Seed of South Sudan (9 page)

I keep remembering that day. I don't think I'll forget that hard day in my whole life. I still remember my three friends I went looking for grass and limbs with. Mangar Ayii was a Cic Dinka (the Cic live to the southeast near Bor, in South Sudan). I think he may have returned to his home. Yel Garang was a Malual Dinka; he is in Seattle, Washington. And Yai, another Malual Dinka boy, is in Texas. (The Malual Dinka are in the Bahr el Ghazal region of South Sudan, but much farther west than my home.)

We were sure that other children were not so lucky, that they did not return from that trip, because there was no adult making sure each group traveled and returned safely. That was another incident where we feel the camp organizers should have been more careful in preventing children from becoming lost and dying in the forest. I know there were some losses, as I had a cousin who was on that trip, and his friend who went with him was never found.

We made our houses out of sticks and mud, with a grass roof. The grasses also were used for our beds. All of us worked to build our own shelter. Once we did this, we also went out to gather grasses to build our classroom.

Just as the group leaders had come from the older Sudanese there in Pinyudo Refugee Camp, so did the idea for starting schools so that we could receive our education. We began classes under a tree in the camp, led by those older Sudanese who had received schooling themselves, and this soon led to constructing a classroom building.

This classroom was one large open building made of tree poles for support and a very big single roof made of grasses laid on pole framing and lashed down to secure it.

When we started having school, we used charcoal from our fires instead of chalk, and cardboard cut from the large boxes our cooking oil came in became a blackboard. The classes were really big. A teacher would teach 100 children in that large classroom building, and then we would go outside in circles and in small groups, we would each take turns writing “1” or “8” or our letters or whatever was the lesson. Later, they tried to give us sheets from exercise books, but there were not enough materials for each to have a booklet. They gave us an exercise sheet and we cut this in two. All pencils were broken in half to give to students. Sometimes in the group they would learn the material. But it was really slow.

I was going to school. At Pinyudo, I learned my numbers and letters and some basic math. This was the school information I wanted to learn. Back in our villages, only a few (one boy out of a family) would be spared the hard work of cattle grazing and farming. If the war had not come to my village, I would have eventually gone to school in Arabic, as the schools were supported by the Sudanese government, which is predominantly Arab and Muslim. What a different fate and schooling I had, there with 15,000 Sudanese children from all across southern Sudan, learning my letters in English by writing in the dirt with a stick. But I was glad to learn English and to have this be the start of my education, which was completed in those refugee camp schools.

This is what I was to do in my family, become educated. But my family was not with me. It was painful to think of being away from my family.

Laat, who was with me on my journey from southern Sudan, was in Group 3. I knew my uncle was in Pinyudo somewhere. There were other boys I was meeting, but I was missing my mother and my grandmother and my brothers and sister. Were they safe? Where were they? I didn't know these things. And in my group there were a thousand other boys who were wondering the same things about their families.

The dance became more important to me at this time. I was very popular as a partner for the pretty girls, and it felt good to be selected to dance. We performed dances called Ayelyom and Kelle. I was even selected to dance for the UNHCR officials when they visited Pinyudo Refugee Camp. It was a way to welcome the officials; it was fun and enjoyable for me. The dancing made me focus without thinking about my parents at that time. I thank my parents for their help to let me know how to dance our traditional dances. I did it for fun and to keep myself out of trouble thinking about my mother and my home. When I came back home from activities, I felt tired and I fell asleep immediately. I did not have time to think about home, or about those colleagues who had died or who had been lost on the hunt for shelter and bed materials.

For the first six months of our stay at Pinyudo Refugee Camp, we were plagued by a lack of food. It was one thing not to have food on our long journey when our enemies were also thirst, exposure, wild animals, and soldiers. It was quite different to be in a large camp, sheltered by homes we'd built ourselves of mud, sticks, and grass, row upon row of dwellings organized in subgroups of a thousand, 12 to 15,000 children in all, children suffering and dying for lack of food.

We arrived probably in late 1987, and that was a time of no food probably for a month until the first truck was finally able to get through. Children perishing from starvation and loss of hope, as well as illness, was a daily event. I will never forget this time. It was probably in May of 1988, six months later, that food started coming more regularly, but we still were limited to one meal a day. We ate no breakfast or lunch, but only dinner, and that was also very little, usually beans or corn, very little meat. The uncertainty of distributions made people hopeless. We in our group tried to encourage each other not to lose hope, just as we had on our journey.

Eventually, malaria began to attack some refugees. That was added to the problem of diarrhea, a continuing tragedy where people became dehydrated and died. Dysentery was a problem. There was also a disease caused by some meats. Dinka call it
agui
or
magui
. If you eat meat with this disease, it can kill you. If you eat it, you become very constipated and your eyes turn yellow and your urine is very yellow. Our people would use the local medicines, the local beer or
mou heer
, to cure it, but we did not have this. In 1988 or 1989, there was a Catholic Church that was opened in the refugee camp, and that church was served by sisters (nuns) from Italy, and they had a medicine that could treat this disease. So they treated people with
agui
, and that is when it was discovered there was a Catholic priest in the camp who was one of the refugees.

The Italian Catholics contacted their headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and they sent this priest's name to Addis and found out he had been ordained in 1982. They told the priest—his name was Father Madol—that they would get him a car so he could open a church for the people in the area around Pinyudo, and then he could help the people in the camp. As you'll see when my story continues, the priest was a great friend to the people in the camp, and having the Mass became very important to us as a way of praying for the many problems people had in the camps and for our families left behind in southern Sudan.

Before Father Madol was discovered, people would just pray under the tree. They would gather at a specific time and pray. Then Father started saying Mass under the tree, and that was good. After that, also, we began receiving medicine and clothing from Ethiopians in Addis Ababa. Finally, we had been discovered and our needs were becoming known, and someone else was helping us.

We had another distraction once some of the elders in the refugees helped organize soccer and volleyball games. Someone provided balls so we could play, and playgrounds were set up in each of the 12 groups. These games were new to many of us, especially to me, but I discovered I really liked volleyball, and I was good at it. Being tall for my age helped!

Once food did start to arrive, a system was set up where each group (there were about 1,000 boys in each group) would take responsibility for distributing and storing the food. We have 12 groups, and the 12 groups each have a playground where they can play soccer, volleyball or basketball. The UN brings the food from the store; they put it on the truck, and they bring it to the group. They put it in the playground, and then the group leader comes and tells the village leaders to get their food. And each group stores the food in one place. This is the ration for one month, and our leader portions it out. Then after a month, they have to get a new ration. So it was really easy. Anyone could see the food. The boys would see the food and know that it is there. Every group and subgroup of that larger group has its own food. There is a day, and everyone knows when it is, when food will be distributed to people.

This process reduced the fear of not having food. It was a simple but important way of assuring the boys that we were not without food. It would have to be used wisely so that the ration would last until the end of the month. But we knew if we did that, we would have enough food.

Gradually we began getting the things we needed to survive there in the Pinyudo Refugee Camp. Especially it was a great achievement for our teachers to organize thousands of minors and control them in peace. Their efforts kept the young boys and girls united from the time they arrived, and their influence continues even until now. We Lost Boys counsel each other, advise one another, comfort one another, even today—we are all brothers who came together during this civil war that tore Sudan apart. Through the school, sports, and cultural activities we grew closer and support each other as we live in homes together, or visit one another in cities where Lost Boys have gone, or visit in our home country.

One way those teachers helped us was through discipline. They taught us how to live in the world. When we were in Pinyudo, we were not allowed to go to the market. The market was a place where Ethiopians gathered to sell and buy goods; these were people who had moved close to the camp to fill some of the jobs that became available as a result of this huge center being built to care for tens of thousands of refugees. The Ethiopians living there not far from the refugee camp would display their goods on cloths on the ground, and many sales would be transacted among the people.

We were not allowed to go there without permission from the teacher. During school hours, there were not supposed to be any students in the market. We could get permission after school was over or if it was a weekend. But there was a teacher who was assigned to patrol the market and make sure we didn't go there without permission.

The name of this teacher was Mathou. All minors knew Mathou for what he did to us, and it was good discipline for success. There were things he would not like minors doing: smoking, drinking beer, stealing, or taking money from the sellers. It was important for him for us to avoid these things. I believe I did not know anything about how to live my life before I lived in Ethiopia. Most of the minors were at first hurt he did not allow us to go to the market. All of us now realize that he wanted to make sure we were successful in our lives. He used to tell us we were the future of Sudan. The image he was looking at for us minors was education to support our country in the future; that was why he kept people focused on school and studying.

Our teachers were treating us like the seed of Sudan's future. They did not feel good if any one of us did not obey the rules of education. They really trained us well beyond their ability. It was wonderful for these teachers to make changes in us that so that we can be leaders, fulfilling their dreams and ideas. I hope we are not going to let them down because they showed us the ways to struggle. Many minors of Sudan who went on to other places in the world should think about these people and how they influenced us. I believe some of our teachers are still in Kakuma refugee camp and they are teaching other children right now.

Since 2011, South Sudan has been independent from Sudan, and Lost Boys, whether in South Sudan or in other parts of the world, are doing an important job for their parents, relatives, families, friends and other Sudanese. They are heroes to children around the world who faced the hardship of the life during this civil war in Sudan. We are still struggling, because even after the peace agreement that ended the war, and after independence, there is much to do to make our new country strong. With our experiences of walking to find safety, adapting to new homes in several refugee camps, learning in school, learning the discipline of the right life from teachers such as Mathou, and later building new lives after leaving the camps, we are better prepared to contribute to this new future for South Sudan.

Sudan, and now South Sudan, face many challenges in the future. For many, many years, there has been a divide between the Sudanese government and southern Sudan. The problems can be expected to continue for many years to come. We Lost Boys were separated from our families at very young ages—many of us six, seven and eight years old—and many are still separated. We became orphans at early ages, and endured extreme hardship, all because of the war within our country. It is estimated that 2 million people died and many thousands were removed from one part of the country to the other and out of the country as a result of the war. We Lost Boys have seen the results of violence in our homeland. We are determined to create a peaceful, progressive future for our country.

Even though conditions at Pinyudo did improve, my impatience and curiosity grew; I wondered about whether there would be more food or resources back at Itang. I got permission to go back there to investigate for myself. I had learned on my long journey to keep going, to keep looking for resources, and I could not stop trying to get better conditions. I ended up staying for only a couple of weeks, for conditions there were not much different from Pinyudo.

In all our days at Pinyudo and Itang, there was a ray of hope, although we did not know the specifics of it. All we knew at the time there at the refugee camp is that someone important had died in a plane crash and he was on his way to see us. Later when we were in the United States we learned who he was. He was a U.S. congressman who'd heard of our plight, that civil war in southern Sudan had killed many, many people, and that thousands had had to flee to Ethiopia. His name was Mickey Leland; he was from Texas. He'd been to Ethiopia and Sudan looking into our camps, and he was trying to find a way for the United States to help.