Seed of South Sudan (12 page)

There are conflicts within these countries between minority and majority populations; in Sudan, the presence of many different tribes presents opportunity for conflict, although most disputes are localized and involve scarcity of resources. Unlike European and Western countries, there is not a lot of infrastructure, no water systems, electricity, good roads and schools, and no strong government structure seeing to the needs of the population. In fact, tribal areas move, sometimes with the season, sometimes with internal wars. Borders are often a compromise after a conflict, and disputes can recur, changing these demarcations.

The one thing we knew in our travels and what we still know today: We tread carefully wherever we go, because conflict with strange groups is frequent in our area, due to these many tribal groups as well as conflicts introduced historically by the non-native ethnic groups coming into our midst. It's like walking on eggshells: We try not to break anything, but sometimes it is inevitable. On our long journey from Sudan to Ethiopia, back to Sudan, and then to Kenya, we learned we had to know when to leave a place we had just entered.

On our journey, each village we came to, we realized what we faced up ahead: maybe help, maybe trouble. Often people would offer us some food, but because they had family and villagers to provide for, we could not stay long. They might put some meal in a gourd for us, and we had to take nibbles of this as we continued our walking.

Why would villagers not welcome us? They would suspect that we were not just there for relief, but instead wanted to move in and settle there, and that scared them. They had land enough for their needs, but if others came after us and our families followed, there would not be enough.

I believe our journey offers a lesson in how our problems in Sudan, in Africa, and other parts of the world will be solved in the long run: One village at a time, one settlement at a time, we will learn how to get along with each other. First, it will take approaching carefully, respectfully, and knowing what the other person's needs are, and the boundaries we need to observe. Within that, not trying to impose our culture on theirs, we need to find the areas where we can agree we need to help each other, just as we did in making shoes and pots and pans for the people in Poktub in our first journey east through southern Sudan.

We relied on each other, and we still rely on each other, in making decisions about our future moves, whether in Clarkston, Georgia, Nashville, California, or Syracuse, New York. This practice of consulting each other comes from our Dinka culture. We are used to our elders negotiating important decisions for the family and for the village. We relied on our parents and grandparents to set guidelines for us. We retain the reliance on elders—I'll write soon about Lutheran Ministries of Georgia, Mama Gini Eagen, and the many, many people who assisted with our transition in Clarkston. Respect for elders is a characteristic of our culture.

Just as my uncle persuaded me that first day on the run from our flaming village to wear my gourd to carry precious water, we try to use discussion and logic to help each other when confronted with a problem. Our parents taught us many skills to help us on our journey, especially how to help ourselves when no one else could give us aid. It's a lesson we keep applying today.

So here we were in Kenya; all was not perfect, but we adapted. If the local Turkana people did not like us, and we could not go outside the camp, we would do something else. What we did was sports.

Our sports training and competitions had started in Pinyudo. There was an adult refugee, Madong Mading Ater, who was from Rumbek near my home village, and he was very skilled in all sports. He taught us soccer, volleyball, and basketball, and organized many teams within the camps, and in the zones. He was in charge of the sports in the camp at Pinyudo and also at Kakuma, so he set up a lot of competitions. At Kakuma, he also arranged handball, and I don't know what other sports he did. For soccer, volleyball and basketball, we even had the zone teams select the members of Central teams that would play teams outside the camp, competing against Itang or Kakuma area teams. In addition, there were athletics, running competitions that were organized for the camp residents.

There were other teachers who knew how to play soccer and volleyball and basketball, because when things were good in Sudan, they learned all of these. Those people were assigned to train us in team sports. These teams were real active.

I became a very good volleyball player. I am tall, and this offers an advantage in spiking the ball or passing back and forth across the net. I was on the Central Team for Kakuma Refugee Camp, the Sudanese Central Volleyball Team; in fact, I was the team captain. In addition, I played basketball. All these sports were new to me, as was soccer, for when I was growing up in the bush, we played with homemade balls made with the sap of local plants, and we had games we played, but we did not have organized athletics.

Majok (standing at left) at Rumbek reunion with coach and mentor from refugee camps, Madong Mading, with his wives.

I was also a coach of volleyball for Zone 2 of the Kakuma Refugee Camp; I trained many boys and girls in volleyball from 1996 to 2001. All this was volunteer work. We won a lot of trophies. Among others, we played against church soccer, basketball, and volleyball teams. We won a lot of cups from them. We played in a church league, and our Catholic church we attended in Kakuma camp was called Holy Cross. When a tournament was being arranged, people at the opponents' churches would ask, “Is Holy Cross going to come?” They knew we were tough competition. So we got volleyball cups all the time.

All these athletic competitions helped because when people came back from school, they had to go to practice, so it made it easier for everyone. When they were working like that, they couldn't be thinking about their problems.

In school, we had full exercise books; we didn't have to cut the pages of a book to share. The UN distributed the exercise book, and pencil or pen. If your pen ran out of ink, you had to buy your own. If we needed a pen, we would trade a half-ration for money to buy a pen. That meant we were really hungry for the next week.

The food was still being brought to the group. They left it there, and you used your ration card to get your cup of grain. It would have to last for seven days. They give you beans, salt and oil. Later, they had to cut the oil. But we were in charge of our own ration, at least at that time.

I've been asked if people attempted to take food from each other. That didn't happen. If you steal food, that puts a mark on you. If you were Dinka, you did not do that. You would be seen as weak if you did that. So those things are tied to the culture. You would just say “I'm not going to die; I'll get my ration tomorrow.” When this happened, you just made up your mind you were not starving. You just went inside yourself. You said this was just something that happened to you.

During this period, 1992 to 1995, the stress of having such a large camp (it eventually grew to 80,000) was affecting the local tribe, the Turkana. In each area so many refugees present in an area restricted where people could graze cattle, and that is what they live on. Pasturing their cattle, moving them from one very dry area to another to find enough grass, was their main occupation. Having routes and resources restricted made them angry. The Turkana had many, many guns and they began shooting into the camp, and in this period, nine refugees were killed by gunshots fired during the day. And in 1997, an Episcopal priest was killed in the camp at night by a local tribesman's bullet.

Father was killed about a half mile from where I lived in Kakuma. It was a terrible thing to go in the morning and see his body lying in the camp where he fell. It was destructive for the whole camp to face the fact that someone hated us so much that they would kill the priest, our Father. There were many times when the harshness of the refugee life affected me very deeply, and this was one of those times. All I could figure out is that I could not do anything about these problems; God had plans for me. The civil war in Sudan started during my generation, so it was God's plan to live that way, to move from country to country all my young life, but it was not an easy thing to do as a human being, for me or for my colleagues. I believe God created the children of Sudan to do something to change our country, which is now South Sudan. I love my country so much, and I hope we Lost Boys are going to do something significant to change life for our people in South Sudan. I am not going to forget my hard life in the refugee camp with my fellow refugees.

The last thing that I wanted to do was give up. I had seen colleagues die by the wayside on the journey to Ethiopia and watched children perish at Pinyudo from lack of hope. I'd known people to disappear, and knew many lost their lives at the Gilo River. My instinct all along the way was to keep walking. Now I could not walk out of Kakuma, but I needed to use every resource to focus on how to survive the pain of these deaths.

Fortunately, still another distraction emerged in the form of community dances in Kakuma Refugee Camp. When I was at Pinyudo, we performed children's dances. Now that I was older, I could learn and take part in the traditional male dances of the Agar Dinka. In the Rumbek area, where Agar Dinka are predominant, we are famous for our jumping in our dances. If you go online to You Tube and search for “Rumbek Dancing and Jumping,” you will find examples of the kind of dances we do. Traditionally, the men are in the middle, the women on the sides, but the women have their own dances as well, and they are very good.

At Kakuma, we would meet in community; Rumbek area, or Agar Dinka people, would meet and dance, older people and younger, from different groups in the camp. Since I was not in my home village, I did not undergo initiation. That is the painful traditional scarring of the forehead, six incisions made across the forehead, by which an Agar Dinka shows he is able to withstand pain without complaint and thus signals he is entering manhood. In the camp we did not do these rituals. Because we were not in our home villages, we did not extract the lower teeth in the mouth at this time.

Instead, my entry into manhood was enduring all the hardships we encountered in our long search for our safe home. Because I was now of age, in our camp I could participate in the dances that symbolized entrance into manhood, including the dancing and jumping that are unique to our tribe. I became quite good at it, as I could jump really high.

In the evenings sometimes there would be dance competitions among dancers in the communities. On Refugees' Day, June 20, all the different tribes would do their dances—Dinka, Nuer, Murle. We would also do this on American Labor Day in September. Our dance style is very exuberant and joyful, and the refugees loved to see it. We have a lot of fun with our dance. So this was another way that I felt better and forgot about the difficulties of my life. After all, I was alive, and I did survive the civil war up to that point. I had many friends, and I was learning about my Dinka life and how it compared with other tribes and other people. I was very proud to be Agar Dinka from Rumbek area.

In 1993, the UN built the classrooms and school resumed for us. I went to third grade in the Juba Primary School. Eventually, in 1996, I would complete Grade 8 and sit for the Kenya Certificate for this in 1996. As time went on, I completed Form 1 (equivalent to the U.S. Grade 9), Form 2 (Grade 10), Form 3 (Grade 11), and Form 4 (Grade 12). All of this was in Kakuma Refugee Camp.

In 1994, a big problem at Kakuma arose from the food supplies. We got rations of grain—like a cup of grain to last us a week, perhaps with oil and salt. No longer were beans distributed. It was barely enough to survive on, and we had to be careful to stretch what was there in order to have food two times a day. Any change to this was a major issue.

Instead of serving regular wheat in our ration, a grain was substituted which was not edible. It was called
miath
, and another name for it was finger millet. In my village, it was recognized that it was so poor a grain, that it was used for fermenting into a beer instead of being cooked for food. The grains were very, very small. The effect of providing this in the diet is that it stopped up the digestive tracts of those who ate it, and could even lead to death.

A doctor who was one of the refugees went to the groups to see how they were cooking it. He was seeing people in the clinic they had there, and children were not being able to go to the bathroom for two to three days. He said they would die if they kept this up. He complained to the camp managers, but the servings went on for months and months. Meanwhile children were seriously affected by the food. This was not a case of staying out of school on purpose. The children in the camp wanted to learn; this was their way to have a better life. The situation went on for eight months, and everyone was suffering. Many people went to the UN compound to get the ration changed, but nothing happened.

The refugees finally started a protest. We blocked the road and would not let any UN vehicles in except those carrying the water people. Every morning from 7 to 9 a.m. they ran the pumps to fill the tanks (remember there are no rivers in this area, no sources of water); they also opened the pumps from 3 to 5 p.m. and the refugees and the UN compound had no other source for water in this desert area.