and bodies of villagers whom the adults were trying to hide from the eyes of children. And I could see by the early morning light that the man who had saved me was not my father. He was Abraham, a neighbor. My family was missing, and I felt certain they had been killed or taken prisoner.
Abraham said we would have to flee if we wanted to stay alive. The soldiers from the north would probably kill us if they found us. Our best chance for survival lay in finding somewhere the soldiers could not hurt us. I did not know how tough our journey would be, but I knew we did not have much in our favor. We had no food or water. I wore what I had worn to bed, which is to say I was naked. As we fled we might encounter more soldiers, not to mention deserts and jungles and the dangers that lurk there.
Abraham and I ran toward the east and the rising sun. We kept to the paths that serve as roads in Southern Sudan. Every time we heard approaching feet we ducked into the brush. When the noise passed by, we emerged and started running again. For a while we traveled with three other refugees from the invading army, a Dinka woman and her two daughters. We had nothing to eat for a long time until Abraham found a pumpkin and an amochro, a short plant with a fleshy, juicy root shaped like an onion. The girls complained of being tired from walking so much, and I was very tired too. My bare feet bled, and my stomach growled after the food ran out. But we kept going toward the east.
One day, as Abraham was leading us single-file along the path, he disappeared around a curve. When we caught up to him, we saw he had stopped near a group of soldiers carrying assault rifles. Abraham was wearing a nice shirt, and the men ordered him to give it up. When Abraham hesitated, the men pummeled him with sticks and the butts of their rifles until he took off the shirt and offered it to the officer in charge. The soldiers beat the woman too. I wanted to cry out, but I thought it best to stay silent. Then one of the soldiers grabbed a clump of my hair and twisted. Tears came to my eyes, but I willed myself not to cry out. The man tore a clump of my hair out by the roots and threw it in my face. That seemed to satisfy him, and he stopped picking on me. We lay in pain by the path and said nothing. Eventually the soldiers got tired of torturing us and moved on.
We saw other people from time to time. One group of soldiers beat Abraham until he almost died, and also punched me and hit me with sticks. They took the woman and her two daughters with them when they left. We never saw them again. It took a long time to recover from this vicious beating, but Abraham and I grew strong enough to walk again. I remember those days as a blur. We did nothing but walk like zombies, stumbling along and searching for food. All the while we headed east. I wanted to quit, but Abraham insisted we could not stop.
“We will keep going until we are killed,” Abraham said.
I learned then that we had a destination: Ethiopia. It was a separate country east of Sudan. We would have to walk about five hundred miles to reach its border. Frankly, I did not believe we would make it. Every morning when I awoke hungry and sore, I thought it might be the day I would die. Facing the threat of starvation, thirst, and murderous soldiers, I looked upon our long walk as a sort of grim game. The object was to see how far we could get before we died. I prayed I would live long enough to learn what had happened to my family.
As we walked, Abraham told me stories. He taught me how to find a kind of grass called apai and how to chew its sweet stems for food. He taught me to beware of water holes because they attract animals and people. And he taught me the best ways to hide. This last lesson came in handy when a group of soldiers nearly found us along a riverbank. We had stopped at a big river covered with apai. Abraham and I had picked our apai and submerged our bodies comfortably in the water as we chewed.
Only a minute or two after we settled in, I heard voices speaking in Arabic, along with gunshots and laughter. I was very scared, but I kept still and hid amid the apai. I grabbed some roots on the bottom of the river and pulled myself slowly down until only my lips and nose were above water. Abraham did exactly the same thing. We breathed as quietly as we could and watched the men through the muddy water that covered our eyes.
A squad of Arabs stood on the bank a few yards from where I hid. They fired their guns in the air in their joy at having found water, and they shouted “Allah akbar!” which means “God is great!” Some sat and smoked tobacco. Some prayed. One man urinated in the water not far from me. Some even jumped in the water and splashed about. The waves they made rocked me as I tried to stay hidden.
After an hour or so, an officer blew a whistle and everyone jumped to attention. Then they marched past us and went on their way. Thus ended the longest hour of my life. When I felt sure they were gone, I emerged from the water. Abraham came out too. We ran into the forest, where we felt temporarily safe. When we had calmed down, we started walking again.
In the following weeks, we met other refugees. It became clear that lots of people were fleeing the war by walking to Ethiopia. Many died from gunshots, thirst, and hunger, but Abraham and I continued on. We met fifteen boys and two adults along the way, and we all decided to walk together.
By the end of October, the land was getting to be very dry. We had nothing to drink. Some of the boys said they wanted to die. Some tried to cry, but no tears came. We were so thirsty that we ate mud to force some moisture into our mouths, but it did not really help. I was so afraid I would die that I gladly drank urine to stay alive. I sang to try to keep my spirits up, but it did not help much. “Don’t let your heart get upset,” I sang to myself. “You are in the hand of God.”
The group that joined us began to dwindle away. Some died of thirst and hunger, and the two adults were shot when we ran into an ambush. Finally, only Abraham and I and two of the other boys remained. We kept walking with nothing to eat or drink. But at the moment of my greatest despair, we found hope. Abraham disappeared ahead of us. When he returned, he brought water in his cupped hands. I drank and knew I would survive. Right around the corner was the huge Kangen Swamp. We caught and cooked some turtles and ate their flesh and their eggs. I drank muddy swamp water. It tasted great.
Not long after that we came to the border of Ethiopia. Members of a friendly tribe on the Sudanese side gave us a blanket, some elephant meat, and some advice. They told us to cross into Ethiopia and head for a refugee camp called Pinyudu. So that is where we went.
Martha
I was a little girl, not even six years old, when the happy days with my family in Juba disappeared forever. It all started when my mother and my little sister and I left our home and went to stay with my grandmother and my aunt’s family. They lived in a farming and cattle-raising village in the countryside. But it wasn’t really my home, and I got scared when my mother left us there and went back to Juba. When she returned to us, she brought a lot of our belongings with her—things like clothes and cooking pots and utensils.
When you are little and in the arms of your family, you don’t really understand, or even care, what’s going on in the rest of the world. Now I know, though, that my parents moved us away from Juba because war had broken out in Southern Sudan, and everyone expected that Juba would become the scene of fierce fighting between government-backed troops and the SPLA.
By Dinka custom, families move to places where the father has relatives. That meant we couldn’t stay with my mother’s mother and sister for very long. So we moved again, this time to a village called Wernyol, where my father had been born. A little later he joined us there.
We stayed in my uncle’s house there for a few months because we had no house of our own anymore. Then my father’s relatives held a feast and killed a cow to roast and invited a lot of people to come and enjoy the meat and help us build a new house. As the delicious smell of meat cooking drifted through the air, everybody worked together, and soon we had a small house with mud walls and a thatched roof and a garden for vegetables nearby. My family was all together again and we had our own home, so it seemed that all was well.
We discovered that life in the country was different from life in the city. We had to keep all our food safe from rats and mice and cats, so the women wove grass baskets for storage. Or they would cut the top off a big gourd they had grown and use that, sticking an ear of corn in the opening to seal it. There are some gourds that grow perfectly round, and we would cut these in half and use them as