Читать книгу Courageous Journey - Barbara Youree - Страница 15

EIGHT

HUNGER’S LESSONS

The thirteen remaining boys still had each other to depend on. They missed Akon’s gentle ways but they were glad for her. The officials began moving the families the next morning, separating them from the orphan boys. All the girls, they discovered, were being placed with families.

“Akon is really lucky to find her aunt,” Madau said. “Most of the orphan girls will just be put with strangers.”

“Let’s go see if we can find her and greet her aunt,” suggested Ayuel. “I want to see her one more time. She really looked happy.” Maybe Gutthier and I should have gone with our uncle when we had the chance. He offered to take Malual, too. Maybe I made a bad decision. Staying didn’t keep him and Chuei from dying.

He and Gutthier searched for their cousin Akon every day, but never found her. The officials would not allow them to mingle with the families who had already been identified.

It took five or six days to relocate the families on the other side of the camp. Some boys tried to sneak in with them, but the officials checked every name and orphaned males were turned back. Ayuel again felt abandoned by adults, even though he knew none of them. He thought of the time the women and girls had turned back to their burned villages rather than walk to Ethiopia.

The next few weeks passed slowly. Food remained sparse. The boys watched the points of tents rise up in the far corner of the field. A rope stretched across, dividing the two societies—orphaned boys from families with mothers, sisters and brothers, and sometimes fathers. Soon a high pole fence replaced the rope. We must be less important, less valuable, they concluded. The thirteen took comfort in remaining together. They too, were a family.

The Ethiopian officials vanished just as the SPLA soldiers had disappeared when the boys arrived. Men in uniform wearing light blue caps appeared. Instead of the one microphone, these men talked over two huge microphones shaped like bells that sat on top of their trucks. The person speaking hid in the truck cab so no one could see him. But his voice came out loud and clear.

“Good morning, boys,” the hidden voice said. “We are here from the United Nations. Now that we have the families and girls settled, we are going to make life better for you, too. As you know, there are several different clans and tribes here. We must all get along. Already we’ve seen fights break out—Dinkas against Nuers, Equatorians against Dinkas, boys from one town fighting against another town. The remedy for this, the U.N. has decided, is to form new “families” of about thirty to fifty boys each that we are calling villages, mixing up the clans, separating relatives and forcing all to live together in harmony. This, we believe, will prevent gangs from forming. Then several villages will be put together to form twelve larger groups.”

“This is the end of our little family,” Madau said. “I don’t like their idea one bit.”

“I don’t either,” Ayuel said as he sat surrounded by his friends and listened to the voice coming from the bells. I’ll be alone again with a bunch of strangers. “But what can we do? At least we have a little food here, and they have promised us schools.”

“You can still visit your friends,” the voice said in a softer tone. “But you are in this camp to keep from being hurt anymore by the war in your country. We don’t want small wars to break out here.” After the low grumbling of the assembly faded, the voice continued. “From now on the supplies will be distributed to the new groups, which we will be forming immediately.

“Please, get in one of the lines in front of these officials to find out which group and which village you are in. Let’s do this in an orderly fashion. Move out of the way when…” The voice droned on, but Ayuel had stopped listening. “At least we can still see each other,” he whispered to Madau.

Since Madau was his cousin and Gutthier his half-brother, Ayuel knew they would not be put together. He tried to be brave and accept the new rule, but it left him feeling lonely. That night, lying between two strangers, he dreamed of coming home with the cows. His mama welcomed him with a smile and said how proud she was of him. He played soccer with his brother Aleer and with Malual and Tor, their voices full of laughter and their bodies brimming with good health.

“So what’s your new group and village like?” Ayuel asked as he walked along the edge of camp at dusk with Gutthier and Madau. They were in Group Ten. It felt good to be with his old friends rather than the strangers he’d been assigned to live with.

“I don’t talk to the people in in my village. They’re mostly Nuers and a few Equatorians. The Dinkas are all older,” said Madau who, by nature, was prone to keep quiet.

“Wish we could’ve all stayed together,” Ayuel said. “There’re about fifty in Village One, or my ‘family’ as they call it. It’s not at all like our family of seventeen.” He slapped at mosquitoes attacking his arms.

“And we’re about the only ones left that get together,” Madau said. “I did see Donayok the other day. He’s the head leader of Group One in charge of over 1,000 boys. He supervises all his village leaders and has his own tukul and boys who work for him.”

“They couldn’t have found a better or fairer leader,” Ayuel said. “We should go see him sometime. Leaders get extra food.”

“Yeah, and he would share. I never see anyone else. Wonder how Akon is doing with her aunt and cousins.”

“Better than us.”

“Like I said, I don’t talk in my village, but I listen to what people say,” continued Madau, picking up on his earlier comment. “The Dinkas were saying—and they’re the only ones I understand—that when the United Nations people first got here, they counted about 33,000 of us. Then 12,000 died of cholera or starved to death.”

“Or from eating too much, too fast,” added Ayuel. “Or from diarrhea.” He thought of Malual Kuer.

“They took away the families and girls. Now there are about 16,000 of us boys in the twelve groups,” continued Madau.

“I still think maybe we should’ve gone to one of the other camps, Markas or Itang,” Madau said. “Maybe we could stay together there.”

“We could just keep going—right now, tonight.”

“I’ve heard Itang is north of here. I don’t want to go to the Markas training camp and be a soldier,” Ayuel said, considering the possibility.

“Well, there’s the North Star.” Gutthier pointed to the first faint star to show in the evening sky. The boys kept walking in that direction without making a decision. “What else do the Dinkas say?”

“That we are going to start building tukuls to sleep in—like back in Duk.”

“Are we really going to go to Itang?”

More stars began to brighten and hang low as darkness fell.

“We don’t have food with us, and we could run into hostile gangs or….”

The howl of a hyena in the distance cut off their conversation. The three friends turned and ran back to their separate new families.

As Ayuel got to know the others in his compound, he spent less and less time with his old friends. He soon realized the boys from the Nuer tribes were not as terrible as he’d been led to believe. The members in his new family felt as lonely as he did.

In a couple of weeks, the United Nations assigned a man to each designated group to teach the boys how to build huts in the style of the ones they’d known in Sudan. Like the other boys, Ayuel dug holes and stuck sapling poles deep in the ground, then plastered the sides with wet clay mixed with straw. The older boys framed the roof with poles that came to a high ridge in the middle. Ayuel helped bundle the thick thatch to place on top. The boys worked through the morning and evening hours building their compound—a sleeping tukul for every fifteen boys with three rows of beds, another building for the kitchen, and one to store supplies after delivery. Ayuel enjoyed the work, and it made him feel proud of his new compound. In the hottest part of the day, the boys rested.

One morning, as the buildings neared completion, a U.N. official called the assembly together to hear an announcement over the loud speakers. Thousands of boys crowded together in small clumps, sitting in the open area of trampled dry grass. The official introduced the new schoolmaster Maker Thiang and praised him as “an educated man from Sudan who speaks English as well as Dinka, Arabic and Swahili.” Maker Thiang stood in the back of a truck, holding a regular microphone.

“Good morning, young men of Sudan,” he said. “Today is a very important day in your lives. Today you all will become students in the schools we are forming. You will learn numbers, geography, science and the history of Africa.” He paused. “Not all today, of course.”

The crowd roared with laughter over the joke, then applauded the new schools. They could like this schoolmaster.

“And you will learn to speak, read and write English.” More applause.

“We now have, however, only a few teachers so your classes will be very large. Some of you, I’ve learned, have had one year or more of schooling, so I am asking you to help one day a week with the beginners. If you are at least eleven years old and have been to school, please see me before going to your classes. Everyone will start in First Class because you will be learning English, a new language for all of you.”

Ayuel turned to Madau and whispered, “Welcome, welcome.”

“American congressman,” his cousin added with a giggle.

“Until we have more teachers, you may choose which school to join. They will all be the same. Just try to go to the smallest class you can find.” The schoolmaster then pointed out the locations of the teachers.

With joy in his heart Ayuel, along with Gutthier, Madau and new friends from both of their villages, chose an area in the shade of a baobab tree. As Ayuel was leaving the assembly, he noticed Donayok among the older boys reporting to Maker Thiang. He waved and his former leader waved back. Donayok was a good leader. I always thought he was intelligent, but I never knew he went to school.

The boys reported, along with about 800 other students, to a young man whom they found perched on a lower limb of the baobab, waiting. At first, the boys pushed and jostled for a spot in the shade, but when the teacher spoke, they sat down quietly and reverently, packed close together. The teacher had no microphone, but he spoke in Dinka with a very loud voice: “I am Joseph from the region of Juba. I studied in Bor, but when I was twelve years old, a missionary took me to London, England, for a year where I learned to speak English.”

“Where’s London, English?” whispered Ayuel.

“No idea.” Gutthier shook his head and grinned.

“It’s where BBC comes from on the radio,” said an older boy behind his hand.

“Our first lesson is about English letters,” said the teacher. “Repeat after me: A, B, C.”

In the beginning, all the lessons consisted of repeating after the teacher. Ayuel found it hard to learn in such a large class. Sometimes he would miss important parts of Joseph’s explanations. When he came back to his compound, the boys all talked about the lesson, but there were always disagreements over what the teacher had said. The Nuers and Dinkas argued. Some began to lose interest in learning.

According to the new U.N. rules, jobs rotated within the village families. Back in their homes, these boys hadn’t been expected to do women’s work, so they were learning these skills for the first time. Some pounded grain into flour, using a hollowed-out log and a club to crush the grain. Others kept the compound clean and ready for inspection by the caretakers.

The four boys assigned each day to do the cooking couldn’t attend class, because their extra duties took the entire day. They had to walk a mile to the river, carry back two buckets of water each, gather firewood and boil the grain or beans. After building the fire, they would take turns stirring the contents of the big black three-legged pots almost continuously so the food wouldn’t burn.

Sometimes, if wheat had been issued and pounded into flour, they made a sort of flat bread that could be cooked on a metal slab over the fire. The caretakers, who were both men and women from the family camp, came around to check to see if the food was correctly prepared. When the others returned from school, the cooks rang a bell and dipped the food into wide shallow bowls. The forty-seven boys in Village One were divided into sub-villages that ate in shifts beginning at five o’clock in the evening. Those who were sick or malnourished could eat earlier. Everyone in a shift had to be present and accounted for before someone said a Christian prayer and they all could begin eating. Each boy carried his own wooden spoon in his pocket, but everyone shared a common bowl.

Ayuel didn’t mind being on cooking duty, but when those who’d been in class tried to explain the new lessons, he became more confused than ever. He never seemed to know what the right way was to do something or who had the correct information. As he sat alone one evening, Gabriel, one of his cousins and age-mates from Duk, came out and sat down next to him in the shade of their sleeping quarters. Neither had listed the other as a known relative in the camp, for indeed they hadn’t known at the time they’d been asked. Discovering each other in the same village brought happiness to both.

“Can you say all the ABCs?” Gabriel asked.

“Sure,” Ayuel said with pride. This was one thing that came easily for him and didn’t require much understanding. He reeled off all the letters, only pausing once at “Q”. “Now, you say them.”

“I always get stuck on K,” Gabriel said sheepishly. “I know it ends with W, X, Y, Z, but I don’t know what’s between.”

“I can teach you,” Ayuel said. “We’ll have helpers tomorrow, and if we can say it all, they will teach us how to write the letters in the dust.”

Every day, the boys listened to their teacher, Joseph, as he read from a book. Sometimes he held up large cards with words for the students to say aloud in unison. Then they copied the words in the dust, writing with a stick or a finger. At first, Ayuel thought of going to school and writing in the dirt as a game. It took his mind off the sorrow he carried always in his heart.

But when Joseph started beating children about the head and shoulders with a long stick if they couldn’t make the letters right, he became discouraged. When Deng came home from Bor, I loved hearing about what he’d learned in the boarding school. Except on days when the helpers came, this school made little sense. Why should I learn this hard language that nobody talks?

Twice he and his friends chose to go to a different school, but that made learning even more confusing as the teachers all taught different words. So they returned to Joseph. The teachers never checked to see who went where. They all carried disciplining sticks. None had been trained as teachers. They were mostly Sudanese refugees themselves who had a few years of schooling.

For weeks, he said “Good morning, Teacher” along with the others with no idea of its meaning, only that the words were English. He asked around but no one else seemed to know either. One day as the class broke up, the boys sang out the usual, “Goodbye, Teacher. We are going home.” A boy beside Ayuel turned and waved at the teacher and sang out the same words in Dinka.

“Is that what it means?” Ayuel asked.

“Yeah. And in the morning this is what we say.” He yelled the words in Dinka toward the teacher. “That will make him mad.” They both ran, fearing Joseph would come after them with the long stick.

“How do you know all this?” Ayuel asked when they slowed down.