by Majok Marier
Those who were able to make it across the river then went further west, one hour from the Gilo, in Pachala. When people went to Pachala, there was no food. There is a small airstrip there; no planes carrying food could land there. The UN base at Lokichoiko, Kenya, was trying to figure out how to help the children. So they came out from Lokichoiko with flights, dropping food down on the ground there in Pachala. We were in an open expanse of land—few trees, no provision for cover. It took them a month to figure out how to fly in and make the food drops. It was the rainy season and people had nothing to eat. So when they started the flights, they dropped food down, and they killed some people with loads of food. While people were waiting for these food drops to get organized, they became so desperate they ate tree leaves, and a kind of fruit on the tree. There is a seed on the tree that people eat.
So we might get food from the airlift, but what about tomorrow or next month? There was no shelter, and we were wet a lot of the time from the rains. What kind of a life is that? This went on for several months.
As SPLA forces were now in control of some of the towns in the southern part of Sudan, camps were being set up to receive us. This is what we heard.
As the dry season began, in January, February, and March, we began moving south. We were encouraged to move toward the Kenyan border, as Sudan was still in civil war, and while the SPLA forces now controlled some of the towns, that could change. If the attacks became more threatening, we were closer to Kenya than Uganda, so we tried to go in that direction. We walked in large groups, moving toward Kapoeta, further southwest in Sudan, in Eastern Equatoria region. (It is now Eastern Equatoria state.)
This time, there were UNHCR support trucks that offered food and water to those walking, and a ride for a while for those who needed to rest. Belongings packed on our heads, we moved through Kapoeta, and then settled east of the town in an area known as Narus close to the Kenyan border. Again, we tried to stay away from population centers, as these could be bombed.
In Pinyudo, we had 12 groups. Then we had six groups within the same area, so we had a total of 18 groups. When people moved out from Pinyudo, they went back to their original 12 groups in these new camps. At Narus, refugees came out of the refugee camp in Ethiopia called Dima. These were more Sudanese. We were all unaccompanied minors, but now our groups included some that had not been at Pinyudo.
With all the movement and the addition of new people, it was hard to tell who had survived the Gilo River. There were other hardships along the way, as there had been in the loss of people while we hunted for grasses to build our huts at Pinyudo. Some people were missing, but some people may have been with different groups. Some may have gone back to their original groups, or they may have gone home to their villages. Years later, people pop up and you see them in passing, and you say, “You are still alive. I did not know that you were alive.” But a lot of people, they are actually gone.
I wondered about my uncle who accompanied me to Ethiopia during my long time at Pinyudo Refugee Camp, and after. I rarely saw him at Pinyudo, and I did not know what group he was in. Only later did I find out that after Pinyudo Refugee Camp collapsed, he ran with all the others, but he walked home to find our village of Adut Maguen. He found the family at Pulkar instead. So my guardian on the way to Ethiopia is still living with relatives near the village where I was born, and I have seen him on my returns to our home. Kau also ran; he lives in Rumbek.
People had begun building homes in the Narus camp when all of a sudden, again, calamity struck. The Sudanese Army captured Kapoeta, and we had to move again. The attack came in the morning; in the afternoon, we were told to leave, to walk to Kenya, to Lokichoiko, where there was a UN base. We did not ask why, we just walked. We began walking at 6 p.m. and we walked all night. If we stopped to rest, we would not make it. Our group arrived at the Kenyan border the next morning, and we walked farther on to Lokichoiko.
Loki—we call it that—became our next stop. Set up on a wide expanse of flat land like our open fields in Pachala, this was not actually the town of Lokichoiko; it was outside the town close to the airport and to the Sudan border. So we just cleared bushes out and people slept on the plastic we put down.
Here the terrain was barren. There was no river, as there had been at Pinyudo. There we’d been able to swim in the river, and we had water not very far from the camp. In Loki, and later at Kakuma, both in northern Kenya, we depended on wells, because this area was very dry with hardly any rain.
It was at Loki that I was shocked at seeing our precious drinking water supply dirtied by a UN camp manager. I can only describe what I saw. When we arrived in Loki, there was a water tank that UNHCR had provided for refugees for drinking, cooking, and showering. The water was regularly pumped from the well, and stored in a large plastic container, kind of like a swimming pool with a cover that holds water collecting on the top. One day I was going to get some water from the water tank. The field official of UNHCR, a man called Phillip, was standing on the water tank. I remember when I saw him, I was very surprised, because I saw him as an official, and here he looked like one of us. He stood on the tank, and proceeded to use shampoo soap on his hair and then to rinse his head in that water. I left that day without getting water for me to drink, cook or shower. It took me two weeks to drink from the water tank again at Loki. This thing was very painful for me to talk about. Sometimes, it seemed the people who were to protect us did not care about us.
Refugees’ leaders were reporting incidents to higher authorities in UNHCR to send Phillip away from the camp in Loki (there were other examples of mistreatment from Phillip), but UNHCR had failed to solve that problem. This was one of many events. UNHCR employees often treated people badly in my presence; we were considered like animals by some UNHCR officials, especially field officers. The water incident was something UNHCR personnel did that affected thousands of refugees. Phillip eventually was killed in a Somalian refugee camp in northeastern Kenya, so perhaps he carried his disrespectful ways too far.
What bothered us in these cases where we experienced neglect or other actions that hurt us as refugees in the camp is that we see ourselves as people worthy of respect. The fact that we found ourselves in need and without a country was not our fault; we were people, just like the camp administrators. It seems that those who are refugees have few rights; what we receive in aid we are supposed to be grateful for and not to complain. Yet these kinds of actions can be helped if the UNHCR would make sure they employ only effective managers, not those who disrespect and abuse others in their care.
While we were in Loki, our next location, Kakuma, was not even a camp yet. It was started during the time we arrived at Loki; that’s when the UN and the other agencies that were assisting them, such as Lutheran World Federation, were debating where they could put us. During this time, we also had the adult camps and the families’ camp, so there were many, many refugees. We were there in Loki for two and a half or three months.
I turned 12 years old in 1992, in Loki, and a camp was under construction in Kakuma, further southeast in Kenya. They were cutting the trees to make the poles that would become the frame for our homes. They would have plastic for roofs. They also were laying out roads and determining the size of the groups, and then creating roads that could pass through these areas. They set up zones throughout the camp so that they could have a way of identifying and organizing all the groups. Now there were many more groups and so they were reorganized and renumbered.
We traveled to Kakuma by truck. And for the first time, the road was paved, a new experience for me—it was just like all the streets we see in Georgia now: all paved. Groups of us stood in the bed of the truck for the journey. In fact, the whole process of moving these thousands of people took two or three months. The day we got to Kakuma, people had been arriving for three days, and the camp directors were showing us where to set up. When we arrived, we were told to sit on the ground so that we could then be directed where to go. I rode in a truck with peo
ple from Rumbek—in fact one was a relative, an uncle, and there was a mother with two girls—and then I joined a group of unaccompanied minors as it was being assigned a place to camp. The UNHCR person did not have many skills in helping people get settled—in fact, he seemed to want to start a conflict among the groups he was dealing with. Two groups, Group 9 and Group 18, were assigned the same space. It was not large enough, and it contained a small creek. Since it was rainy season, a lot of the space was muddy, so there was not much area to set up camp. And then that one leader of Group 18, who was also a teacher, went and asked the UN guy and said, “You know, this space is not going to accommodate us. If you could take us to a different place, that would be good.” The UN guy told him, “I am not going to do anything, so you can just go and stay. Or you can fight to see who can get another space.”
So that group leader said he was not going to do that, he would just move his people to a different place. So that settled the problem. In the morning, he moved his people to an area that was not technically his; instead of staying in Zone 1, he moved to Zone 2. He did not want to fight with another group, but the UN guy seemed to want him to fight as a way to solve a problem.
This same camp director got in trouble with the Catholic priest, Father Benjamin Madol Akot. The field officer ordered Father Madol to move his church to a different place, and Father told him that this was a place he wanted to build his church, in the center of the camp. But the field officer would not let him build his church there. Father refused to leave the place he ordered him from; the field officer told Father that he was going to send him back to Sudan. The two of them got into a fight and they had to call Kenyan police to come and break up the fight. The field officer was fired immediately.
After these opening events, things eventually started happening for the good. We lived with the others in our group, with each group numbering about a thousand. Each of us was assigned to a house, and three or four people were to live in that house. They called our names and they told us where we could build our house, and they gave us poles and plastic and nails. Then they actually hired Kenyans to come in and make the house. They scheduled it so they would come to the group and they would demarcate everything, and then they would start building. So for the first time, we had someone providing a home; we did not have to gather sticks and make mud and create our own walls.
At least that was the way it was for a while. Then the plastic that was being used for roofing melted in the sun. We complained to the UN people and they said they would survey, but this was complicated. The people who were in charge of construction for refugees would take some time before coming to survey. And it would take some months for them to build your house or secure the material for you, so people got tired of it and said, “Give me some materials, and I can do it myself.”
Unlike Pinyudo, there were no grasses in this area, and there was no tree you could see the leaves on. In fact, I think they went out of the area to West Pakot in central Kenya to get the trees for the poles they supplied. The UN would even deliver firewood to us. We could not go and get anything. The local people around here could shoot us, we were told. In Ethiopia, we could go anywhere, get the trees and build our houses, and there’s a lot of grass and plenty of grains. However, this area of Lokichoiko and Kakuma was a desert with none of these resources.
So we requested materials from the UN camp managers, and some people they did give material to and some not. We started installing macute—palm leaves stitched together—to make the roof. Walls are formed of upright sticks, and then you place the mud on top of that. That was the solution we refugees came up with.
Because of the UNHCR, Lutheran World Federation, and many other aid agencies, Kakuma Refuge Camp was a very good place in 1992 to 1995 for having food, water, and healthy conditions. People got a full ration for two meals a day, and water was available to drink, to cook, and to get a shower. The kind of food that we received at that time was wheat flour, maize or corn, sorghum, dry fish, cabbages, sugar, oil, beans and salt. These foods were distributed to everyone throughout the camp. Again, the food was brought to the groups, the group leader distributed it to all the boys, and the boys made it last through the week. The refugees’ life was a little better during that period of time. In the middle of this period, about 1993, the Lutheran World Federation cut some of the food from the refugees’ budget, so we no longer had wheat flour, dry fish, or cabbages.
In this camp there was a lot more order, and roads were in place to bring rations to each group and otherwise provide for walking among the groups. The camp grew rapidly. There was a terrible genocide in Rwanda in 1994, and we started having more Rwandans, and then, eventually, Somalis who were displaced by the collapse of civil government in that country came to Kakuma from refugee centers closer to Somalia.
The camp had more resources available than any of the ones we’d been in so far, and we were assured we were safe here, as we were far away from the civil war in Sudan. Yet people wanted to know when the war would end. No refugee camp is like being at home, and our group members and all the children in the camp wanted their families, or to know if their families were still alive. We were told the UN would support us from primary grades through Form 4, and they would provide that education. (In Kenya, as in many former British colonies, high school consists of Form 1, 2, 3, and 4. These are similar to grades 9, 10, 11 and 12 in U.S. high schools.) After that we would be released. Where would we work? Probably we wouldn’t go to a university, as Kenyans didn’t like us, and weren’t likely to have us attend, even if we qualified.
So here we were in Kenya, hopefully safe, looking forward to being educated, but in a country where we were strangers, sometimes barely tolerated, a situation we encountered over most of the 15 years of our journey.
Six
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Kakuma Refugee Camp
Many times in our travels to other countries outside of Africa, we’ve found confusion about our country—some people think Sudan is Somalia, or vice versa, possibly because both start with the letter “S.” And people don’t know the culture of, say, Kenya versus Sudan, or how West African countries may differ from East African. Each country really has its own culture, and there are often many different tribal cultures within a single country, just as in southern Sudan, there are Dinka, Nuer, Murle, and quite a few others—and a hundred languages.
The culture of Sudan is very, very old, as it is in these other countries. There are many strong tribal influences, and there are religions and government forms that have been introduced, especially during the colonial period, which is really late when compared with the cultures in these African countries. In the late 1800s through the mid–1950s and ’60s, European nations competed with each other to see who could own the most of Africa. Britain shared control of Sudan with Egypt from the end of the 1800s until 1956, and then Sudan became independent. British culture influenced Sudan, but not to the extent that British colonial rule affected Kenya and quite a few other countries. Sudan did see introduction of Christianity to southern Sudan, and to this day, the conflict between the Christian/animist culture with the Islamic culture of northern Sudan—its native African culture gave way to Islam, the faith of Arabs moving into the area in the 1500s—continues to color Sudan’s history. Some of Sudan is Muslim; the Muslim Africans of Darfur represent a second culture, but among the Lost Boys and the southern Sudan area, the tribespeople are primarily Christian or traditional African religion. Kenya is predominantly Christian. Somalia, however, is predominantly Muslim; its northern tip is directly across from the Arabian Peninsula, and it traded directly with Islamic countries over the centuries.
There are conflicts within these countries between minority and majority populations; in Sudan, the presence of many different tribes presents opportunity for conflict, although most disputes are localized and involve scarcity of resources. Unlike European and Western countries, there is not a lot of infrastructure, no water systems, elec
tricity, good roads and schools, and no strong government structure seeing to the needs of the population. In fact, tribal areas move, sometimes with the season, sometimes with internal wars. Borders are often a compromise after a conflict, and disputes can recur, changing these demarcations.
The one thing we knew in our travels and what we still know today: We tread carefully wherever we go, because conflict with strange groups is frequent in our area, due to these many tribal groups as well as conflicts introduced historically by the non-native ethnic groups coming into our midst. It’s like walking on eggshells: We try not to break anything, but sometimes it is inevitable. On our long journey from Sudan to Ethiopia, back to Sudan, and then to Kenya, we learned we had to know when to leave a place we had just entered.
On our journey, each village we came to, we realized what we faced up ahead: maybe help, maybe trouble. Often people would offer us some food, but because they had family and villagers to provide for, we could not stay long. They might put some meal in a gourd for us, and we had to take nibbles of this as we continued our walking.
Why would villagers not welcome us? They would suspect that we were not just there for relief, but instead wanted to move in and settle there, and that scared them. They had land enough for their needs, but if others came after us and our families followed, there would not be enough.
I believe our journey offers a lesson in how our problems in Sudan, in Africa, and other parts of the world will be solved in the long run: One village at a time, one settlement at a time, we will learn how to get along with each other. First, it will take approaching carefully, respectfully, and knowing what the other person’s needs are, and the boundaries we need to observe. Within that, not trying to impose our culture on theirs, we need to find the areas where we can agree we need to help each other, just as we did in making shoes and pots and pans for the people in Poktub in our first journey east through southern Sudan.