. I still remember my three friends I went looking for grass and limbs with. Mangar Ayii was a Cic Dinka (the Cic live to the southeast near Bor, in South Sudan). I think he may have returned to his home. Yel Garang was a Malual Dinka; he is in Seattle, Washington. And Yai, another Malual Dinka boy, is in Texas. (The Malual Dinka are in the Bahr el Ghazal region of South Sudan, but much farther west than my home.)
We were sure that other children were not so lucky, that they did not return from that trip, because there was no adult making sure each group traveled and returned safely. That was another incident where we feel the camp organizers should have been more careful in preventing children from becoming lost and dying in the forest. I know there were some losses, as I had a cousin who was on that trip, and his friend who went with him was never found.
We made our houses out of sticks and mud, with a grass roof. The grasses also were used for our beds. All of us worked to build our own shelter. Once we did this, we also went out to gather grasses to build our classroom.
Just as the group leaders had come from the older Sudanese there in Pinyudo Refugee Camp, so did the idea for starting schools so that we could receive our education. We began classes under a tree in the camp, led by those older Sudanese who had received schooling themselves, and this soon led to constructing a classroom building.
This classroom was one large open building made of tree poles for support and a very big single roof made of grasses laid on pole framing and lashed down to secure it.
When we started having school, we used charcoal from our fires instead of chalk, and cardboard cut from the large boxes our cooking oil came in became a blackboard. The classes were really big. A teacher would teach 100 children in that large classroom building, and then we would go outside in circles and in small groups, we would each take turns writing “1” or “8” or our letters or whatever was the lesson. Later, they tried to give us sheets from exercise books, but there were not enough materials for each to have a booklet. They gave us an exercise sheet and we cut this in two. All pencils were broken in half to give to students. Sometimes in the group they would learn the material. But it was really slow.
I was going to school. At Pinyudo, I learned my numbers and letters and some basic math. This was the school information I wanted to learn. Back in our villages, only a few (one boy out of a family) would be spared the hard work of cattle grazing and farming. If the war had not come to my village, I would have eventually gone to school in Arabic, as the schools were supported by the Sudanese government, which is predominantly Arab and Muslim. What a different fate and schooling I had, there with 15,000 Sudanese children from all across southern Sudan, learning my letters in English by writing in the dirt with a stick. But I was glad to learn English and to have this be the start of my education, which was completed in those refugee camp schools.
This is what I was to do in my family, become educated. But my family was not with me. It was painful to think of being away from my family.
Laat, who was with me on my journey from southern Sudan, was in Group 3. I knew my uncle was in Pinyudo somewhere. There were other boys I was meeting, but I was missing my mother and my grandmother and my brothers and sister. Were they safe? Where were they? I didn’t know these things. And in my group there were a thousand other boys who were wondering the same things about their families.
The dance became more important to me at this time. I was very popular as a partner for the pretty girls, and it felt good to be selected to dance. We performed dances called Ayelyom and Kelle. I was even selected to dance for the UNHCR officials when they visited Pinyudo Refugee Camp. It was a way to welcome the officials; it was fun and enjoyable for me. The dancing made me focus without thinking about my parents at that time. I thank my parents for their help to let me know how to dance our traditional dances. I did it for fun and to keep myself out of trouble thinking about my mother and my home. When I came back home from activities, I felt tired and I fell asleep immediately. I did not have time to think about home, or about those colleagues who had died or who had been lost on the hunt for shelter and bed materials.
Four
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Seed of Sudan
For the first six months of our stay at Pinyudo Refugee Camp, we were plagued by a lack of food. It was one thing not to have food on our long journey when our enemies were also thirst, exposure, wild animals, and soldiers. It was quite different to be in a large camp, sheltered by homes we’d built ourselves of mud, sticks, and grass, row upon row of dwellings organized in subgroups of a thousand, 12 to 15,000 children in all, children suffering and dying for lack of food.
We arrived probably in late 1987, and that was a time of no food probably for a month until the first truck was finally able to get through. Children perishing from starvation and loss of hope, as well as illness, was a daily event. I will never forget this time. It was probably in May of 1988, six months later, that food started coming more regularly, but we still were limited to one meal a day. We ate no breakfast or lunch, but only dinner, and that was also very little, usually beans or corn, very little meat. The uncertainty of distributions made people hopeless. We in our group tried to encourage each other not to lose hope, just as we had on our journey.
Eventually, malaria began to attack some refugees. That was added to the problem of diarrhea, a continuing tragedy where people became dehydrated and died. Dysentery was a problem. There was also a disease caused by some meats. Dinka call it agui or magui. If you eat meat with this disease, it can kill you. If you eat it, you become very constipated and your eyes turn yellow and your urine is very yellow. Our people would use the local medicines, the local beer or mou heer, to cure it, but we did not have this. In 1988 or 1989, there was a Catholic Church that was opened in the refugee camp, and that church was served by sisters (nuns) from Italy, and they had a medicine that could treat this disease. So they treated people with agui, and that is when it was discovered there was a Catholic priest in the camp who was one of the refugees.
The Italian Catholics contacted their headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and they sent this priest’s name to Addis and found out he had been ordained in 1982. They told the priest—his name was Father Madol—that they would get him a car so he could open a church for the people in the area around Pinyudo, and then he could help the people in the camp. As you’ll see when my story continues, the priest was a great friend to the people in the camp, and having the Mass became very important to us as a way of praying for the many problems people had in the camps
and for our families left behind in southern Sudan.
Before Father Madol was discovered, people would just pray under the tree. They would gather at a specific time and pray. Then Father started saying Mass under the tree, and that was good. After that, also, we began receiving medicine and clothing from Ethiopians in Addis Ababa. Finally, we had been discovered and our needs were becoming known, and someone else was helping us.
We had another distraction once some of the elders in the refugees helped organize soccer and volleyball games. Someone provided balls so we could play, and playgrounds were set up in each of the 12 groups. These games were new to many of us, especially to me, but I discovered I really liked volleyball, and I was good at it. Being tall for my age helped!
Once food did start to arrive, a system was set up where each group (there were about 1,000 boys in each group) would take responsibility for distributing and storing the food. We have 12 groups, and the 12 groups each have a playground where they can play soccer, volleyball or basketball. The UN brings the food from the store; they put it on the truck, and they bring it to the group. They put it in the playground, and then the group leader comes and tells the village leaders to get their food. And each group stores the food in one place. This is the ration for one month, and our leader portions it out. Then after a month, they have to get a new ration. So it was really easy. Anyone could see the food. The boys would see the food and know that it is there. Every group and subgroup of that larger group has its own food. There is a day, and everyone knows when it is, when food will be distributed to people.
This process reduced the fear of not having food. It was a simple but important way of assuring the boys that we were not without food. It would have to be used wisely so that the ration would last until the end of the month. But we knew if we did that, we would have enough food.