by Majok Marier
We relied on each other, and we still rely on each other, in making decisions about our future moves, whether in Clarkston, Georgia, Nashville, California, or Syracuse, New York. This practice of consulting each other comes from our Dinka culture. We are used to our elders negotiating important decisions for the family and for the village. We relied on our parents and grandparents to set guidelines for us. We retain the reliance on elders—I’ll write soon about Lutheran Ministries of Georgia, Mama Gini Eagen, and the many, many people who assisted with our transition in Clarkston. Respect for elders is a characteristic of our culture.
Just as my uncle persuaded me that first day on the run from our flaming village to wear my gourd to carry precious water, we try to use discussion and logic to help each other when confronted with a problem. Our parents taught us many skills to help us on our journey, especially how to help ourselves when no one else could give us aid. It’s a lesson we keep applying today.
So here we were in Kenya; all was not perfect, but we adapted. If the local Turkana people did not like us, and we could not go outside the camp, we would do something else. What we did was sports.
Our sports training and competitions had started in Pinyudo. There was an adult refugee, Madong Mading Ater, who was from Rumbek near my home village, and he was very skilled in all sports. He taught us soccer, volleyball, and basketball, and organized many teams within the camps, and in the zones. He was in charge of the sports in the camp at Pinyudo and also at Kakuma, so he set up a lot of competitions. At Kakuma, he also arranged handball, and I don’t know what other sports he did. For soccer, volleyball and basketball, we even had the zone teams select the members of Central teams that would play teams outside the camp, competing against Itang or Kakuma area teams. In addition, there were athletics, running competitions that were organized for the camp residents.
There were other teachers who knew how to play soccer and volleyball and basketball, because when things were good in Sudan, they learned all of these. Those people were assigned to train us in team sports. These teams were real active.
I became a very good volleyball player. I am tall, and this offers an advantage in spiking the ball or passing back and forth across the net. I was on the Central Team for Kakuma Refugee Camp, the Sudanese Central Volleyball Team; in fact, I was the team captain. In addition, I played basketball. All these sports were new to me, as was soccer, for when I was growing up in the bush, we played with homemade balls made with the sap of local plants, and we had games we played, but we did not have organized athletics.
Majok (standing at left) at Rumbek reunion with coach and mentor from refugee camps, Madong Mading, with his wives.
I was also a coach of volleyball for Zone 2 of the Kakuma Refugee Camp; I trained many boys and girls in volleyball from 1996 to 2001. All this was volunteer work. We won a lot of trophies. Among others, we played against church soccer, basketball, and volleyball teams. We won a lot of cups from them. We played in a church league, and our Catholic church we attended in Kakuma camp was called Holy Cross. When a tournament was being arranged, people at the opponents’ churches would ask, “Is Holy Cross going to come?” They knew we were tough competition. So we got volleyball cups all the time.
All these athletic competitions helped because when people came back from school, they had to go to practice, so it made it easier for everyone. When they were working like that, they couldn’t be thinking about their problems.
In school, we had full exercise books; we didn’t have to cut the pages of a book to share. The UN distributed the exercise book, and pencil or pen. If your pen ran out of ink, you had to buy your own. If we needed a pen, we would trade a half-ration for money to buy a pen. That meant we were really hungry for the next week.
The food was still being brought to the group. They left it there, and you used your ration card to get your cup of grain. It would have to last for seven days. They give you beans, salt and oil. Later, they had to cut the oil. But we were in charge of our own ration, at least at that time.
I’ve been asked if people attempted to take food from each other. That didn’t happen. If you steal food, that puts a mark on you. If you were Dinka, you did not do that. You would be seen as weak if you did that. So those things are tied to the culture. You would just say “I’m not going to die; I’ll get my ration tomorrow.” When this happened, you just made up your mind you were not starving. You just went inside yourself. You said this was just something that happened to you.
During this period, 1992 to 1995, the stress of having such a large camp (it eventually grew to 80,000) was affecting the local tribe, the Turkana. In each area so many refugees present in an area restricted where people could graze cattle, and that is what they live on. Pasturing their cattle, moving them from one very dry area to another to find enough grass, was their main occupation. Having routes and resources restricted made them angry. The Turkana had many, many guns and they began shooting into the camp, and in this period, nine refugees were killed by gunshots fired during the day. And in 1997, an Episcopal priest was killed in the camp at night by a local tribesman’s bullet.
Father was killed about a half mile from where I lived in Kakuma. It was a terrible thing to go in the morning and see his body lying in the camp where he fell. It was destructive for the whole camp to face the fact that someone hated us so much that they would kill the priest, our Father. There were many times when the harshness of the refugee life affected me very deeply, and this was one of those times. All I could figure out is that I could not do anything about these problems; God had plans for me. The civil war in Sudan started during my generation, so it was God’s plan to live that way, to move from country to country all my young life, but it was not an easy thing to do as a human being, for me or for my colleagues. I believe God created the children of Sudan to do something to change our country, which is now South Sudan. I love my country so much, and I hope we Lost Boys are going to do something significant to change life for our people in South Sudan. I am not going to forget my hard life in the refugee camp with my fellow refugees.
The last thing that I wanted to do was give up. I had seen colleagues die by the wayside on the journey to Ethiopia and watched children perish at Pinyudo from lack of hope. I’d known people to disappear, and knew many lost their lives at the Gilo River. My instinct all along the way was to keep walking. Now I could not walk out of Kakuma, but I needed to use every resource to focus on how to survive the pain of these deaths.
Fortunately, still another distraction emerged in the form of community dances in Kakuma Refugee Camp. When I was at Pinyudo, we performed children’s dances. Now that I was older, I could learn and take part in the traditional male dances of the Agar Dinka. In the Rumbek area, where Agar Dinka are predominant, we are famous for our jumping in our dances. If you go online to You Tube and search for “Rumbek Dancing and Jumping,” you will find examples of the kind of dances we do. Traditionally, the men are in the middle, the women on the sides, but the women have their own dances as well, and they are very good.
At Kakuma, we would meet in community; Rumbek area, or Agar Dinka people, would meet and dance, older people and younger, from different groups in the camp. Since I was not in my home village, I did not undergo initiation. That is the painful traditional scarring of the forehead, six incisions made across the forehead, by which an Agar Dinka shows he is able to withstand pain without complaint and thus signals he is entering manhood. In the camp we did not do these rituals. Because we were not in our home villages, we did not extract the lower teeth in the mouth at this time.
Instead, my entry into manhood was enduring all the hardships we encountered in our long search for our safe home. Because I was now of age, in our camp I could participate in the dances that symbolized entrance into manhood, including the dancing and jumping that are unique to our tribe. I became quite good at it, as I could jump really high.
In the evenings sometimes there would be dance competitions among dance
rs in the communities. On Refugees’ Day, June 20, all the different tribes would do their dances—Dinka, Nuer, Murle. We would also do this on American Labor Day in September. Our dance style is very exuberant and joyful, and the refugees loved to see it. We have a lot of fun with our dance. So this was another way that I felt better and forgot about the difficulties of my life. After all, I was alive, and I did survive the civil war up to that point. I had many friends, and I was learning about my Dinka life and how it compared with other tribes and other people. I was very proud to be Agar Dinka from Rumbek area.
In 1993, the UN built the classrooms and school resumed for us. I went to third grade in the Juba Primary School. Eventually, in 1996, I would complete Grade 8 and sit for the Kenya Certificate for this in 1996. As time went on, I completed Form 1 (equivalent to the U.S. Grade 9), Form 2 (Grade 10), Form 3 (Grade 11), and Form 4 (Grade 12). All of this was in Kakuma Refugee Camp.
Food Fights
In 1994, a big problem at Kakuma arose from the food supplies. We got rations of grain—like a cup of grain to last us a week, perhaps with oil and salt. No longer were beans distributed. It was barely enough to survive on, and we had to be careful to stretch what was there in order to have food two times a day. Any change to this was a major issue.
Instead of serving regular wheat in our ration, a grain was substituted which was not edible. It was called miath, and another name for it was finger millet. In my village, it was recognized that it was so poor a grain, that it was used for fermenting into a beer instead of being cooked for food. The grains were very, very small. The effect of providing this in the diet is that it stopped up the digestive tracts of those who ate it, and could even lead to death.
A doctor who was one of the refugees went to the groups to see how they were cooking it. He was seeing people in the clinic they had there, and children were not being able to go to the bathroom for two to three days. He said they would die if they kept this up. He complained to the camp managers, but the servings went on for months and months. Meanwhile children were seriously affected by the food. This was not a case of staying out of school on purpose. The children in the camp wanted to learn; this was their way to have a better life. The situation went on for eight months, and everyone was suffering. Many people went to the UN compound to get the ration changed, but nothing happened.
The refugees finally started a protest. We blocked the road and would not let any UN vehicles in except those carrying the water people. Every morning from 7 to 9 a.m. they ran the pumps to fill the tanks (remember there are no rivers in this area, no sources of water); they also opened the pumps from 3 to 5 p.m. and the refugees and the UN compound had no other source for water in this desert area.
After a short time the UN asked for a delegate to visit the compound and they worked out a solution. The situation changed, and wheat grain replaced the miath. We did not know why the miath was substituted, only that it caused a great deal of illness. We did know that the camp was growing—quickly. In this time, there were about 50,000 people in the camp, and there were 53 groups of Sudanese. Of these, there were 17 groups of boys. In addition there were community groups of 18- to 50-year-old people gathered in their tribal and national groups. Among the refugees were Sudanese, Burundis, and Somalians. In addition there were people who wanted to form communities around their faiths. There was a Holy Cross Catholic Church community group, and there was an Episcopal Church community group.
From 1996 to 1999, the camp became even bigger. They had to build a larger distribution center. This was probably to accommodate large numbers of Rwandan refugees, as well as even more refugees from Somalia, as these increased the numbers at Kakuma in 1996. Now the camp held 80,000 or more.
The biggest change for us was that we had to each go get our food, and it resulted in extreme mistreatment from Kenyan police. The first sign of change was Kenyan workers employed by the UN building a huge metal wire fence around the new center. Within the outside fences, they built little columns, narrow paths bending back and forth so that refugees would queue up in these lines for food, rather than have food brought to their groups where the group leaders could distribute it.
The first day that they tried to have the refugees line up in this way for a bi-weekly ration, there was trouble. The Kenyan police were the ones who were directing the lines. When people did not move fast enough or objected to the long lines, police beat them with a stick. These police beat and beat those who were their targets. They struck on the joints—elbows and knees especially—where the pain is the greatest. I will never forget these scenes of beatings by the local police, who were hired by the UN to do this.
In terms of food, it was no different in amount. But when we had control of our own food, it felt more secure. As refugees, this was all we had. If I volunteered and coached volleyball for years, I received no pay. Like anyone else, all I had was this ration every two weeks. If I broke a pen or it ran out of ink, I traded half a cup of wheat—half of my food for two weeks—to replace it. Food was our currency, and we wanted to control that currency. To know we would not starve was very important.
But this food fight we did not win. We were forced into the fences, to stand in line for hours and hours for a single ration. In fact, I had to choose whether to eat or to go to school. If I stood in line, sometimes it would take two days to receive a ration. I had to be absent from school all that time, and I missed lessons that I needed to understand later information.
The Kenyan police carried this stick called a rugu, a Kiswahili word. They beat people even when there was no reason. They beat people like animals. Even though the UN saw that the police were beating them to a very dangerous point, nobody would say, “These are the people, don’t do that.” So it was a really bad life. Those blows to the joints would hurt for days.
There were some occasions when we traveled back to Loki for short visits. There was a checkpoint on the way; the cops would be up there. You would travel by bus, or matatu, a minivan that runs from Loki to Kakuma and from Kakuma to Lodwar. If you are in this area, and they see you are Sudanese, knowing you don’t know Kiswahili, they would put you in this house they have and tell you that you have to provide travel papers, or you have to give them money. If you don‘t have the money, they put you in jail. I had found myself some papers, but I still had to give them money. That time was really bad.
The police, like other Kenyans, were thinking we were a people who do not have a country or do not have a good place. But if you go to South Sudan now, there are Kenyans everywhere. They have learned about our country and found it has many things to like. When we were in their country, they looked at us like we were not human. And they said we were bad people. We tell them, “You know what—we stayed in your country for nine years, and so we know what Kenya is like. We are physically very close to you, yet we didn’t know what Kenya was like, and Kenyans didn’t know what South Sudan is like. Now you see our country is not even like your country; we’ve got a lot of resources, a great deal more than in northwestern Kenya, and we have a good country.”
In Kakuma, thanks to Father Madol and thanks to the large Catholic population in the town of Kakuma, we had a big Mass under the tree, and the Catholic people in the town supplied other needs to the refugees. They even sent people to lots of competitions like choir competitions. The Episcopal Church was also very big there. The choirs would compete. They would go to Lodwar, the headquarters of the Turkana District, and they would be part of the competitions. This is where they also had leagues to play soccer and basketball and volleyball, and since I was coach of volleyball for Zone 2, I went on many of these trips.
The people we met there would say, “Why don’t you people have a good country? People are fighting there, and you are competing with us?”
And we’d say, “Well, what do you do? It doesn’t mean that if people are fighting in Sudan we don’t do other activities.” They thought that we would not have any talents to show other people, that we were coming fro
m the bush and had no special skills. But we won a lot of volleyball championship cups from them.
Seven
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Change Is in the Air
This change in how we got our food was traumatic to some people. The presence of the Kenyan police was more evident—they were everywhere. By this time, the camp had grown to more than 80,000, and included many Somalians who’d been moved from two camps in northeastern Kenya where there was a lot of violence. For those in the camp, the process of getting food meant not going to school. Since we had traveled so many miles over so many years to get to safety to have a future while southern Sudan was under assault, we were pretty unhappy with this situation.
Majok Marier (left) and Stephen Chol Bayok, friends since the Pinyudo Refugee Camp.
At the same time we knew there were not many alternatives. The war still raged in southern Sudan, and we knew from our forced exit from Pinyudo and the sudden move from Kapoeta that returning to the war zone was fraught with dangers. We did not hear much current news of the war, but we knew that there were no prospects for ending it anytime soon. This was in 1996; the war had begun in 1983. So there wasn’t much hope we could go back home.
The coordinated protest to challenge serving the miath instead of an edible grain gave us a sense of ourselves as a strong force for change. We were not able to take part in the war, but we could strengthen ourselves in the camp. One way we did this was through our community meetings. Here everyone spoke Dinka, and so we could talk easily about what we knew of the war, and about other things.