by Majok Marier
Gradually we began getting the things we needed to survive there in the Pinyudo Refugee Camp. Especially it was a great achievement for our teachers to organize thousands of minors and control them in peace. Their efforts kept the young boys and girls united from the time they arrived, and their influence continues even until now. We Lost Boys counsel each other, advise one another, comfort one another, even today—we are all brothers who came together during this civil war that tore Sudan apart. Through the school, sports, and cultural activities we grew closer and support each other as we live in homes together, or visit one another in cities where Lost Boys have gone, or visit in our home country.
One way those teachers helped us was through discipline. They taught us how to live in the world. When we were in Pinyudo, we were not allowed to go to the market. The market was a place where Ethiopians gathered to sell and buy goods; these were people who had moved close to the camp to fill some of the jobs that became available as a result of this huge center being built to care for tens of thousands of refugees. The Ethiopians living there not far from the refugee camp would display their goods on cloths on the ground, and many sales would be transacted among the people.
We were not allowed to go there without permission from the teacher. During school hours, there were not supposed to be any students in the market. We could get permission after school was over or if it was a weekend. But there was a teacher who was assigned to patrol the market and make sure we didn’t go there without permission.
The name of this teacher was Mathou. All minors knew Mathou for what he did to us, and it was good discipline for success. There were things he would not like minors doing: smoking, drinking beer, stealing, or taking money from the sellers. It was important for him for us to avoid these things. I believe I did not know anything about how to live my life before I lived in Ethiopia. Most of the minors were at first hurt he did not allow us to go to the market. All of us now realize that he wanted to make sure we were successful in our lives. He used to tell us we were the future of Sudan. The image he was looking at for us minors was education to support our country in the future; that was why he kept people focused on school and studying.
Our teachers were treating us like the seed of Sudan’s future. They did not feel good if any one of us did not obey the rules of education. They really trained us well beyond their ability. It was wonderful for these teachers to make changes in us that so that we can be leaders, fulfilling their dreams and ideas. I hope we are not going to let them down because they showed us the ways to struggle. Many minors of Sudan who went on to other places in the world should think about these people and how they influenced us. I believe some of our teachers are still in Kakuma refugee camp and they are teaching other children right now.
Since 2011, South Sudan has been independent from Sudan, and Lost Boys, whether in South Sudan or in other parts of the world, are doing an important job for their parents, relatives, families, friends and other Sudanese. They are heroes to children around the world who faced the hardship of the life during this civil war in Sudan. We are still struggling, because even after the peace agreement that ended the war, and after independence, there is much to do to make our new country strong. With our experiences of walking to find safety, adapting to new homes in several refugee camps, learning in school, learning the discipline of the right life from teachers such as Mathou, and later building new lives after leaving the camps, we are better prepared to contribute to this new future for South Sudan.
Sudan, and now South Sudan, face many challenges in the future. For many, many years, there has been a divide between the Sudanese government and southern Sudan. The problems can be expected to continue for many years to come. We Lost Boys were separated from our families at very young ages—many of us six, seven and eight years old—and many are still separated. We became orphans at early ages, and endured extreme hardship, all because of the war within our country. It is estimated that 2 million people died and many thousands were removed from one part of the country to the other and out of the country as a result of the war. We Lost Boys have seen the results of violence in our homeland. We are determined to create a peaceful, progressive future for our country.
Even though conditions at Pinyudo did improve, my impatience and curiosity grew; I wondered about whether there would be more food or resources back at Itang. I got permission to go back there to investigate for myself. I had learned on my long journey to keep going, to keep looking for resources, and I could not stop trying to get better conditions. I ended up staying for only a couple of weeks, for conditions there were not much different from Pinyudo.
In all our days at Pinyudo and Itang, there was a ray of hope, although we did not know the specifics of it. All we knew at the time there at the refugee camp is that someone important had died in a plane crash and he was on his way to see us. Later when we were in the United States we learned who he was. He was a U.S. congressman who’d heard of our plight, that civil war in southern Sudan had killed many, many people, and that thousands had had to flee to Ethiopia. His name was Mickey Leland; he was from Texas. He’d been to Ethiopia and Sudan looking into our camps, and he was trying to find a way for the United States to help.
Leland was on his way to Pinyudo Refugee Camp in 1989 when his plane crashed in the mountains of western Ethiopia. We were waiting for someone to come to see the problems. Imagine if Leland had come to Pinyudo and found the problems. We would have received some attention from America—America, the land with so many resources, so much freedom.
But no one came to find us. We still wondered where the rest of the world was in relieving the problems. It was not just our camps we were worried about, even though we never ate more than once a day, and there was illness, and much missing our families. We were concerned for our families and for our country in its long battle for resources that could help our lives; we needed help combating the Sudanese government, which took all our natural resources of water and oil, and provided no infrastructure, no electricity, no water systems. Now that government that gave us nothing was trying to kill all of us, and we needed other wealthy nations to come to our aid.
Where did the problems in Sudan come from? And what about Darfur? Many people have heard of Darfur. In fact, it is a sore point with the Lost Boys and the many others who suffered in southern Sudan that so many people were dying in the bombing and attacks on the villages in the south, and we were fleeing our homes, long before Darfur conflicts arose. Our civil war started in 1983, and the war extended past the time we eventually resettled in the United States in 2001. The war actually ended with the Peace Agreement in 2005. We believe the people in Darfur should be free of violence, also, but the problems of government attacks on their own people in southern Sudan began long before the world started hearing about Darfur, in 2003.
The native peoples of Sudan are those in south Sudan, Blue Nile province, Nuba Mountains, Darfur and other regions that are not Arab. Several centuries ago, the Arabs entered the Sudan area to trade with the native people in Sudan and west Africa. The traders then became those in power. A decision was made by the British to leave Sudan totally in the 1950s. Before that time they governed Sudan in an arrangement with Egypt. There was an attempt to separate the south from the rest of Sudan at that point, but southern Sudan agreed that they would stay with the Arab people and remain part of Sudan. A conference was held in Juba in 1950 with all chiefs of southern Sudan villages about separation of Sudan and they decided not to separate the southern provinces from the north. That was a mistake, as the Arab traders and their descendants, a people with a different religion and ethnic group from the natives, then ruled the country.
All the water from the headwaters of the Nile, which lie south of Sudan, is destined for Egypt. This is because Egypt and the Sudanese government determine these things, and the native people of Sudan do not have power to change things. All of Sudan’s oil, most of which is in Bentui, Unity State—an area of southern Sudan—is pumped ou
t and flows directly through the lower part of the country up to northern Sudan to Port Sudan on the Red Sea. All the revenues from the sale of oil go to the Sudanese government, which is controlled by Arabs. Egypt, whose development depends on waters from southern Sudan, does not appreciate how southern Sudan helps Egyptian people with water from the River Nile. Egypt supports their friends in north Sudan because of the Islamic Brotherhood.
These Arabs are Muslim. The people in the south are mostly Christian or animist, the native religion. The civil war in southern Sudan began over the attempt by the Sudanese government in Khartoum trying to impose the Muslim sharia law in all of Sudan. It began in 1983, and it reached my village in 1987. In time, some 80,000 refugees filled camps in Pinyudo and other locations. An estimated 2 million died in the war. Yet the news was not widespread about the civil war that eventually extended over two decades. Is it a coincidence that the United Nations Secretary during part of this time was from Egypt?
Khartoum focuses all the resources that it receives to develop the areas in the North rather than in the South and in other remote areas. There is no infrastructure—schools, hospitals, factories, roads, security—they are all lacking in southern Sudan, and before the civil war, the politicians from southern Sudan did not secure these things in their areas. Southern Sudan got two vice presidents before the civil war, but they did not build one house in their own home town. They lived in Khartoum for their whole life because they did not want to come back to southern Sudan.
Darfur is in western Sudan, and its characteristics are different from southern Sudan. In Darfur are many Africans who have over the centuries converted to Islam, but they are native Sudanese like those in the south, so they are Muslim Africans. It is important to know the truth, and that is that the Darfurians were the highest percentages in the Sudanese Army, the same army that killed many of our people in southern Sudan; it was those soldiers we were fleeing all those months on our journey, and the ones who would kill us if we did not reach safety.
At this time, the Darfurians regret what they did to southern Sudanese people, and we are still welcoming them as our people of one nation. We are all Sudanese. What happened in Darfur is that unlike southern Sudan, there are few natural resources in Darfur. There are no roads going into that area. Between Libya and Sudan, if you travel by car, you’ll easily get lost because of dust. There’s not any road you will see. Dust will cover it. In their area, it is desert; there are no resources, no water; their people rely on the government, and so when they started demanding resources, that’s when the government started bombing their villages.
In our area, meaning the western part of southern Sudan where the Malual Dinka live, the Marleen, the nomadic sheepherders, came over into western Bahr el Ghazal, looking for water for their livestock. They took a lot of children from there, and that’s why slave trading started. What affected us was the Sudanese government was not enforcing the border there. All through this region they took a lot of children and they killed a lot of people. Here is the Kirr River; they have to get water, so what happened was that during this dry season they come on this river; they burn all the houses around here and stay there, and they abduct the children and girls; then they kill the Malual Dinka’s animals and get the meat, then take cows with them as they leave.
Back in Darfur, north of this area, the Janjaweed were given guns by the Sudanese government, so they warred on the native African tribes. They were also Muslim, but the government would set one part of the tribes against another, and they would say we will give you power, and then you can kill the other people. Those native people were wanting the government to provide them with health care and infrastructure and access to water. So then the Janjaweed, now armed, started warring on these Darfur Africans.
This all started long after our civil war had caused us to have to leave our homes, see our companions die, lose our parents and families—it had been going on since the early 80s. We were warred on earlier than Darfur, but the world heard more about Darfur, and it was termed “genocide.” We feel the southern Sudan war was genocide as well. Likewise Rwanda, which experienced so many millions of deaths in 1994, was called genocide. Maybe these are called genocides because the rest of the world got to hear about them. After Rwanda, maybe the world was watching more. So those are the differences in the southern Sudanese civil war and the tragedies in Darfur.
Five
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Fleeing Ethiopia
We Lost Boys of Sudan all had different experiences—we varied in age and came from numerous villages across southern Sudan when the civil war erupted, and journeys took different paths before we ended up in Pinyudo Refugee Camp. There were 12 groups that included about 15,000 boys altogether at Pinyudo. But we will all remember the Gilo River, and we will never forget that experience. If you ever meet a Lost Boy, you will know he is in fact a Lost Boy if you mention the Gilo River, and his reaction is to become either very quiet, or very angry, as he relates what took place.
First, we have to return to the country of our refuge, Ethiopia. During the Sudanese Civil War, the Sudanese government was determined to eliminate the Sudanese Peoples’ Liberation Army, and the government’s Sudanese Army held many of the southern Sudan towns. The SPLA, under the leadership of John Garang, fought for control from one village to another, attempting to take areas from the SA. The SPLA sanctuary was Ethiopia, and this safety was made possible because of the mutually helpful alliance between the dictator of Ethiopia, Mengistu Haile Mariam, and John Garang. Mengistu’s protection made the camps able to operate eventually so that we could obtain food, shelter, and safety from the SPLA and the UN.
After the severe hunger of the first months in Pinyudo when so many children died, the food gradually became more predictable, although we continued to receive only one meal of corn or grain or beans a day. Still, we’d built our homes and a classroom. We’d found a priest among us, Father Madol, and we were having Mass, and we were about to begin construction of a nice church in our camp. There was a great deal of excitement about this. Life was a little bit okay for the unaccompanied minors at Pinyudo Refugee Camp.
Then, with the fury of a sudden desert dust storm, in May 1991, we were ordered to leave the country in 24 hours. After ruling Ethiopia for many years, Mengistu was overthrown by rebels, and the rebels ordered refugees to leave. In the camp, there was chaos. Where were we supposed to go? And how? People ran around in panic. All they could think about was the hard months of journeying to find safety, and how that now would start all over again.
There was no reliable transportation for us to leave the country. It was not a simple thing to do—there were no trucks to carry us or any other transport. Ethiopian rebels were combining their armies with Sudanese armies from the Khartoum government to take control of all of Ethiopia and to take revenge on the SPLA and its kind. We were going to be under attack anywhere we went.
Our leaders told us to run—and that’s what we did. People had to try their best to walk by foot for 100 miles to reach the southern Sudanese border and, beyond that, the town of Pachala. Boys who had walked to Ethiopia through Pachala on the way to the refugee camps gave us directions.
We had to swim the Gilo River, a river forming the border with Sudan, in order to reach this safe area of Sudan. It was the rainy season, and the Gilo River was full of swift, turbulent water because of the heavy rainfall. People could not see the other side of the river, and they wondered how to cross. There were no boats or local fishermen to help them negotiate the river.
With my companions, I was able to swim in the swift water. There were high waves in the river. Coming behind us were the other refugees, and we were all trying to make it out of Ethiopia before the rebels caught up with us. We made it across, but others were not so lucky. In 1992, I talked to my friend Mawat who was there. The rebel troops came up behind those on the river’s edge and began shooting; they forced people into the river with their heavy gunfire, and then contin
ued shooting as people tried to swim across the river. If you were swimming in the river, three or four people jumped on top of you as they fled into the river. They bumped into bodies as they tried to cross. Others were killed by crocodiles in the river. So whether from being shot, or drowning, or being attacked by crocodiles, many, many people died at the Gilo River.1
Anti-aircraft were patrolling the borders between Ethiopia and Sudan and shooting at rebels who might be in those areas. They followed the routes to the towns they already knew, like Pachala. So the refugees avoided these places, moving beyond the river and Pachala to open fields outside the town. They had to go where they would not be hit by bombs.
The Ethiopian rebels themselves teamed up with the Sudanese government. They were actually based in Sudan. When the rebels overthrew Mengistu and we were told to leave for the sake of our lives, we walked away very quickly. I was one of the first, and since I was nearly 12 years old, and I’d grown tall, my natural tendency to move quickly was aided by long legs and moderately good health. That’s why I could get to the river before most of the others who were caught up in the gunfire. There was a special group of refugees trailing far behind us that came out from Pinyudo, heading for the river. They could not walk easily because they were older, and there was an International Red Cross worker with them. When they got to Pachala, the Sudanese government bombed them. They captured them, including the IRC worker, and took them all to Khartoum. They released the IRC person, but they kept the children. I don’t know what they did with them.