by John Bul Dau
I regret that I never had the chance to be initiated into manhood in the Dinka way. Dinka boys of fifteen or sixteen must go through an intense ritual of initiation. They live totally isolated for about two months. They fend for themselves and kill and cook their own food. When their time is up, they return to their villages not as boys but as men. That means they can fight lions, go to war, and have all of the privileges of adulthood except marriage, which Dinka men traditionally put off until they are about age thirty. People of my father’s generation sometimes showed off having passed through the initiation by carving scars into their foreheads and removing their lower teeth, but that tradition has almost disappeared. None of this happened to me because I was only thirteen when I had to flee Duk Payuel and seventeen when I arrived in Kakuma. I had spent my initiation time on the run. To this day, some Sudanese jokingly refer to me as a “boy” because I never went through the initiation into adulthood.
We Lost Boys had to raise ourselves and each other in Kakuma. Imagine thousands of children and teenagers all in one place, with only a handful of adults. Does that sound like a playground? Or a paradise? I assure you it was neither.
We had our fun and our playtime, of course. We played soccer and alueth, and we wrestled and told stories in the Dinka way. After a while we teenagers even started dancing on Saturday nights. We invited some of the Lost Girls to dance with us, but there were never enough of them for every boy to have a dance partner.
These were the highlights of camp life. But of course life at Kakuma wasn’t all fun. The biggest problems were food and shelter. We refugees divided ourselves into circles of a dozen or so. We said we belonged to a “group,” but really each group acted like a family. We built a shelter out of tree limbs, palm branches, and whatever other materials we could find, but the huts leaked when it rained and always needed repairs. Food was scarce, but we shared what we had with other members of the group.
About every sixteen days, UN trucks arrived in Kakuma to distribute dry food. Every boy got six kilograms, or about thirteen pounds, during each visit. Mostly we received corn, wheat flour, and lentils. That had to last us more than two weeks until the trucks came again. Some of the boys in my group had a little money from selling their rations or the vegetables they grew to others in camp or to the native Kenyans. We used the money to buy sugar and salt to help flavor our meals.
We pooled our food rations and ate them sparingly to make them last. I was in charge of dinner for our group. I insisted that we eat only one meal a day. I asked the group when they wanted to eat. We settled on 10 a.m. and set up a schedule so that each boy would get a turn at being the cook. I measured out one day’s worth of corn meal every morning and gave it to the chef of the day. He dropped it in a kettle of boiling water and then added a bit of sugar and salt. When the corn meal turned into a watery yellow porridge, it was time for dinner. Every boy dipped his cup into the porridge and drank. That was all we had to eat for twenty-four hours.
No matter how much we tried to ration the food, we always seemed to run out before the UN trucks came again. We might go a day or two without any food. If the trucks got delayed by bad roads or bad weather, it might be a couple more days before we got anything to eat. We called these times without food our “black days.” Kakuma was pitch black at night on those days because nobody bothered to kindle a cooking fire.
To make the time pass until the next shipment of food arrived, we told stories and played games. We tried to trick our bellies into thinking we were full by drinking a lot of water. But that only worked for a while, and then our hunger pains would come back. When we couldn’t avoid the subject of food any longer, I would remind the boys in my group of an old Dinka saying: “Hunger does not know nguik.” The nguik is the spot on a cow’s neck where you stab it with a spear to kill it. Hunger did not know how to find that spot on a human being. What I meant was that hunger might make us feel bad for a few days, but it would not kill us. I used that saying to remind everyone to be strong, like a Dinka.
When the youngest boys got very hungry, some of the older boys played a trick to help them. They went to the clinic and pretended to have very bad diarrhea. The treatment for diarrhea is to drink water mixed with powders containing sugar, salt, and medicine. The pretenders got packets of the powder at the clinic and returned to the group to share. We all drank the medicine. It gave us strength to get through another day. I feel a little bad about the trick now, not knowing if some boys who were really sick couldn’t get that medicine because we had gotten it first.
Every year, each boy received a ration card. When caretakers doled out the food, they trimmed a boy’s ration card and pressed his finger in invisible ink. Some boys stole ration cards and tried to go through the food line twice. However, they were swiftly caught. The caretakers made them put their fingers under a special kind of light. It made the invisible ink glow blue or purple. The caretakers took their cards away, and the Kenyan police put them in jail.
With only a few adults to supervise us, we had to create our own ways of living from day to day. We could have given up on going to church and school, but we did not. Church and school are important to the Dinka. Children embrace them even when there are no adults around. At Kakuma, church helped give us hope that better things would come our way. School helped give us the tools to change our lives.
Every night, children gathered to sing and worship God. My church group was No. 36, and it had 600 to 800 boys. For two hours, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., we met outdoors for church. Only we didn’t call it church. We called it “synagogue,” and we modeled it on the Jews of the Old Testament. We were Christians, but we were mimicking the ways of the Israelites when they wandered in the desert without a home. I was the one who supervised the services. I kept track of who would give the sermon each night, and I made sure the worshipers had tambourines and drums. Boys who wanted to preach came to me for tryouts. Those who made the cut prepared themselves in the Dinka way. They isolated themselves and fasted for a while. Going without food wasn’t too hard when there was so little to go around in the first place.
I also started school at the refugee camp. There had been no formal schools in Duk Payuel, so I was very excited to begin the first grade. I was eighteen years old when I had my first school lesson.
Everybody started school at the same time—big kids and small kids, Dinka and Nuer and members of all of the other tribes. We learned in groups of sixty. I remember my first day of class very clearly. I sat with my group in the powdery red dust of Kakuma in the shade of an achuil tree and nervously waited for the teacher. We had no blackboard or chalk or desks or chairs or pencils or paper. All we had was an easel made out of sticks and nails, topped with a sheet of cardboard. For chalk, we had lumps of charcoal from the cooking pits.
I remember my teacher’s name: Atak. He was Sudanese and spoke Dinka. He walked through our circle of sitting boys and gave us our first lesson.
“Good morning, pupils. I am your teacher, Atak,” he said in Dinka. “When I say ‘Good morning, pupils,’ you say, ‘Good morning, teacher’ to me. Let’s try it.”
“Good morning, pupils!”
“Good morning, teacher!”
“This is our first lesson. It is about respect,” Atak said.
We felt right at home. Respect is the first thing a child learns in a Dinka family—respect for mother, father, aunts, uncles, other children, and animals. Every adult must be given great dignity. Children must do what an adult says to do, whether it is a parent or someone else from the village. What they say about African communities is true: It takes a village to raise a child.
With Atak as our teacher, we learned to say “thank you” and “good morning” and many other words and phrases. After Atak was satisfied with our manners, he took roll by asking us to stand and say our names. “My name is John Bul Dau,” I said, and Atak wrote that in his register. Atak said he would read us the roll again and asked us to respond with a new word. It was in a new language, called
English, he said. He gave us the word and we all practiced it. It was the first English word I knew. So, when Atak called my name, I responded as he told me: “Yes!” I was very excited.
Next we learned our ABCs. We had nothing to write on except the red dust at our feet, so that is what we used. I drew the letter “A” with my finger. That night, my first homework assignment was to practice drawing that letter. I had seen that letter before, on my shirt at Pinyudu that said “USA.” Now I was on the brink of learning all of the letters and how to put them together to form words.
My group went home and practiced our letter “A.” Every day we learned new letters and new numbers. Then we learned new words and how to make sentences. We practiced in our huts, where every night a new boy would be chosen to play teacher and lead the lesson, while everyone else played their parts as students. Slowly, we taught ourselves to read, write, and speak English, and to do math. I started reading everything I could find that had English words. I read the ingredients on food packages and the words on T-shirts. I read the sides of vegetable oil cans. It was a big, big day when I got my first book and Atak began to introduce me to the world outside East Africa. Some books had pictures of cities in faraway places. Some had pictures and words that seemed totally strange. They showed things like coffee pots, microwave ovens, and kitchen sinks. I had seen nothing like them. Our camp had no electricity and no running water. What did I know of computers and television sets and other items of daily life in big cities?
Sometimes the teachers knew as little as the pupils. Once we read a book about some Kenyan children. They tried to stay awake one night but fell asleep when clouds covered the moon. One of the pupils asked about the English word “cloud,” which was new to our vocabulary. The teacher did not know but pretended that he did. He said a cloud was a very big bird. Later I learned the truth. I smile when I think of that teacher.
I worked hard at my lessons. I progressed very quickly through school until I reached the equivalent of middle school. I had to study many subjects and get passing grades to get to the equivalent of high school. It was very hard because we were in Kenya so the exams were in Kiswahili, a third language I had to master beyond Dinka and English. I studied in the evening until the sun set, and I stood in line to use the little libraries that missionaries had built for us. Thankfully, I managed to pass.
Then came high school lessons. I felt as if my life depended on my passing the exam that would give me a high school diploma. Again I studied very hard. The libraries were afraid their books would get stolen, so none of the books could be checked out. I sat on the library floor and hand-copied books on history, geography, civics, agriculture, and other subjects. Then I took those papers home and studied them. Just as before, I worked with other boys in my group to play teacher and students. We drilled each other every day from sunrise to sunset. I encouraged everyone to start studying early in the morning.
“Get up! Get up! Time to study!” I shouted at 4 a.m. I also walked around beating a piece of tin with a stick. Bang! Bang! That is how we started our school day.
Finally the big day came. I took the test and passed with a C-plus. It was a very hard test. I was very proud. Earning a high school diploma in East Africa marks a man as smart and successful. I dreamed of being a teacher, a politician, or someone who ran a large organization.
Everyone celebrated earning their diplomas with music and dancing. We rented a tape player and some Congolese dance music tapes, and we had a party. Some of the Lost Girls came to the party and danced with us.
Seeing girls made me think of families. I had lived in Kakuma for several years and was no longer a boy. Some of the Lost Boys and Lost Girls had gotten married and begun to raise families. Nobody knew how long we would have to stay in camp. Perhaps the camps would last until the war ended in Sudan, and nobody knew how long that would be. But I was in no hurry to marry. I knew I would need to provide for a wife and children, and I was a long way from having a job and a home of my own.
Martha
UN schools were open to girls just as in Pinyudu, and now that we were older, we sometimes managed to attend. But if we weren’t finished with our morning chores by the time school started at nine, we weren’t allowed to go. The families we Lost Girls were staying with didn’t encourage us to go to school anyway. They would rather have us stay at home and work for them. And besides, an education wasn’t something a Dinka girl had been taught to value. It didn’t mean anything to us. We would say to ourselves, “Oh, maybe I will go to school tomorrow,” but then the next day, after we’d fetched water and swept our compound and ground maize, it was too late to go and we were already tired.
Gradually, though, by going to classes now and then, I began to understand English. Learning a new language made me really excited about learning more. And in Kenya I saw women who were nurses and doctors and teachers, and I started to think: If this woman can do it, why can’t I? I began to realize how much a good education could bring to your life. The Kenyan women with educations were strong, they had a voice, they had equality. This was something I had never seen in my own culture.
I started to think that if I were educated, when I grew up I could take care of myself and my sister. I was about 13 then, and this was a whole new idea for me. I also knew anything could happen in Sudan, and that in the future I might be able to return. Whatever I learned in Kakuma, I could use back there. It would be good to have strong, educated women with equality and a voice when the war was over and Southern Sudan was rebuilt. So I started rushing through my morning chores and getting myself to school every day.
Sticking with my plan to be a strong, educated woman became much harder when I got to be fourteen or fifteen. That is the age when most Dinka girls from the countryside get married. City girls don’t marry so young, so if my real parents had been with me, I don’t think they would have wanted me to marry. But Deng, the man who was with Yar, was now my guardian. I called him my “uncle,” and by custom he was allowed to negotiate with any man who wanted to marry me, asking for cows in exchange for his consent. A man in his late forties, older than my own father would have been, wanted to marry me and began coming to our house. My uncle would tell me to go sit with him, and the old man would tell me that he liked me. I was always honest, saying that I was not ready to get married. But he would try to convince me, saying all these nice things about me.
I also heard that other men were talking to my uncle about taking me as a wife. Now, among the Dinka, a man can abduct a girl when she is walking alone, and then she has to marry him. So I was very, very careful, always surrounding myself with my friends when I was out and about. Sometimes I would even stay with a friend at night because I was afraid my uncle would make me go with one of these potential husbands.
This kept going on, over and over for two years. But during that time I also met John. He told me his name the first time I met him at a dance, and later he got up the courage to come and stand outside my house. Some girls saw him and yelled, “Look, there’s a man standing by the gate.” I peeked out of a window and thought, what does he want?
John
I remember exactly where I saw Martha for the first time. Some Lost Boys were teasing her and acting mean on the way home from school, but she ignored them. I thought she showed great courage. When I saw her later at that dance, I asked very politely if I could talk to her, which was a sign that I liked her. She turned me down in the polite way that all Dinka girls turn down all Dinka boys when they try to strike up their first conversation. Dinka tradition said she could not encourage me—or, at least, not right away. I would have to be persistent. So I started going to her house. She never told me she disliked me, so I thought I had a chance with her. I was determined to be her boyfriend. Day after day, I kept politely asking for her time. She kept saying no, but she always let me come back the next day. After many, many days, she finally said yes, she would allow me to visit her and we could be boyfriend and girlfriend
Martha
/> John and I would sit and talk together. That is how “dating” is done in the Dinka culture. The man comes to your house, where you are chaperoned, and sits across the room from you, and the two of you talk.
Since John was a Lost Boy and I was a Lost Girl, we had a lot of background in common. He was a nice guy who seemed strong and confident, with no fear of anything. And he was young. I liked him, but I had more important things to think about just then.
That older man was still hanging around and hanging around. It got so I had to plan my whole life around avoiding him. My uncle kept telling him, “Oh, she’s going to change her mind,” or else, “If you find her alone, just take her.”
A good friend of mine named Mary had gone through the same thing. Her uncle at Kakuma had wanted her to marry an older man, but her mother hadn’t. So her mother ran away from the camp with her children. She took them to a secure place the UN had, and they took her and her kids to Nairobi, the capital of Kenya. After that, they were able to emigrate to Canada.
I got a letter from Mary telling me that now she was free. No one could force her to get married. “I don’t want to get married, and I can stay unmarried,” she wrote. That sounded really good to me. She also told me to try to get to Nairobi, so we could speak by phone (there were no phones we could use in Kakuma). Also, once I was in Nairobi, she could wire me some money. Now that her life was better, she wanted to help me.
I found a family from Kakuma who was going to the city on the bus, and I went with them. Nairobi was overwhelming to me, bigger than any place I had ever seen. And it was so beautiful, with the shops, the tall buildings, the lights—electricity everywhere—and all the cars honking and streaming through the streets. It was so, so exciting. I had seen pictures of big cities, but I had never thought I would be walking around in one. This was a different world, a world I wanted to have.