by Cola Bilkuei
We were to leave on September 11, 2003. As excited as I was, I forgot about the significance of that date. Like most Sudanese, I knew that Osama bin Laden had been in Khartoum in the 1990s as an ally and benefactor of the government. We knew him as a Muslim enemy in our country before he was an international terrorist and the world’s most wanted fugitive. Bin Laden had given the Sudanese government money, arms and training in the early 1990s, for its war against our Dinka people. Sometimes his al-Qaeda fighters were captured in the south of Sudan, and their identification would show that they had come from Afghanistan, or the Middle East, so we knew they were not government troops. When I’d heard about the attacks on America in September 2001, I thought: Now, he’s not only fighting against the Dinka, he’s fighting against everyone!
Even though I was excited to be starting a new life in Australia, I was dreading saying goodbye to Father Dominic. He didn’t come to the airport. He was crying so much I even reconsidered going to Australia. Gogo Jane was crying as well. All the neighbours came out to see what the commotion was about. The little neighbouring children started crying as well when they saw how upset Father was.
Bol Bol and I also had tears in our eyes. We did not know if we would ever see Father again, and knew little about what was awaiting us in Australia. Would it be better, or would we be wishing we were back with Father Dominic? We didn’t know.
I was going with Bol Bol. He was going to Adelaide because his sponsor was there. Mayoum Mijok was in Sydney, so that was where I was going. Father had paid four thousand rand for our tickets. He’d also given us five thousand rand as pocket money. I still can’t quite believe how good he was to us, for so long, even helping us to leave him. I owe him more than I can say.
CHAPTER 11
Australia
WE FLEW QANTAS. I came with two bags Father Dominic had given me, filled with nothing but clothes.
I had flown in a helicopter before, in Sudan, but then we had been herded in like goats. What was my first impression of being in a commercial jetliner? I was excited because we had our own seats! In fact we had our own TV and flight attendants asking us what we wanted to eat! More importantly, though, I finally had official papers, so I could relax about crossing a border.
A flight attendant asked me if I wanted some Australian red wine. Remembering what Father had told us about good manners, I said, ‘Thank you, let me try.’ She brought one of those very small bottles. Bol had one and I had one – it was powerful, making me want to go straight to sleep. But I also wanted to watch every channel on the TV and listen to every channel on the music system. I slept for about two hours in total.
When we landed in Sydney, the immigration officials asked us where we came from. They thought we were from America because I had on my Nike cap and an earring, and wheeled my two nice new bags. We looked as though we were coming from America, not Africa. There were other Sudanese on our flight who’d come from Kakuma, the refugee camp in Kenya, and they thought we were from America too. At the airport in South Africa we had helped them with filling in their departure cards and even using the toilets (I had to show them how the flushing and the taps worked). On the flight, they’d thought they had to pay for their food and were worried that they didn’t have any money. I went up to them and said, ‘It’s all free, even the alcohol.’
These Sudanese looked as though they’d come straight from the war. They were thin, their possessions were in maize sacks, they wore cheap nylon clothes, and they were carrying Sudanese handcrafts made out of animal skins, which were taken away from them by customs. Their bags were checked, and everything was taken aside. Meanwhile, Bol and I were allowed to go straight through. Our years in South Africa had served us well.
Now it was time to say goodbye to Bol, as he was catching his connecting flight to Adelaide. He got on the train to the domestic terminal, and we promised to keep in touch. I would have liked him to stay with me, as we had been through many trials together, but I had to be strong in this new land.
After he had gone, I waited and waited at the airport. I didn’t know who was going to collect me. I was looking around, and could see faces everywhere, none of them familiar.
Eventually a man came up and said: ‘Are you Chol?’
I said: ‘Mayoum! Mayoum! My cousin!’ I hadn’t seen him since I was five years old.
Trying to calm me down, this guy said: ‘No, I’m Moses, a friend of Mayoum.’
We drove into Sydney and the weather was beautiful. Moses had a nice car and put some hip-hop in the stereo – it was the new 50 Cent CD.
I said: ‘Moses, this country looks good.’
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘but you’ve got to work for it.’
I didn’t feel put off one bit. I could work like an ox. I was bursting with ideas and plans for what I was going to do. Moses kept looking at me and saying: ‘This is not Africa, you’ve really got to work hard here.’ I said: ‘I’ll do anything.’
We arrived at Mayoum’s house in Lalor Park. He had come to Australia in 1998 with his wife and two children, and by now they’d had another three children. None of his children spoke Dinka – they were total Aussies.
When I got to the house, the kids and I had a lot of fun. They were saying I was different from everyone else who came. I said it was because I’d been living in South Africa and had been going to school.
Mayoum came home that night. We talked seriously. He asked me about the family and I told him how many people were dead. He brought out a picture of three gentlemen from his photo album. He told me that one of them was my father as a young man, another was my Uncle Sejin, and the third was my Uncle Mayar.
Mayoum asked me: ‘So which one is your father?’
I pointed to him, and Mayoum laughed. I was pointing to the wrong one. I suppose it seemed funny at the time, but it also made me sad. I had not seen my father for sixteen years, more than half of my life, and I couldn’t remember what he looked like.
Eventually I was tired and had to go to bed. I had a bedroom in Mayoum’s house. It had a child’s bed, one wardrobe and a little table. At that moment I felt very happy. My life had changed for good. Seeing those young kids speaking proper English, with all the freedom they had, I could see that this was my future. I was happy, but I was also in a hurry – I wanted to catch up and learn and do everything in one day.
***
Next day Mayoum’s wife, Martha, took me to Centrelink and the Commonwealth Bank to get my affairs sorted out. Mayoum said he was going to take me to school to enrol. I didn’t want to go back to school, not after South Africa where schooling had led to me being victimised. This time I wanted to earn money to help my family.
I asked Mayoum to let me work for a while first. He didn’t agree, and wasn’t happy with my choice. I was his guest, and I should have shown more respect and agreed with his decision. But because Father Dominic had paid for my ticket, I felt that I was free now, that I didn’t owe my future to Mayoum.
I spoke to Bol on the phone, and he had some exciting news – my old friend Angelo Kuot was there in Adelaide!
When I spoke to Kuot, he said: ‘Come to Adelaide, I’ll help you get a job!’
Without a pause, I said, ‘All right!’ He helped me get a ticket, and after two weeks in Sydney I flew to Adelaide.
In South Africa I had had no briefing on how to do day-today things in Australia: how to find a flat, make a living, get transport, do the banking, and so on. Nobody told me about renting, working, or how the law operated. When I came here, it was Mayoum who taught me many of these things, but I learnt the practicalities of daily life through my friends. I didn’t mind. In every country I have been in, this is always how it goes.
Kuot was living with a white lady called Kate, a volunteer who helped Sudanese boys get on their feet in Australia. She came to pick me up from Adelaide airport with a card saying CHOL. When I saw the card, I was so happy to see her. She took me to Prospect, a suburb in Adelaide, where her house was. Kuot had a low bed i
n his room and I slept there for a few hours. He was meant to be coming home from work at midnight. I looked at the pictures in his room and was laughing to see him.
When he got home at one o’clock, we chatted until daybreak. We had so many experiences to tell each other – quite a lot had happened between Uganda and Adelaide! We talked about friends we’d known in Uganda. Some were already dead, some had gone back to rejoin the SPLA in Sudan, and some had disappeared. Kuot asked how Australia compared with South Africa. I said they looked exactly the same, with freeways, BMWs (though not as many in Australia) and Mercedes, and McDonald’s. The only thing about South Africa that showed you were in Africa was how many blacks were around. The physical environment, the land, was similar in both countries. Kuot said what a good place Australia was and how life was going to improve now.
Since we had become separated in Uganda, Kuot had lived in Kampala for three or four years before getting a chance through the United Nations to resettle in Australia. He came in 2002, a year before me. He now worked for a car-parts company in Adelaide, making parts for the Holden Monaro. I didn’t even know what that was. He was also working part-time assembling airconditioners for another company.
It’s very important for Sudanese to share with and help one another, to make a chain of assistance. But that chain can only work if there is trust. At least, having shared so many experiences, Kuot and I knew we had that trust. In Adelaide, Kuot, Bol and I were going to get a house together and make our new life.
I stayed with Kuot in Kate’s house for two months. Kate taught us a lot: household budgeting, keeping our receipts, managing our lives. It was reassuring to find someone in Australia who would be as kind to us as Jacob and Father Dominic had been in South Africa. We found a house to rent in Mile End. The house was nice, very big and old. We each had our own bedroom with one toilet outside and one toilet inside the house, and two sitting rooms. There was a garden outside with lemon trees. When we saw it, we immediately decided we wanted to live there.
Kuot found a job for Bol in a company called Godfrey Office Equipment. Bol went to work in the morning, Kuot went in the afternoons, and I cooked for them both. Two weeks after Bol got his job, he went to his boss, John, and asked for a job for me. I went in and John’s offsider, a woman called Marcia, said: ‘Are you sure you want to work?’ They thought I would run away after a week or two. Once I assured them I was serious, they said they would teach me how to be a spray painter. Bol was doing spot welding. Together we were making filing cabinets.
A week after I got the job, I got a phone call from a cousin in Sydney who said: ‘Your father is in Nairobi and he wants to talk to you!’ She gave me a number and I called him. The last time we had spoken, I was a child. He had not even known I was alive, let alone in Australia! Once he had recovered from this surprise, he started talking away about how cold Kenya was, and how he needed me to send him money so he could go back to his second wife and kids in Sudan. He knew about Thonager’s death but was vague on details about my family. I didn’t know how to feel, but I thought I should send him some money. ‘Give me one week,’ I said. ‘No,’ he said. ‘One week is too long!’
My father was impatient about a lot of things. He couldn’t understand why I was not already a doctor, or a pilot. In Dinka culture, once the decision is made that you are a doctor, you simply become one, and then you learn how to do it along the way. You inherit your position, or you are given it. My father couldn’t understand that it doesn’t work that way here in Australia; that you have to study for a long time, and pay money to the university, before you can qualify. I gave up trying to explain to him why I wasn’t instantly rich.
Kuot and Bol were kind: they said they’d support me for two weeks so I could send my first cheque to my father. He was very happy. I said, ‘Dad, buy some clothes for yourself and go to the barber shop and have your beard trimmed.’ He said, ‘All right.’ Then I said I couldn’t send all my money to him, so he’d have to wait a couple of months before I could send more. I was very happy to be able to help him – if I’d gone to school, as Mayoum had told me to, I wouldn’t have been able to help Dad get back to Sudan and buy clothes for his wife and kids. But it would have been nicer if he hadn’t been so totally interested in what I could do for him.
I worked at Godfrey as a spray painter, preparing those filing cabinets, until one day my spray gun exploded in my hand. It burned my right arm from the wrist almost up to the elbow. They gave me two weeks off, and then I came back. The factory got very hot, and Bol left after six months. I stayed working there; it was enough for me that the job was secure. They taught me to spot weld too.
Three months after I’d spoken to my father, a cousin in Khartoum called me to say that my brother Monyleck would be there soon and we might be able to talk. I was excited to hear from Monyleck because, unlike my father, he was still with my own family and would have news. I knew about my mother, sister Ajok and brother Thonager passing away, but didn’t know anything else. When I called the number in Khartoum, Monyleck and I were pleased to hear each other’s voice. But sometimes, the more you change, the more you stay the same! We started arguing straightaway. I was angry at him over Thonager’s death.
‘Millions of people have died in Sudan,’ Monyleck said. ‘It was not my fault!’
I said he could at least have advised Thonager not to join the army, but he would not admit to having done anything wrong. Even after all these years I was still angry at him for pressing me into the army. I cut the call.
Afterwards my cousin called and scolded me: ‘You’re brothers, you shouldn’t fight. Monyleck is worried about you. Call him back.’
In the end I did. ‘Why do we have to fight?’ Monyleck said. ‘There’s only me and you left now.’
I said: ‘What do you mean? What about Athien?’
He said she’d passed away. She’d got sick and was taken to hospital, where she’d died. Once again, I was ripped apart. She was the baby of the family. But I didn’t cry, not then. I wanted to find out from Monyleck what kind of girl she had grown into. After our mother had died, she had moved in with Monyleck’s family, where I gathered that life had been hard for her. As a female relative moving in, she would have been treated more as a servant than a family member. Monyleck assured me that until Athien got sick she had been happy and beautiful and would probably have got married. By picturing the life she might have led, I was able to find some happiness.
Eventually I sent Monyleck seven hundred Australian dollars. He was overjoyed – it was the first time he’d had money in his life. It brought him closer to me, and since then we have talked a lot. Once we started talking about something from my childhood that I’d forgotten or buried. Back when I was around seven years old, there was one time when we were told the Arab militia were coming and everyone ran into the forest to hide. My dad and Monyleck were there, and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, my dad and mum started arguing. My blind old grandmother was there too. Then my dad started bashing my mum. She was crying, Thonager was crying, Athien was crying. Monyleck tried to stop the fight and my dad hit him too. This was while everyone was supposed to be hiding. Dad kept bashing, bashing, bashing, and all the other villagers started running away from us because we were making so much noise we would attract attention from the Arabs. I just stared at my father, wishing I had the power to stop him. But I couldn’t. After it was over, my father took my grandmother and my stepmother, and they left to go to the city. They told Monyleck to look after his mother and brothers and sisters.
When we came back out, we heard that the Arabs had killed people in our village and it was not safe to return. Monyleck got us a lift to the city to follow our father. We got there before he did – he’d had to walk, while we were given a ride. It took him a week and he said this was punishment for his mistake. He’d suffered for seven days walking with his mother, he said; he’d made a terrible mistake and wanted to be forgiven. He had to sacrifice a goat for the ancestors to forgive him. We kil
led the goat and were together again, as a family.
Monyleck said that the fight had been over my stepmother being jealous of my mother and wanting to get rid of her. She had told lies about Mum, and that was what had caused Dad to hit her. He was surprised that I could remember the incident, for I had been so young at the time, but once he started talking it all came back to me. I still cry over some memories of my mother.
Monyleck and I had argued ever since I could remember. I resented his role in recruiting me into the SPLA, even though I knew he had no choice. He was always a combative boy. But this story about our mother reminded us that we were brothers, that we shared these memories and many more. All our brothers and sisters and our mother and grandmother had been killed, and we were all that was left. We had to stop fighting now.
The owner of Godfrey Office Equipment was very kind to us, but some of our friends in Adelaide were getting into trouble with the police, getting caught drinking and driving. Adelaide started to seem very small for us Sudanese. Even though we didn’t want to be disturbed, there were always Sudanese in trouble coming to our house. They wanted to go to nightclubs and they weren’t polite. I was always hoping to keep things respectful and to live the way our fathers had taught us, but these guys wanted to disrupt things. They wanted to come at all hours and lie around drinking, making a mess, not cleaning up after themselves. The way I live, if you want to pay me a visit, I’d like you to call beforehand. But these guys would just drop over and stay as long as they liked.
Bol began to grow defensive and always wanted to do his own thing. We started to have disagreements. Bol became unreliable and often let me down when I wanted to meet him or ask him to do something. To him, this was ‘freedom’; to me it was bad manners. Kuot went to Melbourne, and I went back to Sydney. When I got there, Mayoum laughed about our earlier arguments. He thought I’d learnt my lesson and should have listened to him in the first place, and now I was crawling back to him for help.