by John Bul Dau
Martha
In Pochala, just as in our first days in Pinyudu, we used the trees for shelter. We survived on the small bit of food that Yar had managed to take away with her from Pinyudu—a little dried corn and lentils. In a few days it was gone.
Still we were so lucky that we had survived. Our hearts were filled with pain because now we knew why we had heard booming guns on our walk here. When the news came of the killing at the Gilo River, everybody cried and cried, not just us children. So many people we had known in Pinyudu were gone, shot down there or carried away by crocodiles or the river. And we kept thinking, “The next time danger comes, it will be my turn to go.” That thought and the loss of our friends and relatives at the Gilo haunted us. It was another darkness we had to live with. We felt hopeless.
We began to trade the few clothes we had brought with us to the Anyuak for food. They would come to town and bring corn and millet, sorghum, and beans and take the T-shirts or other clothes the UN had given us in exchange. Maybe a T-shirt would be worth two cups of maize. Some people sold all the clothes they had and were left naked and starving. I still had the brown dress that I had been so happy to get in Pinyudu. It was the only thing I had left to wear. Now, it was torn and dirty, but I kept patching it.
Some people were dying, but others were saying, “The UN is coming, the UN is coming.” The problem was that there was nowhere at Pochala for planes with food and supplies to land, no landing strip. For three weeks after we ran out of things to trade to the Anyuak, there was no food.
When you don’t have anything to eat, you just think about eating. Your stomach grumbles, and then it hurts, pinching, and you have no energy. When you’re really starving, your stomach hurts until you don’t want to do anything. It feels like your whole body is shutting down. That’s how I felt when I finally heard the plane overhead.
At first we were afraid the plane had been sent by the northern Sudanese to bomb us, and people hid wherever they could. But some elders had been told that planes were coming with food. When they told us this, people started running toward the sound of the plane, and in a few minutes it was dropping what looked like paper toward us. But as the “paper” got closer, we could see that it was really sacks of corn and beans. Some sacks split open when they hit the ground, and corn and beans spilled everywhere. People were taking what they could from the ground. They didn’t care if the food was mixed with dust and debris. This was food, and they were starving.
Yar came home with some dried beans and corn and sorghum. She called us to come and separate the food from the dirt and dried leaves and grass. It took us a long time to do that, but we were happy because we knew we would eat at last.
Yar ground some of the corn into a powder, and that day we had a meal. The following morning the elders distributed more food. They handed it out a little bit at a time, to make sure everyone got some. Every few days after that the UN would make another drop. But they couldn’t drop oil or salt, things that would have given the food some taste, so the food had almost no flavor at all.
For about a month we stayed under trees. It was the rainy season and we were wet all the time, with no dry clothes to change into. After a while some Lost Boys built us a simple shelter made of tall grass and leafy tree branches. We had to be very careful not to light any fire close to it, because it would have burst into flames.
Almost overnight Pochala became a big town, full of refugees. I was so happy when I found that my good friend Nyayik had made it to Pochala, and we started spending lots of time together. We went to an outdoor church under a tree that had logs for seats. It felt like things were starting to calm down and that we had made a new life, yet again. Over the simple shelter we lived in, we now had a nylon tarp for a roof, supplied by the UN. But that wasn’t enough to protect us from what came next.
John
One day, I heard the sound of an airplane. I hoped it might be a plane from the UN bringing us food. Instead, as I listened closely, the sound became clear. It was the engine of a bomber from the northern armies. It flew over our refugee camp and dropped its load of bombs—boom! boom! boom! Fountains of dirt flew into the air where the bombs struck the earth. A couple of boys were injured. After that raid, everyone all over town started digging trenches. Whenever we heard a bomber overhead, we dived into our safe holes in the ground.
Thank goodness the UN and the Red Cross kept up their relief missions, flying over Pochala and dropping loads of food, medicine, and clothes. They even dropped fish hooks so we could catch our dinner in the rivers nearby. We cleared some ground for a landing strip, and then the planes began landing to make their deliveries. We got very good at listening for the sound of airplane engines and distinguishing the sounds of enemy bombers from friendly cargo transports.
Gradually in early 1992, I noticed the bombers coming more often. The northern armies were on the move. They advanced toward Pochala and captured many southern towns, leaving tens of thousands of Sudanese homeless. Now even more people were like us—refugees on the move.
One day our adult caretakers, including Abraham, decided that it would be unsafe to linger in Pochala. The northern armies were closing in. The caretakers stayed up into the evening and discussed our future. They decided we must walk farther into the interior, toward the border with Kenya. The journey would take us through jungles, grasslands, and desert. But it was the best chance we had for survival.
Martha
Again we started packing. We had only been in Pochala a few months, but we had to leave, this time heading for Kapoeta, a large town near the border with Kenya that the SPLA also controlled. We weren’t sure if we would run into the militia, so once again we had to sneak away. For a very intense day and night we walked silently.
Soon we were in the territory of tribes I had never seen. Some had made scars on their bodies as a sign of beauty. Lots of people in Southern Sudan do that, but some of the married women here had stretched their bottom lips by piercing and weighting them, and the men had done the same things with their ears. We had never seen such long, long lips and ears before. What we ate, we got from trading with these local tribes. Some of them had no problem with us; some attacked us. One tribe even tricked us by first trading goats to us for some empty cooking oil cans we had, then sneaking up on us to steal their goats back. There was shooting, and some of my group was killed. It seemed that I was going to live around shooting and violence all my life.
I was traveling with hundreds of people all walking at all different speeds. Yar and we children were usually in the slow group. Tabitha was big enough now to walk on her own, but she was scared and crying a lot. Sometimes when it was time to move on again, she would say she didn’t want to keep going.
John
So began what turned into a 500-mile journey. We walked from village to village. The towns had names such as Raat, Buma, Kapoeta, and Nairus. We kept moving farther south to get away from the fighting. We eventually realized that if we ran out of safe land in Sudan we would have to go into the neighboring country of Kenya. At the end of the line was Kapoeta then Lokichokio, just over the border. If we made it that far, the pursuing armies would not follow us.
As one of the eldest of the boys in my group, I acted as a leader on the march to Kapoeta. I told the younger boys what to do and helped care for them. As we marched, we sang songs. There were Christian songs and proud songs about what it means to be a Southern Sudanese. We made up many songs on the spot. Some were funny. Some reminded us of our homes and our families, and they were sad. Some just helped us march in rhythm. One boy sang out, “I am malaria!” That meant he felt very strong because malaria can hurt anyone. We all felt proud because we were walking a route of our own choosing, and not at the point of any gun.
At a town called Pakok we found some yams and peanuts. That filled our bellies for a while. But further south the sun rose higher and hotter, and we ran out of food and water. One night the group of boys I was marching with pooled the last of our beans and
water. We ate those, and then we had no more food.
The next day was over 100 degrees. The ground was so hot that blisters formed and burst on the bottoms of my bare feet and the dry air made me very thirsty. I tried to keep going, but finally I had to stop. I lay down and fell asleep right next to the road, right in the middle of the day. All around me, other boys did the same. We were too thirsty and hungry to keep going, and too tired to care. I thought I would die.
As if by a miracle, a UN truck arrived that day to bring water to the line of Lost Boys. I ducked my head in the truck’s water tank and took a big gulp. It tasted wonderful. I found the strength to keep moving.
From that day onward, UN truck drivers visited our line of refugees every day. They brought water and food. They also brought news of the outside world. They said the northern armies were not far behind us and that we must keep moving. From a caretaker who had a radio, we also learned that news reporters from the outside world had begun to take notice of the Lost Boys. A radio network in England called the BBC was reporting on our movements.
We came to the outskirts of Kapoeta in the barren, dusty land called the Tingilic Desert. A native tribe called the Taposa lived in the desert and envied the food that we carried. At first, the Taposa tribesmen collected any leftover food we discarded whenever the UN trucks arrived with a new supply. Then they began attacking the boys at the back of the line to steal their food right after they got it. I was walking with my group of boys when the Taposa attacked.
Being attacked was frightening to begin with, and in this case the timing couldn’t have been worse. One of the boys in my group had eaten some undercooked beans that had made his stomach swell with gas. His belly grew so large that he felt terribly sick and could barely move his arms and legs. I tried to help him by making him drink soapy water to make the swelling go down, but it did no good. He just lay in a grove of thorny trees in too much pain to move. And that’s when the Taposa attacked.
Tribesmen came on fast, firing their guns in the air. At first, they fired to let their fellow tribesmen know when to start the attack, and to scare us so we would drop our food. As they kept on firing, some shot directly at the Lost Boys. I tried to get everyone in my group to run, but the boy with the big belly could not move. I hit his belly with a stick, trying to force him to his feet. He just cried.
“This is the end of my life! I’m going to die,” he whimpered.
“Stop!” I screamed at him. “Get up. We have to go.”
I couldn’t just leave him there. With the help of a couple of other boys, I tried to roll him like a ball along the trail, but that was no good. Finally, we made a stretcher out of some wooden poles and a blanket, and we carried the round-belly boy. The Taposa followed us and fired their guns again. Fortunately, a UN car came along and scared the Taposa away. One of the men in the car got out and gave the round boy some medicine. I think they took him in the car with them. When I got to Kapoeta, I found the boy. The swelling in his belly had gone down a bit, and he felt much better. We called him The Boy Who Ate Beans, but as far as I know he never ate beans again.
We stayed in Kapoeta for only three days. Like the other towns we had passed through, it soon fell to the invading soldiers.
Martha
We knew we needed to keep moving toward Kenya, but we were afraid of the local tribes between Kapoeta and the Kenyan border. A safe way to get there was in one of the big tractor-trailer trucks that carried cargo from Kenya into Sudan. When they headed back to Kenya, they were empty, their cargoes already delivered. But many of the drivers of these trucks were cruel. They would pretend they were stopping for the refugees, and the refugees would run toward them, then the drivers would suddenly take off before the refugees got to their trucks. Then they would stop again a little farther down the road, and the refugees would run toward them again. In this way, the cruel drivers led people farther and farther from the safety of Kapoeta, into the countryside where they could be attacked by hostile tribes.
Yar was smart enough not to let us run after those teasing drivers. She had another plan. On the way to Kapoeta, she had traded something—I don’t know what—to one of the local tribes for a big chicken. Now people from Kenya like to eat chicken very much, so she traded that chicken to a Kenyan driver in exchange for a ride for all of us. We got into the big, empty tractor-trailer truck and sat down and watched as the dry desert land just rolled away behind us. So fast, so painless, not like walking step by step by step to get where you want to go. It was my first time in a vehicle since I had been separated from my parents four years before. At last we were headed for safety.
Part Five
REFUGE
John
We kept walking and walking. One day, we crossed the Kenyan border without realizing it. There was nothing to mark that we had entered a new country. Our spirits rose as we realized the soldiers would not follow us. We walked into the town of Lokichokio. There we stayed for two months until we received news from the UN. There were too many boys to stay in that one town. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees had decided to relocate all of us to a new camp sixty miles inside northwestern Kenya. The camp would form around the tiny town of Kakuma in the high, windswept desert.
The UN sent open-topped trucks to Lokichokio to take us to Kakuma. The truck beds were covered with benches for us to sit on. I had never ridden in a car or truck before. I got aboard the truck carrying a bundle of sticks. I had made a crude hut out of the sticks in Lokichokio and wanted to take them with me to Kakuma. Lots of other boys on the truck had their own bundles of sticks. I put a mark on my bundle to show it was mine. The truck bounced and jolted us along some very bad roads, but we arrived safely at Kakuma.
It did not look like much. The campsite was barren and dusty. Every day the temperature soared toward 100 degrees Fahrenheit or more, and dry winds blanketed the camp with a fine, red dust that covered the ground like snow. Swirling clouds of dust blocked out the sun. Cars had to drive with their headlights on just to make it across camp. The first time I tried to walk through the dust, I sank into it up to my knees. I was a red-black man.
Kakuma was an end and a beginning. It was the end of our wandering. The Kenyan government ordered that all refugees stay in camps such as Kakuma. We could not leave it to go look for work or to try to find a new life in one of Kenya’s cities. Instead, we knew we would be stuck there for quite some time. But Kakuma also held out hope that our lives might change for the better. Here at last we would have freedom from fear. We would get food from the UN. We would have access to schools. We would build circles of friends and make new families. And we would work hard to try to make a brighter future for ourselves and, we hoped, our fellow Sudanese.
Martha
It seemed that the trees were always our first home. And that’s the way it was in Kakuma. There were no real shelters, so we crowded under the trees. But the trees couldn’t protect us from the wind. The wind would pick up red dust and sand and hurl it at us in great gusts. Everyone had dust on their faces, in their hair, in their noses. If you sneezed, you sneezed dust. If you coughed, you coughed dust.
Still, we were lucky because it rained a little when we first came to Kakuma and that settled the dust. We didn’t know it then, but it never rained in that part of Kenya. The local tribe, the Turkana, were amazed to see rain. They said that God really must be with the Dinka if it rained on us.
The Turkana themselves had no food and no jobs. They had been dying of disease and starvation, and the few goats they kept had been dying as well. But when we started to arrive, their lives got better because the UN was there with food. The Turkana would come to the camp, and we would share food, whatever we had, with them. We knew what it was like to be hungry and desperate. Later on, when Kakuma was well established, the Turkana gathered firewood in the forests to trade with us for corn or clothes. That way, they could eat, too.
Our leaders at Kakuma told the UN that we should be divided into groups according to our clans an
d the counties we were from in Sudan. The boys were grouped that way and lived together. The Lost Girls were all placed with families. Tabitha and I got to stay with Yar, and after a while her husband’s brother Deng came to stay with us. He had gone to Uganda when he had had to flee Southern Sudan, then he had heard that Yar was at Kakuma, so he came there to be with her. Neither of them had spouses anymore, so they became a couple. That is a Dinka custom, for a widowed woman to live with her brother-in-law. And Dinka men always have more than one wife.
Life in Kakuma followed the same patterns at first as life had in Pinyudu and Pochala. We got help from the Lost Boys to build a small house, and when the UN started bringing cooking oil to us in big metal cans, people cut up the empty cans and fit the pieces together to make a metal roof. We planted a garden, so we had fresh vegetables to eat, including cabbage, something I had never eaten before. I thought it was delicious.
The UN dug wells for water, but getting it was an ordeal. We girls took turns waking up really early in the morning, before the sun had risen, to get in the long line at the well. Then we’d carry our full cans home.
John
If I had grown to adulthood in a Dinka village like my brothers and sisters before me, I would have had many relatives and many traditions to guide me along the way. Dinka children learn respect from their parents and other elders, who are quick with discipline and encouragement. They learn the value of education by absorbing the laws and traditions of the tribe. They learn responsibility through taking care of goats and cattle. And they are tested again and again until they learn courage and leadership.