Seed of South Sudan (14 page)

I walked from Rumbek, in southern Sudan, to Ethiopia. I walked for a month. As a group, we walked mostly during the nights to avoid government soldiers, and I ended up in Ethiopia, a neighboring country. I stayed in Ethiopia for four years where another civil war followed. In 1991, I left Ethiopia and moved between the borders until I ended up in Kenya in 1992. We lived in Kenya for nine years and in 2001, I came to the United States.

The Lost Boys who were resettled in the United States wanted to obtain an education, and I have done this but with great effort and sacrifice. Because the airlifts were occurring in 2001, I left before finishing secondary school, so I had to take GED courses. I also had to work to support myself, as refugee status requires that the refugee be self-supporting within three months. Rather than take a couple of years of courses to finish high school, I found a self-paced program and obtained my GED, and then enrolled in Georgia Perimeter College and Clayton State University, where I graduated with a bachelor's degree in management.

I hope to become a teacher so I can take these skills back to South Sudan. I want to lead the effort to bring education to this area of the world that is just beginning to establish the things it needs to be strong. Unfortunately, applying for jobs in Georgia has been disappointing, as I have received no offers. I've recently married a Dinka wife in south Sudan, and will begin again to look for a position in the United States that will enable me to teach. Of the resources needed for a new South Sudan, schools are the most critical. With Majok focusing on wells for our villages, I hope to build schools and programs to help young South Sudanese boys and girls to learn so that they may guide the new country.

When I was first in Pinyudo and we had been organized into groups, I saw him at one of the volleyball competitions between the groups. He was in Group 12 and I was in Group 9. The first thing I noticed was that he spoke Agar Dinka like people in my village, in Rumbek area. When I heard him, I knew he was from my area. Then the next thing I noticed—as a young boy of seven, missing home after many months on the dusty paths across east Africa—he was older, 10 years old, and he wore the traditional scars across his forehead, meaning he was initiated into manhood in the same fashion of the Agar Dinka.

So he was older, and he was from my area, and this was very important. I felt like someone from home was in that group, and the group was located near mine, so we could visit easily. He and I played basketball, volleyball and soccer together. We met at the community dance events at Pinyudo, and we knew the same dances as we were both from Rumbek area of the Lakes region. His is one friendship that has continued to our new home in Clarkston, Georgia, so this is a strong connection from the refugee camp days.

The building of support among the Lost Boys began in the camps, but it continues in the present through many organizations here in the United States that are devoted to assisting Lost Boys and Southern Sudan.

Our Dinka culture, like that of many tribes in southern Sudan, is built around our cattle, and there are many connections between this and every aspect of daily life. An important part of every Dinka's life is the marriage that he makes. It is a matter of growing up knowing that you will marry, you will have many children, and you will be supported by and provide support to a large extended family of aunts and uncles, grandparents, nieces, nephews, cousins, and many others. The marriage will benefit everyone because there will be more children to carry on the tribe. So a large emphasis is on that marriage, and on the bride-price that will be paid in a traditionally orchestrated exchange between the family of the groom and the family of the bride.

The groom's side will negotiate with the family of the bride to determine the number of cattle that will be provided by the groom to the bride's family. There will be gifts from the bride's family as well, but the larger gift will be from the groom, meaning the groom's uncles and cousins and parents and other relatives of the groom as well. Lengthy negotiations ensue—often in a public gathering where other village members can watch—and offers are made back and forth. A beautiful, young, healthy bride with a large or valuable dowry will command a larger number of cattle than one who has less attractive features, physically and resource-wise. The number of cattle is an issue, but also the age and the quality, especially the coloring, of the cattle. Remember that frequently Dinka names, including mine, are derived from the color of cattle—this is like U.S. families giving new babies names of fancy cars, or celebrities, or favorite politicians; it's very important to the culture.

I'm trying to convey the emphasis that is placed on a woman's value in Dinka culture. Her value, her beauty, and her qualities as a woman mean greater monetary and status value in a Dinka marriage. A good marriage is a blessing to the family, as their wealth will increase with a skillful negotiation and securing of such a union.

So it was a bad thing for us to learn, in Kakuma Refugee Camp, that one of the UN-employed teachers was encouraging young girls in her classes to use their bodies to earn money. She was a Kenyan lady who was supposed to be teaching children, boys and girls, but she changed her teaching to mislead the girls. She taught girls how to get money from the market, and she told them that the parts of their bodies were gold, so why not use it to get clothes, shoes, food, lotions and other things. This woman was employed by UNHCR to be a teacher. Yet she was doing the opposite. This was a very negative thing in the refugee girls' lives, to be trained in that way; the teacher took advantage of the fact that there was no way to make income in the camp; the only currency was exchanging the ration of food. So if a young girl wanted lotions, or more food, or clothes, the teacher was showing her an immoral way.

These are some of the issues that refugees faced in the camp. Possibly it was unknown officially to UNHCR while it went on, but it destroyed some young girls' lives. In my culture, such a girl is spoiled for marriage. It was a very bad thing that this teacher did. A lot of people complained about her and she left. Our people don't tolerate that kind of thing because our girls are really the income to the family. Anybody that messes with the girls—the family would not be happy about it. Other cultures may do it, but in Dinka culture it is not good.

Our respect for women is not just because of this custom. Women hold authority in our communities and in our families. It is the sayings of our grandmothers and mothers and aunts that we remembered in times we were separated from family. The women must support the decisions of the men, or they will not happen. Women work extremely hard in our culture, and their lives are often filled with many occasions for sorrow, especially when giving birth. All their days are filled: with working with their men in the field in the morning, then coming in to make food for their children, walking sometimes miles to get water and firewood, grinding grain, then tending the children all day and making meals for the family, providing for clothing and family needs of all kinds. It does not end as an elderly person, for they help their daughters with their families, too.

At Kakuma, another thing we complained about, but it did not change over the nine years I was there, was that women and girls were allowed to go to the UN staff compound at any time. The compound is the group of buildings and tents that housed UNHCR staff as well as refugee aid workers from various humanitarian groups. If you were a man or a boy, you could not go. The exception to this was that a man with a title, such as the chairman of the camp, who would carry identification as chairman, would be allowed into the compound. Or a man or boy who was provided a specific written pass could go. But women and girls did not have to provide any papers. They went all the time.

This made our men very suspicious. A man would say, “Why can my wife go in, and I can't?” There was a great deal of questioning about this, and it often caused a lot of friction in the families, where the husband and wife would separate. Why should an agency devoted to the welfare of refugees inflict such pain on the people it is to help? We never understood why the males could not go beyond the gate to the fenced compound, but women and girls were free to go anytime. More of the world now knows of how sexual enslavement was going on in Darfur and other places where different groups in northern Sudan warred on the people there. But it seems incredible UNHCR or other people would be taking sexual advantage of refugees in their charge.

Another food shortage hit us in 1997, and the distributed food was reduced. Instead of one cup of grain, which was expected, incredibly, to feed us for two weeks, it now became one-half cup. There were some days we did not eat, but saved our ration for the next day. And then there would be another day during those two weeks when we would again go without eating. That was a great hardship. We were playing sports, going to school, and having to deal with the hunger that followed us every day. The ration returned to the full cup eventually.

We slept in shelters that had been constructed by the local Kenyans who were employed in many, many functions throughout the camp. We were three or four to a shelter, and we kept our rations there, cooked there. During the dry season from January to March, the winds blew sand from the desert into our shelters. Often we would wake up covered in sand.

As the years lengthened and more refugees were added, my group changed to Group 17. I attended school with my group, so there were 17 primary schools. I went on into high school. A high school was built in 1997—a large open building with a sheet metal roof, not like our primary school classroom with the palm-leaf cover. We were progressing through our forms, learning the materials for high school proficiency. We were doing all this in English, a big difference from our Dinka, Nuer, and Murle languages, and different, too, from the Arabic we would have learned in southern Sudan.

The question continually hanging over our heads was what would we do after we finished school? We were getting into our mid- and late teens now. We knew it was not likely we could go to university in Kenya.

In about 1999, UNHCR started meeting with group leaders. They came up with solutions for our future, at least some of us, that involved relocating us overseas. The group leaders and UNHCR then came to meet in the groups with us. It was there that we began to hear the words “resettlement” and “resettlement in the United States.” UNHCR staff led discussions focusing us on thinking of our future. They outlined the limited opportunities where we were.

“Where are you going after high school?” the officials asked. We knew that we didn't want to live in the town of Kakuma, where there was no water and no food. They said if we resettled, we could work, go to school, get some vocational training, and start our lives. They had a plan for underage boys and girls to go to the United States as foster children. They said older boys, now becoming or already considered adults, could go in groups and live together to learn about life there with people we knew.

The process of selecting boys to go to the United States started with a list from some old books. When we had first come to the camp at Pinyudo in Ethiopia after our long journeys to find safety there, an organization called Radda Barnen (Swedish for Save the Children) took our pictures. This group was doing a lot of things for us in Pinyudo. They took our pictures, then. About the time of the resettlement talks, one of the same people who had done that project came to see us in Kakuma. He knew us and he met us at Pinyudo. The others that died, he didn't have them on this list, and they said that they didn't make it. So when this person came in from the UN and said they wanted to resettle the minors, they went for the old books that the names were in. These were records from this project that started back in 1989 in Pinyudo. Those records are all we have of our past. They recorded our names, took our pictures, recorded our tribes and sub-tribes, and wrote down what we said in response to the question, “Why are you here? What happened in your village?” So this book has much detail of what we said to the Save the Children people when we were new at the camp in Pinyudo. There are thousands of pictures and papers that say what happened to us. So the UN could identify who arrived first at Pinyudo and who was now at Kakuma.

That is the list that the UN took in deciding who to resettle first. My name was in there. So they went to each group and they called the names. When they went to the groups, sometimes the group has changed, but still they knew you were in a certain group at Pinyudo. That's how they determined who would go.

What happened in Ethiopia is that they would see your physical exam results, and they would give you the year you were born. You may be 18 or seven or 17. They would go by your height. So I was determined to be seven years old. The data base of all these documents is available for all Lost Boys to see on a website devoted to our reunion. It is amazing to see these pictures. Even though my picture is not there (many pictures were lost or perhaps did not turn out good, so are not included), I am grateful to have my home village, my family, and my Agar Dinka tribe listed. I can look and see how many boys in that camp had my first name—there are many! And it is there for all to read: the animal attacks, soldier attacks, thirst, disease, and starvation that the Lost Boys endured on the way.