by Susan Kuklin
We just ran. Many people were running beside us. Many people died. I saw them. It took many years before I could sleep at night. I’d wake up screaming or I’d jump up and start running.
As we ran, I heard David scream, “I got hit!”
He had been shot in the leg. There was blood everywhere. He shouted at us, “You guys go!”
“How we going to leave you? You’re bleeding.”
“You guys have to go! GO!”
We didn’t know what to do. We were too young to pick him up and carry him ourselves. Some people who knew David came by, picked him up, and hid him in the bushes. Me and Michael joined the others who were running from nowhere to nowhere, just running not to die. We got to a clearing place where many people gathered. But we still didn’t see our parents. We told some guys that David was shot. Around four or five hours later, after the shooting cooled down, Michael, me, and his friends went back for David. He was still alive.
The older guys picked him up and carried him to the river. They found a canoe and we all got in. We rowed to our old refugee camp, Etang. We reached Etang, but the entire camp had been destroyed. I don’t know who destroyed it. We went back into the canoe and continued rowing to we don’t know where. The U.N. found us, put us on a bus, and took us to a town called Gambela, in Ethiopia. From Gambela, we were moved to another refugee camp, called Dimma.
Being a refugee is not easy. Sometimes you must go from place to place to place. There are a lot of people. Everyone is in crisis. Everyone is in trauma. The water is not that clean. Bad water kills a lot of kids and a lot of elders. We must rely on the U.N. to bring clean water, and sometimes they run out. If a sickness comes, like a cold, it goes to everybody. If a serious disease comes out, no one is safe. The sanitation is not that good. A refugee camp is not a very good place. I didn’t want to be a refugee. But I was a refugee for half my whole life.
In Dimma, we were given food, we were given clothes, and we were given some money because we had left with nothing. The camp was organized in blocks — Block One, Block Two, Block Three. We were in Block Six. We lived in a tent until they could make houses. Our house looked exactly like the one we had at home, one big room made with palms. To sleep, we put plastic on the dirt floor, and then a blanket on top of the plastic. We had another blanket to cover us. It was not very comfortable. No pillows. No mattress. Oh, no.
The camp collected many lost kids [who came to be known as the Lost Boys and Girls of Sudan] and put them in a shelter. They fed them, gave them some clothes and blankets. Refugee families went to the shelter to look for their children. If a parent didn’t come, the child was considered lost. The shelter area was open two times a week. The first week we went there, we didn’t find anyone from our family. The second week we went there, we found Zatrak, my mother’s youngest son. He was four or five — I’m not really sure how old. That was a joyful time. We were crying. We thought all the rest of our family was gone.
Zatrak was with two other young boys, who were our cousins. We took all three boys to our house in the camp, and we grew to a family of six. There was no school. No school at all. The children played all day.
The U.N. people cut [operated on] David’s leg, and he got better. He started walking again. In Africa, we didn’t have cars. We walked long distances to fetch things: food, water, showers, everything. And imagine, when women walk, we have a big huge container of water or grain on our head. Even though this was considered women’s work, my brothers had to do it because I was too little. After a while, David’s leg got swollen again. The U.N. tried cutting him again.
Sometimes there was not enough food. The food that was delivered was not cooked. The U.N. brought us dried food, like corn, then we cooked it ourselves. Oil is the only food the U.N. gave us that didn’t have to be changed into something else. They brought the oil in a huge container, and then they measured cups of it to each family.
Before Dimma was built, the Ethiopian people didn’t have much business. When we arrived, they had a small area near the camp where we’d take our corn and turn it into flour. They used a taawun. I don’t know how you call this machine in English. It was a good business for them. They sold us meat and vegetables. To get the meat and vegetables, we had to sell some of the corn the U.N. gave us. If the U.N. gave us three bags of corn, we saved two and sold one. This was illegal. We were not allowed to sell things the U.N. gave us, but we had no money. How else could we get meat and fruit and vegetables? If we were caught, we could get into trouble. They could take away our refugee cards. Without that card, we’d get nothing, nothing at all.
At first, my brothers got the food and cooked because I was too young to do the women’s work. Once I turned twelve, I became like the wife, like the mother. Life became too difficult because I was still so young. I woke up early in the morning, got some clean water, came back to the house, and cooked the meal. I didn’t play with the kids anymore. I worked like a housewife.
To get clean water, like the water we have here in the sink, I’d wake up at four o’clock in the morning to go on the water line. Maybe I didn’t get the water until ten o’clock because the line was so long. Sometimes the water would be gone, and we waited until they brought in more.
We had big plastic jugs that we carried on our heads. We carried everything on our heads. We’d wrap cloth on our heads. I don’t know how you call it in English, but we call it thath. I took a scarf or T-shirt and I wrapped it around the top of my head to balance the heavy jug. Sometimes the jug hurt, because I was only twelve years old, and not very strong.
The morning water lasted for the day’s cooking and cleaning. And then I got the evening water. Some of the people working in the water area were very nice. If you got a nice person, especially if you were a young girl, they’d let you leave a second container in the evening line. Every container had a name or something to recognize as your container. Otherwise, you would be on line all day.
There was this older girl that didn’t like me for some reason. She didn’t want me in the line. She threw my container away. I asked her, “Why did you do that?”
“Get out of my face.” That’s all she said to me.
On the first day, I let it go. And then the second day, she did it again, and I let it go. On the third day, as soon as I took my water, she came, kicked the container, and the water spilled out. I had to go back on the line to get more. And then I got mad. We fought. I was younger than she was, but I tried my best to be a fighter because I had to defend myself.
The guys who kept the line in order tried to stop the fight. They separated us, but they couldn’t take us to jail because there was no jail. After that we be cool; we even became friends.
African life is not like American life. In America, if you fight with somebody, if you hurt somebody, you go to jail. In the refugee camp, if you fight with somebody, you get away with it. Maybe, if you have a family, they be mad and ask who started the fight. But if you are somebody like me, with no adult family to care about me, I had to take care of it myself. There were so many people in the camp, lots of fights broke out. My younger brother Zatrak was always fighting.
I watched the kids who had parents play. It was sad seeing kids my age playing, happy. They didn’t need to care about what they were going to eat later, what they were going to eat tomorrow. Some kids enjoyed themselves and played all day, while other kids struggled. I’m one of the kids who struggled. Sometimes I cried. I missed my old life. I missed my mamma.
We wanted to know if our family was alive in a different refugee camp. You needed money to travel to other refugee camps, and we didn’t have any. Besides, we were too young to travel alone. David was old enough, but he couldn’t walk long distances; he couldn’t go anywhere. We were stuck, but at least we were stuck together.
There were lots of lost kids, kids who didn’t have any family around. They were young and didn’t know how to be safe. They didn’t know if they be alive tomorrow, or if they be dead tomorrow, you know? Some peopl
e had a good heart. They took care of those lost kids. They brought them to their house and treated them like their own children. There was a woman from my block that we’d go to for help. She took care of us sometimes. She was married with her own children, but she helped me do things, things that I didn’t know how to do, things that I couldn’t do because I was not yet a woman. She took care of us even though we never knew her back in Sudan. She just felt sorry for us and tried to help.
I remembered my mom as a very strong woman. I remembered her working in the field, like people here who work on a farm. I remembered how proud she was. I thought, okay, even though I’m young, if she did that, I can do it.
In 1996, when I was fifteen, David’s leg got worse. The U.N. sent him to Addis Ababa, the capital city of Ethiopia. At the hospital, the doctors separated his leg from his body. I went to Addis Ababa to help him. We stayed in a room near the hospital, and I became like a wife. I washed his clothes and cooked. My other brothers stayed in the refugee camp while me and David lived in Addis Ababa. During that time, we put our names on a list to immigrate to the United States. I wanted to go to the U.S. so much because I heard that it was a safe place. I heard that people who had already gone to the U.S. could support their families and not rely on the U.N. I thought that if I went to U.S., I could take care of my family.
While we were living in Addis Ababa, David met a girl who someone thought would be a good wife for him. I knew for sure she was never going to be a good wife, because she acted weird. But I couldn’t speak bad about her because I didn’t want my brother to feel bad.
In 1998, the Ethiopian government collected all the Sudanese people who were staying in Addis Ababa and took us to a new refugee camp called Sherkole. David, his wife, and I lived in a tent until we could make a house with wood. Soon Michael, Zatrak, and our cousins moved in too. There was still no school. The children played all day.
By now, I was seventeen years old and didn’t want to play with kids. Doing things by myself became easier. I acted like a woman. That means I prepared everything, carried the water, shopped for food. I’d go to the market to sell some of the sorghum the U.N. gave us for meat and honey. I learned to say, “I’ll give you this; you give me that.”
When we first moved to Sherkole, David’s wife was okay. She helped him get used to the fake leg that they gave him in the hospital. She walked with him and did his laundry. But that’s all she did. I did everything else: bring the water for him to shower, cook, clean, get his medicines. All day, I did this and I did that. She just watched. She was a weird woman.
David started going to the Presbyterian church in the refugee camp. He became one of the church leaders, and then an evangelist minister. Guests came to our house all the time. I thought to myself, he has a wife; she can do the things that I do. And guess what? She just kept sitting down, making herself clean, and doing things that she’s not supposed to do, girlie things, like putting on her nail polish and combing her hair. Finally I told her, “Hey, I’m not the wife in this house. You’re wife! You can do the things that I do. I’ll show you how; you can do this.” She didn’t care. She continued to act just like a guest. She be sitting there, watching me work. When the food was ready, she came and ate.
Sometimes I felt like I didn’t want to let her eat. I kept my mouth quiet. If my brother wanted it that way, I had no choice. I was not going to tell him not to be with this lady. My little brother Zatrak didn’t like her at all. He told me, “Nyarout, I want to beat up this lady.” “Come on, don’t do that. Don’t do that,” I’d tell him. “Just leave it.”
In Sherkole, we became lucky. David got a notice to come for an interview to go to the U.S. He’d been on the waiting list for two years since we were in Dimma. The two lost boys, our cousins, were still living with us. David said, “I can’t leave them. Let’s try to take them with us.”
Everyone who lived with us could go to the United States, including our cousins. But first we must all be interviewed and checked out. The interview was hard. They asked the same things, again and again. “How did the war start?” “How did you get to here?” “How many days did it take to go from Nasir to Ethiopia?” Sometimes they asked the same question in a different way. I guess it was to check that we were honest. One question hurt us the most: “Where are the other family members, like your father and mother?” That question hurt us because, at this point, we didn’t know where our parents were. Were they okay? Were they alive? We had no idea. We went through many interviews, we answered many questions, we had many medical checkups, and we passed everything.
Months later — I’m not sure how many months — we found out that our parents were alive in Ethiopia too, in another refugee camp.
My brother and I left the Sherkole refugee camp to go to Addis Ababa for our orientation meeting. Orientation is the last step before coming to the U.S. In the morning, like, nine in the morning, we were on the way to the meeting. We saw a friend from the camp — his name is Both — who was also visiting Addis Ababa. He came up to us in the street and said, “Your mom is here.”
Both is a good guy. We were good friends. I said to him, “Please, don’t lie to us.” I wanted to see my parents so bad before I left. “No, I’m not lying.” And then he said, “I can take you over there where she at.”
When I saw my mom, I was so happy I didn’t even feel myself. I couldn’t even look at her. I cried and cried and cried happiness tears. I was crying very loud — like really, really loud. I couldn’t believe it was her. My mom was crying too. She said, “I can’t even believe how much you’ve grown.” It had been seven years since I’d seen her. That’s a long time for a child.
Mom had heard that we were in Addis Ababa. She had enough money to buy one bus ticket to come and try to find us. Refugees don’t have phones. We don’t have the Internet. To find one another, we ask people who are traveling from one camp to another if a family member is in the camp. Sometimes we give the traveler letters in the hope that the person meets our family. My mom asked every Sudanese she saw if they knew about us. And then that guy, Both, told her, “Yeah, I know them. They in Sherkole.”
Later, when we got to the orientation meeting, they told us about the life and the rules in the U.S. They said that we will have the freedom to do whatever we wanted to do, except killing and stealing. They taught us that if you became a criminal, if you did some bad stuff, they would deport you back to where you came from. I worried about Zatrak, my younger brother. He was a fighter. He was always getting into fights.
They said that you could have a job if you were old enough, like eighteen and up. They said that when you earn your money, it’s your money.
After our orientation, me and David went back to the refugee camp. We left my mom in Addis Ababa. It wasn’t hard to say goodbye, because we knew that we were coming back. The hard time to say goodbye was when we left to come over here. My mom couldn’t come with us because she needed a form to come over here. Our process was already done but hers wasn’t. She stayed in Africa.
Before we left, we had four more days to be with our mom in Addis Ababa. The U.N. gave us some money, so we rented a house rather than stay in a hotel. It was me, my brothers, my mom, and David’s wife. The only person missing for me was my dad. He was in another refugee camp somewhere. I remember the things that we used to do because I was Daddy’s little girl, his tiny, skinny Nyaluot. I never saw my father again. I can’t even remember his face.
My mom told me that she and my father had arranged a marriage for me in the U.S. They didn’t know the guy; they knew his family. He was the father of Both, my friend who had found my mother in Addis Ababa. Since my dad was not coming to the U.S. with us, David, the oldest son, was in charge to make this happen. I didn’t say nothing. I just kept quiet, because if I said no, they would still make me do it. But I started to worry about what life in the U.S. had in store for me.
On August 11, 1999, we flew to America. The flight was very scary. It was weird to be in the plane. Th
e food was different. My younger brother, he opened a wrapper and looked at some brown thing. David opened one too and put it in his mouth. He immediately took it out and gave it to me. He said, “Try this — it’s really, really good.”
“Okay, what is it?”
“Just eat it. It’s good! Try it.” And then when I put it in my mouth, it was very nasty. I spit it out, I didn’t like it. We didn’t have chocolate in our country.
We landed in New York City. There were these huge screens that were so clean you can see yourself. You couldn’t walk through them, though. We never saw glass so big. Oh, my gosh, it was weird.
There were lots of people in the airport. I had never seen fat people before, and I was scared to see people so big. I stared at them. Seriously? People can get fat like that? In my country, people are so skinny. How did they get so much food to be fat like that?
I didn’t understand what anybody was saying. I speak Nuer and a little Ethiopian. This new language, English, was confusing.
We walked around the airport with plastic cards on our backs that said we were refugees. At one point, a girl, a stranger, came up to me and wanted to hug me. She wanted to welcome me, but because I didn’t speak English, I didn’t understand what she was trying to do. She scared me.
We had our I-94, a document that said we could come to the U.S. That’s a document that you use to get your Social Security, to get your ID, and all these things. That’s the only document they gave us in Addis Ababa.
We changed planes to go to Nashville, Tennessee, our new home in the U.S. It was my younger brother Zatrak, Michael, David, his wife, the two cousins, and me. At the Nashville airport, we met the people who sponsored us, friends from the camp who had already settled in Nashville, and the man my parents had arranged for me to marry. He was just standing there, with a flower in his hand. He was too old for me. He was, like, fifty years old, and I was eighteen. No, I did not like him. I did not like him at all. I grabbed the flower and walked away. I didn’t even shake his hand.