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.”
