by John Bul Dau
At last, at dark we rested near a pool of water where we could drink and cool our aching feet. We hadn’t gotten separated from Nyanriak and her children, thank goodness, and now we were with a bigger group of people from our village. That group would become our new family.
We had no food to eat, as everybody had run away from the village with just the clothes on their backs. Besides being hungry, we were so tired and our feet hurt so much. The adults let us sleep for a couple of hours before we moved on. Tabitha and I curled up next to each other on the ground. I was too scared and shocked to understand it then, but now I think of that night as the beginning of a bad dream that would last for years. It was probably good that I didn’t know what lay ahead for Tabitha and me.
As soon as dawn lightened the sky, we moved on. The adults were afraid the government-backed militia that had attacked us could still be nearby, and they wanted to keep us moving as fast as we could away from our village. Nyanriak had her own five kids to take care of, but she knew that Tabitha was too little to keep up with the rest of the group. She asked a man named Deng to take care of Tabitha. He often carried her on his shoulders. I followed close behind, watching Tabitha’s feet dangling above my head as Deng marched along. I was always looking up to make sure that my little sister was safe.
The next day we came to a village, and the people there gave our group a gourd for water, dried kernels of corn to boil for food, and a pot to cook in. Such simple things, the gourd and the pot, but without them it was hard to eat or drink. We were thankful to the villagers and warned them that the militia was moving through the area, leaving death and destruction in their wake. In the weeks ahead, as we moved from village to village, we sounded the alarm, spreading warnings as we went.
As the fighting in the south grew worse and more villages were attacked, more and more people joined us, including elders who tried to keep everybody in line. For us Dinka, elders are the respected adults who guide us and care for us. When elders in our group saw a small child too tired to walk, they would carry the child. I wasn’t carried very often, and I didn’t want to be because I needed to follow whoever was carrying Tabitha. I began to feel that now I was her mother and responsible for keeping her safe.
After many days, we left all the villages behind and walked through an area covered in low forests for a while. The forest time had good and bad parts. It was cool in the shade of the trees, and some of the trees had leaves and fruits we could pick to eat. A few of the elders would go out and hunt the forest animals, too. If they managed to kill a deer or antelope, we’d make a fire and roast the meat. Anything was delicious because we were hungry all the time.
But I was also really afraid of the animals. In Sudan there are lots of wild animals, and people have to be very cautious. The whole time we were in the forest, I remembered a story my mother had told us. She had walked to another county once, hoping to trade some fabric she had sewn into filters for straining liquid in exchange for corn we could eat. At dusk, as she was walking back to our village alone, she entered a stand of tall trees and heard a big crack from a branch. She froze, then slowly looked over her shoulder and saw that a big cat, probably a leopard, had jumped out of the tree and was on the path behind her. But it was looking in the other direction! The wind must have been carrying her scent away from it, because it didn’t turn around. She was shaking, but she slowly, quietly crept into the bushes to hide. Finally, the huge cat slunk away, and she ran home.
I also remembered another time, when I was at a cattle camp with my uncle and my mother and sister. A hyena came very close to us, but hyenas are easy to run off—at least if you’re an adult. I had heard they would attack children, though. Now, at night in the forest, I remembered those dangers. Often we were on the move at night, when it was cooler and harder for any militias that might be around to spot us. But in the dark, we couldn’t see where we were stepping. I kept worrying that when I took the next step, my bare foot would feel a snake slithering under it.
When we left the forest behind, the desert lay in front of us. Now there was no food to eat and no water to drink. When we came to a dry riverbed, people would dig and dig and dig, looking for wet mud to suck on. We ate that mud, too, as if it were food. A lot of people gave up hope, and we lost some of our group. And so many of us kids got sick. We felt so tired and ill that we’d find a spot to lie down and say to ourselves, “This is it, I’m not going to make it. I can’t go on anymore.” But somehow, most of us did make it. Whenever we found a little water, we’d drink too much at once and that made us sick. Since the water was dirty, it also gave us diarrhea and we felt even weaker.
When at last we came to a creek with plenty of water, I was very, very, very sick. I shivered so hard and was so weak with a fever that I couldn’t move. I probably had a disease called malaria. Most of the people in my group got it at some time or other, because mosquitoes carry it and they were always pestering us.
So many of us were sick and exhausted that the elders decided our group should rest a few days by the creek. Some of the men went off to hunt and came back with meat to roast. I was so sick that it was hard for me to eat. I just lay on the ground, and Tabitha sat beside me, staring at me. I could tell she was very scared because I couldn’t take care of her, and that only made me feel worse.
After a few days, we broke up our camp and started to cross the creek. Suddenly, gunfire rained down on us from the few trees in our path. This time it really was the Murle! They were waiting to ambush us because we were in their territory and they thought we had killed their cattle to eat. They had seen the smoke from our fires and smelled roasting meat, so they had come looking for us.
In just a few minutes, they had killed five people and wounded others. The gunshots woke me out of my sick daze, and I started screaming and screaming and screaming. I couldn’t stop. One man was lying on the path in front of us, dead and staring at the sky. Even today, when I close my eyes, I can see him lying there.
Our men started shooting back at the Murle, and they ran away, but we ran too, crossing the shallow creek and racing up the other side. The elders were trying to keep us from scattering everywhere and losing each other. I ran with Tabitha, and we didn’t look back. The strange thing was that the whole terrible attack scared my sickness away, and I was able to keep going, even when we had to cross a muddy area, where we sank up to our knees and the elders had to drag us kids through the ooze.
Finally, we came to a little town where we could rest for a few days. Men from the SPLA were there, and the villagers gave us milk and millet and sorghum—a kind of grain you boil and eat like grits. Usually by the time we got it, the food was cold and had no taste, but we didn’t care. When you’re really hungry, your body just wants any kind of food to stay alive.
In that town, the big group that we had been with for weeks decided to split up. We had heard of two refugee camps in Ethiopia. One was closer than the other, but no one was sure if the United Nations (UN) was there with food and supplies to help us. The other, farther camp was called Pinyudu. I listened to the elders debate these camps back and forth among themselves. Some said the UN was at Pinyudu already, so it was worth going the extra distance. Our friend Deng was going there, but Nyanriak was worn out from being on the run with so many children, so she decided to go to the closer camp. She asked Deng if he would take Tabitha and me with him. She had her own five kids to take care of. Two more were just too much.
So it was decided. Tabitha and I would go with the group traveling to Pinyudu. We just followed what the adults told us to do. Of course we would. That was the tradition among the Dinka, to respect your elders and do what they told you. But even if our traditions had been different, I was six and Tabitha was three. What choice does any young child have but to do as the adults say?
For another week and a half or two we walked on. The days had run together for me a long time ago, so I wasn’t even sure how long it had been since that terrible day when my parents went off to church an
d I saw them for the last time.
Once we crossed the border into Ethiopia, we were in forest again. The local people along the border, the Anyuak, were good to us, and we went from village to village. It was the growing season, May or June, and they had food to spare. These people were not cattle keepers like we Dinka, so they had no milk, but they gave us corn on the cob that we roasted or boiled and tomatoes and the leaves from a bean plant and lots of mangoes. It all tasted so good. I realized after a while that I had stopped being so afraid all the time. We were in a different kind of place, and I was curious about it and the people who lived there. And soon we would be in Pinyudu, where I expected to find a village and a life like the one we had had to leave behind in Sudan.
Part Three
REFUGE
John
Abraham and I were far from alone when we reached Pinyudu. The civil war in Sudan had touched millions of lives. Many had been killed on both sides. We were among the lucky ones who survived, although we did not feel lucky.
More than a quarter-million refugees from Sudan’s civil war poured into Pinyudu and three other camps in Ethiopia in 1988. An even greater number probably died from human violence, animal attacks, hunger, thirst, and disease. Both Martha and I arrived in Pinyudu that year, but our paths didn’t cross until much later.
Almost all of the survivors were male teenagers and boys as young as three or four. Older men had gone to war as soldiers or been killed in battle. Women and girls had been captured, killed, enslaved, or raped, leaving only a few hundred to reach Ethiopia.
At the time, the world paid little attention to the war and its victims because East Africa is so isolated and so seldom featured in the world’s news. Eventually, news reporters from Europe and America began to learn about the refugees who had walked, like me, to safety and begun to scratch out a living in Ethiopia. They called us Lost Boys. They took the name from characters in the book Peter Pan.
News reporters called Pinyudu a “camp,” but it was just a big, open place with no houses except a few belonging to the local Anyuak people. It had no fences, no running water, and no electricity. Everyone sat under trees or built shelters out of sticks. Abraham stayed with me for about two months and then went to live with other adults. I lived with boys who were mostly my age or somewhat younger. There were too many of us for adults to take care of, so the adults put some of the older boys like me in charge of the younger ones. At only thirteen years old, I became the supervisor of 1,200 boys. I made sure that sick boys got medical attention and oversaw the distribution of food.
We made our first huts without tools. I showed my group how to get wood from the forest outside camp without axes or saws. I climbed a tree until I got to the high branches. Then I grabbed a stout branch and jumped. As I fell, my weight bent the branch until it broke. Everyone watched and then copied me. That is how we got small logs for our hut. Then we pulled up grass in the camp and let it dry to make a roof.
We stayed hungry for many months. Once in a while we killed a crocodile in the river and ate it, but often we would go for days without food. Those were dark, difficult times.
Martha
For months Tabitha and I had lived in the wilds of Southern Sudan. All that while the elders in our group had told us that we were going to a new home where we would be safe and there would be lots of other Sudanese people who had had to run from their villages and who were homeless like us. At last the big day came. We got to Pinyudu.
But it wasn’t a town, or even a village. It was nothing but a big open field. Standing and sitting and lying around that field were lots and lots and lots—hundreds, maybe a thousand—of us Sudanese. But there was no UN and no food. Like John and his group of Lost Boys, we went to bed hungry again, finding a place to lie down on the rocky red soil of Ethiopia to sleep. Tabitha was so skinny then that her bones poked up through her skin.
A few days after we got to Pinyudu, though, things changed. The UN’s refugee agency had heard about all of us waiting in that field, and they arrived with dried corn, beans and lentils, oil, and salt. We were all so hungry that when we smelled the corn and lentils cooking, our bodies just couldn’t wait. We started eating when the food was still hard, gobbling down the kernels and the lentils as fast as we could. Our stomachs couldn’t take that hard food, and we just got sick. And the more we got sick, the more diseases spread.
John
The food the UN brought to Pinyudu was barely enough to live on. The group of children I lived with pooled our camp food rations and boiled them in a large metal cooking oil container we had cut in two to make a pot. We had no silverware, cups, or plates. Instead, we passed around a single bowl and each boy dipped into the food with his fingers. Often a boy would burn his hands and cry in pain. That led some of the boys to cut spoons out of scraps of metal so they could scoop their food without burning their fingers. Some boys found that if they carved really big spoons, they could get more food than the others. I thought that was unfair. One day when the boys went to the river to play, I took all of the spoons and destroyed them. That way we were all equal again.
The UN also brought us tools, blankets, and secondhand clothing. I got a shirt and wore it as proudly as anyone who ever wore fancy new clothes. On the pocket someone had stitched a strange, three-letter word. I could not read, so I got some of my friends to help say the word out loud. The letters read U-S-A. We pronounced it as one word, “Oosaw.” I figured it must be a rich person who had plenty of clothes to give away.
I got a blanket too. It was a very important day when a boy got a blanket. The material was thick and warm, and it had a wonderful smell. When I got my UN blanket, I put it over my head and ran around camp, smelling it and saying, “This is mine.” UN blankets had two sides and a layer of air in the middle. Some of the boys cut through the stitching along the edges and separated the blanket into two thinner sheets. They sold one sheet to a tribe of people who lived outside the camp in return for some monkey meat. Abraham bought a needle at a market and used it to sew my UN blanket into a new pair of shorts. Now I had something to wear with my new USA shirt.
Not long after we arrived, a terrible disease called cholera raced through the camp. It spreads wherever there is no clean water or sanitation. We had no latrines and no running water to wash ourselves, so everyone was filthy all the time. Flies flew everywhere. When we wanted drinking water, we took it from a stream next to our camp. We used that same stream to bathe, and from time to time we saw raw sewage in it that came from outside camp. We did not know about germs, but we were spreading them every day.
Cholera struck its victims suddenly. Boys who were too weak to walk to the usual places to relieve themselves just squatted in the middle of camp. They got so sick that their jaws clamped together and they could not talk. About one in five boys suffered from cholera on any particular day.
Sick boys gathered under the trees and called for their mothers and fathers. Every day, about one to three died in my group of 1,200. I organized gangs to carry the bodies outside camp for burial. This was before the UN brought us tools, so we had no shovels, axes, or spades. We dug into the earth with sharp sticks. We could only dig about eight to ten inches deep with our crude tools. We placed the bodies in these shallow graves, covered them with dirt, and went back to camp. Hyenas and lions dug up the graves at night to gnaw on the bodies. The hyenas woke me with their crazy laughter. When I visited the graves in the morning, an arm or leg stuck out of the ground. That happened all the time, until our adult caretakers showed us how to dig our latrines downstream from camp. Then the cholera slowly went away.
In addition to diseases, everyone in camp suffered from tuktuk. It is an African insect that burrows under the skin of the feet. There the insect feeds on blood and lays eggs. I was barefoot like everyone else, so I got tuktuk in my feet. It hurt so much I had trouble walking. Some boys’ feet got so bad they could not walk at all. They just pushed themselves along the ground with their hands and arms, but that only led
to tuktuk infesting their hands. Nothing did any good until we got kerosene from the UN. We washed our feet regularly in kerosene, and that worked for some people. The kerosene only seemed to make my feet swell up and sting. I got better by checking and cleaning my feet five or six times a day.
Some boys went insane from constant exposure to disease, starvation, and death. They refused to touch dead bodies. They cried out the names of loved ones. Some smeared their heads with filth and tried to get me to smell them. I tried to model good behavior and keep spirits up. I led some of the boys in singing hymns, and I always took my turn at burying the dead.
Some boys found clever ways to get enough to eat. We called one of the boys Ateermadang, which is the name of a spirit that the boy said dwelt inside him. The name roughly translates as Problem Stopper. The boy got food because he pretended to have special powers to see and know things others could not. Ateermadang offered his services to other boys. For a bowl of food with a tiny bit of meat, he would pretend to go into a trance and find lost objects and catch boys who had stolen things. He ate like a king for a while until someone exposed his lies. Ateermadang confessed everything. He said he had gone crazy with hunger and made up his stories just so someone would give him something to eat.