by John Bul Dau
Martha
Though boys were put into their own groups with the older ones in charge, Sudanese elders, following our traditions, decided the girls needed to be looked after by adults. The elders advised the UN to put us with mothers of young children or with the few families that had made it to Pinyudu intact. Tabitha and I were lucky again because we were placed with a nice woman named Yar. She had three children of her own, and there were two other girls who were placed with her, so altogether she had seven children to take care of. The oldest one was her eight-year-old son. We all called her Mother, another Sudanese custom. That’s what you call any woman your mother’s age, as a sign of respect.
By this time the UN had given us little tents to sleep in, and we’d zip ourselves into them at night. After a while, the boys in the camp helped us build a small house. They made the walls with branches of trees and grass that they covered with mud, and the UN gave us a big piece of nylon fabric to use as a roof. I was so happy to have that little house as a home.
Yar was very good to us. After a while she began to raise chickens and a small vegetable garden in the little yard beside our house.
During the day we could almost feel carefree, like children again. We went swimming in the river, and we helped Yar with easy chores, such as sweeping our compound or collecting fire for cooking from a neighbor. In a Sudanese village, the first woman to start her cooking fire in the evening lets other people come to light small branches from her flame and carry them back to their yards to start their own fires.
I remember that at Pinyudu I could always hear the sound of pounding, as people pounded the dry corn kernels into meal to boil. They’d hollow a hole in a log and put the corn in there, then pound and grind it with a heavy stick. It was a lot of work. We’d eat boiled lentils with our corn, and sometimes Yar would trade the Anyuak a little of our UN oil for fish they’d caught in the river.
Once it grew dark, we went to sleep because the only light we had was from the cooking fires. You could see the dying embers from the fires as little sparks across the camp. Otherwise the only light was the moon staring down from the night sky.
The cooking oil cans John mentioned were useful in Yar’s family, too. We cleaned the empty ones out and used them to collect water. Because I was one of the older children in Yar’s “family,” it was my chore to go to the river and draw water for cooking, drinking, and washing. People also washed clothes and other things in the river, so it was not exactly clean. I would try to wade out away from shore and dip the water there. I’d hoist the biggest can onto the top of my head or ask someone nearby to help me, and then carry a smaller can in my hand. The cans full of water were really heavy, and I had to stop to rest in the shade of trees on the way home. Someone from our house had to go to the river a few times a day to collect water. It was hard work, and after a while, it got scary.
At first we had loved swimming and splashing in the river. We’d even swim to the other side and sneak green mangoes off trees that belonged to the Anyuak. The unripe mangoes were sour, but we liked that taste. Then suddenly, people who went down to the river started to disappear, and we were sure crocodiles were lurking in the river and taking them. We stopped swimming and playing there, but we still had to wade in to fill our cans with water.
When we went to the river for water, we often saw the Anyuak people, and they fascinated us. They were probably of average height, but to us tall Dinka, they seemed like tiny, tiny people. They spoke a different language from ours, and at first we used hand signs to communicate, though after a while we picked up some of their language. More and more of them moved near camp. They don’t keep cattle or grow gardens big enough to produce food to get them through the dry season. So when UN food bags would break open, leaving food behind, the Anyuak would collect it. They also loved to trade us things we needed for the used T-shirts the UN gave us.
The UN workers tried to be fair in dividing up food and clothes among so many of us. They didn’t want us to fight, so we had to get in line, and when our turn came, people handing out clothes would put their hands in a bag and pull out whatever they touched. One time I was lucky enough to get a dress. I was so, so, so happy that I had gotten this beautiful thing to wear. It was brown with short sleeves and a white and yellow collar, with a little bow under my chin. At first it was big on me, but over time it fit better. It was something I treasured, and I took good care of it. Little did I know that I would wear it for years.
At Pinyudu I met a girl named Nyayik, and we became good friends. We went to fetch water together, and we played with empty tuna and tomato paste cans, pretending to cook and be housewives. We would gather with other kids under this one particular tree to play. The boys in our group had something that looked like a fishing net, and they would put the net on the ground and then sprinkle it with broken corn to attract birds. The net had a long string on it, so the boys would move away from the net, but when a bird landed to eat the corn, they’d pull the string tight and catch the bird. When we had a few, we’d pluck them and boil them to eat.
On Sundays we’d all go to church together. Our church was made of mud—mud walls, mud benches—but we loved going there and singing and dancing and praying. We’d been taught exciting songs, songs of encouragement or sorrow. Church was something we looked forward to, a happy thing. It was in Pinyudu that I took the name Martha. I wanted a name from the Bible, and also Martha was the name of an old neighbor. I liked the way it sounded with my Dinka name, Arual. We all tried to choose a name that would sound good with our Dinka name, or rhyme with it.
The UN had started schools in Pinyudu, and some of the boys went. But the Dinka didn’t believe that girls and boys were meant to do the same kind of things and there was no encouragement for us girls to go to school, even though the UN people kept telling us about the importance of education.
The first white people I ever saw were those UN people at Pinyudu. They were Europeans, and they seemed so odd to us with their long noses and white skin. The men were much fatter than our Dinka men, and the hot weather was really hard on them. They wore these shirts that did not cover them up, and we could see hair, lots of hair, on their bodies, and sweat. This was so different from our own bodies. We would just look at them, stare at them, marveling.
When the rains came to Pinyudu, we stayed inside most of the time. It rained so hard that the little creeks filled with water, and the river would be full of fallen trees. We got our water then from seasonal ponds. We’d get rained on going to get it and be soaking wet and cold after that. We didn’t have any towels, so we just dried ourselves with our dirty clothes as best we could.
Still, I liked the rainy season. It was a time to rest and stay inside and tell stories to each other. A lot of the stories were about animals and being brave around animals, or things like why hyena is called hyena or why an animal acts the way it does. But some were sad human stories, like what can happen to you when your parents are not there.
Every time we heard that new people were arriving in Pinyudu, a lot of us Lost Children would go and wait for them, looking at every adult arriving and hoping that our mother and father might be among them. We had been told that people had been scattered when the fighting started in Southern Sudan, so we kept hoping that our parents were still alive, that one day they would make it to Pinyudu. And every time they weren’t in the new group, we would leave heartbroken. Even though our little group at Yar’s home had started to feel like a family, a safe place, it couldn’t fill the hole in my heart left by my missing parents.
We didn’t have radios or TVs at Pinyudu, so when the UN wanted to tell us something, they’d send a couple of guys around with megaphones to spread the word. Usually the guys with the megaphones would just be reminding us that we had to come and re-register ourselves with the camp officials, something we had to do every couple of months. But one day, after we’d been at the camp for about three years, we heard the megaphones, and it wasn’t the usual thing. What the man was shouti
ng into the megaphones was shocking. He kept saying, “Tonight we are going to leave” over and over. “You have to pack your belongings and get ready to leave.”
John
Slowly I had come to like the life of a Lost Boy in Pinyudu. We shared our daily chores. We played and swam and even started to dance and sing. But good times never last forever. Ethiopia was in the middle of its own civil war. In May 1991, when I was sixteen years old, the rebels drove the president out of the country and set up a new government that was friendly with Northern Sudan. The new government decided to close the refugee camps. We had to pack and leave Pinyudu. We didn’t even have time to harvest the corn and vegetables we had planted near our huts.
The adults in camp who acted as our caretakers had a long discussion among themselves and decided to head back into Sudan. We learned we would go toward the town of Pochala, which the southern forces still held. There was not much else we could do.
Part Four
WAR
Martha
We couldn’t believe it! It was all happening so fast, and everything was suddenly in confusion as people gathered their few small belongings. We put what we could in the nylon bags that corn and lentils had come in. If people had known ahead of time, they would have ground corn to prepare for the trip, but there was no time. Some people killed their chickens and ate them quickly.
That night there was silence all over the camp, from our little homes to the Lost Boys’ compounds. The UN wanted to keep the news of our leaving from the Anyuak, because they were afraid the Anyuak might take things from us by force. At first we had all gotten along with the Anyuak, but tensions had grown and there had been a few fights with them. Still, some of the older Dinka boys had married Anyuak girls, and they were staying behind.
I remember it was bedtime and dark as we left our new home. We were tired, but being scared kept us wide awake. We walked through the forest single file, a long, long line of children broken here and there by the figure of an adult. Tabitha was six now, old enough now to know that something was happening. She had forgotten about the trip to Pinyudu, I think, and how bad it was, but I remembered, and walking again brought back the memories of that long, hard walk to Ethiopia just three years before.
We had to walk all night to leave the Pinyudu area. We rested during the day under the trees, and by the next day we made it to the Gilo River. The UN had food waiting for us there because there were only a few boats to take us across the river, and it would take many days to get all of us ferried over to the Sudanese side.
People settled in beside the Gilo, relaxing and cooking and visiting together. In the mornings we’d get in line for a boat, but by day’s end, we’d still be waiting. So the next day we’d get back in the line again. The man who was organizing the boats happened to be Yar’s cousin, and finally she explained to him that, with all us kids, it was going to take her a long time to walk to Pochala. She asked him if we could get on a boat sooner, and he said okay.
As we stepped into the little boat, the river looked big with a rough current, and the people on the other side looked small and far away. But we made it safely across and spent the night on the riverbank there. In the morning we joined a bigger group and started walking again.
John
I must have reached the Gilo River after Martha had already crossed, because my crossing was as different from hers as night is from day. I was resting and eating my lunch on the side of the river when the Ethiopian army attacked us with bullets, mortar shells, and grenades. People jumped into the water and began to swim toward the other side.
I leaped up, scattering corn meal. Bullets zipped through the air, making birdlike sounds as they went by my head.
I ran toward the Gilo River. I was not a good swimmer, so I hesitated and looked for the best place to cross. More bullets whizzed by my head, and more grenades landed around me. I panicked and jumped in the water, flopping into the mud and reeds at the river’s edge. The impact knocked the air out of my lungs. I struggled into the muddy water and began to kick toward the far side.
A big man from the Nuba tribe grabbed me. He was panicking too, and he could not swim at all. He pushed down on me to try to keep his own head above the water.
“Sa’adni! Sa’adni!” he yelled in Arabic. “Help me, help me!”
I had learned a little Arabic in Pinyudu, where it was used as the common language to communicate among all of the tribes. “I can’t help you,” I shouted at the big man. I kept struggling and swimming and kicking. The Nuba let go. I do not know what happened to him. I surfaced, free from his grasp, and started swimming again toward the far shore.
At home in Duk Payuel, I had learned how to swim on my back, but I had never learned the crawl very well. So when I surfaced, I flipped face up and started to do the backstroke, staring up at the sky. As I slowly made progress, I glanced anxiously left and right. Everywhere, people were screaming and flailing. Bullets and shrapnel hit their bodies and put blood in the water. I knew crocodiles must be in the river and that they could smell blood. I did not see any crocodiles near me, thank goodness.
Some of the adult caretakers from Pinyudu had managed to string a rope across the river, and boys who couldn’t swim were pulling themselves across. Others were crossing in the small boats belonging to the Anyuak tribesmen, who used them to fish on the river. At least one boat overturned in the middle of the river, dumping four Lost Boys into the water. A crocodile killed one, and two of the other three drowned.
Another boy found me in the water. He tried to grab me to keep from drowning. “If you hold me like that I can’t push water. I can’t carry you,” I screamed. He relaxed just a bit. I held his arm with one hand and began paddling with my other hand. After a few strokes, I switched hands and kept going. We slowly made our way across until I could feel mud under my feet.
The boy I had dragged across the river scrambled up the bank, and I followed on my hands and knees. At the top, I turned and looked at the shore where I had started. Smoke and dust filled the air, and shells exploded on the ground. Boys were running for their lives all around me. Some fell as bullets fired from the far shore tore into their bodies. I ran too, until I was out of range of the guns and mortars. Fortunately for us, the Ethiopian army would not cross a crocodile-infested river. We ran and then walked until we felt safe.
I still have bad dreams about crossing the Gilo River. I still wonder what war does to people to make them shoot unarmed children. Do those Ethiopian soldiers ever get nightmares? I do not know.
Of the roughly 20,000 Sudanese who went into the Gilo River, maybe 2,000 to 3,000 died in the attempt to get across. Those who survived found themselves back in Sudan, where the war raged on and food was still scarce. Once again I had no food or shelter and no immediate way to get any. It was obvious my long ordeal was far from over.
Martha
We’d been walking about a day and a half and we were almost halfway to Pochala when we heard the booming of big guns. We didn’t know what was going on, so we kept walking. We were more concerned about lions than guns then, because someone had seen a lion. We were told not to make any noise. We felt like we were going to be attacked by a lion at any minute. At night, we slept on the road, but when I tried to sleep, the crack of a tree in the forest or the wind blowing or the grass swaying made me think that something deadly was about to come out of the forest. Lions aren’t afraid of a big group. They’ll go right into that group and grab someone. It’s just a matter of whether it’s your day to be grabbed. This wasn’t my day, or Tabitha’s. And after a few days of walking, we came to Pochala, another place to start over.
John
I walked away from the death and destruction of the Gilo River. Others walked too, including Abraham. He had survived, and he helped gather the refugees from Pinyudu and take care of them. As the Lost Boys found one another, we came together in groups and marveled that we still lived. One man had avoided the bullets and mortar shells but not the animals in the river
. While swimming across, he lost a hand and part of an arm to the jaws of a hungry crocodile. We called him Mkono Moja, which means “One Hand Man” in Kiswahili. Considering the fate of so many who had died in the Gilo, he was fortunate.
For a while, I hoped that I might return to my village of Duk Payuel and look for my family. But as I thought about my situation, I realized I could not go back. Civil war still raged in Sudan. The northern armies controlled much of the homeland of the Dinka. And there could be no life and no peace in Southern Sudan for anyone with dark skin who opposed the national government.
So I set out with the other refugees for the Sudanese town of Pochala, not far from the Ethiopian border. SPLA soldiers from Southern Sudan, our friends, had taken the town in battle but did not know how long they could hold it. I hoped to stay there as long as it was safe. Then, if I had to, I would move on to keep away from the invading army. Thousands of other boys from Pinyudu joined me on the trek to Pochala. We went along a muddy road in a single line. We went slowly, as we had no food or water and were all on foot. Our line stretched out so far between the first boy and the last that it took two days for everyone to pass the same spot.
There wasn’t much to Pochala. The battle for the town had left it in ruins. I spent my first night in an abandoned military barracks. There was almost no food in the town. SPLA soldiers came and gave us something to eat from time to time, but mostly we Lost Boys stayed hungry. Over the next few months, our numbers swelled as refugees poured in from other Sudanese towns. The soldiers just didn’t have enough food to share with so many.