2006 - What is the What (44 page)

The roar was like the earth ripping open. The women ululated again and the men yelled. I threw my hands to my ears to block out the sound but Moses slapped my hands away.

—But there is much work to do, Garang continued. We have a long road ahead of us. You boys—and here Garang indicated the sixteen thousand of us boys sitting before him—you will fight tomorrow’s battle. You will fight it on the battlefield and you will fight it in the classrooms. Things will change at Pinyudo from here on after. We must get serious now. This is not just a camp for waiting. We cannot wait. You young boys are the seeds. You are the seeds of the new Sudan.

That was the first time we were called Seeds, and from that point forward, this is how we were known. After the speech, everything at Pinyudo changed. Hundreds of boys immediately departed to begin military training at Bonga, the SPLA camp not far away. Teachers left to train, most of the men between fourteen and thirty had gone to Bonga, and the schools were reorganized around the missing students and teachers. Moses, too, thought it was time.

—I want to train.

—You’re too young, I said.

I was too young, I believed, and thus Moses was too young, too.

—I asked one of the soldiers and he said I was big enough.

—But you’ll leave me here?

—You can come. You should come, Achak. Why are we here, anyway?

I didn’t want to train. There were so many aggressive young boys at Pinyudo, but I have never had this aggression in my blood. When boys wanted to wrestle, to fist-fight to pass the time or prove their worth—and at Pinyudo, once we had all gotten our strength up, boys would want to spar for no reason at all—I couldn’t find the inspiration within me. If the wrestling wasn’t done among friends and out of affection, I couldn’t bring myself to care about such contests. I wanted to be in school, wanted only to see the Royal Girls and eat lunches cooked by their mother and find things hidden under their clothes.

—Who will fight the war if not men like us? Moses said.

He thought we were men; he had lost his mind. We were no more than eighty pounds, our arms like bamboo shoots. But nothing I said could dissuade Moses, and that week he went off down the road. He joined the SPLA, and that was the last I saw of him for some time.

The summer was awash in work and upheaval. Shortly after the departure of John Garang, another charismatic young SPLA commander came to Pinyudo, and he came to stay. His name was Mayen Ngor, and he was on a mission. Like Garang, he was an expert in agricultural techniques, and made it his task to irrigate the land that abutted the river. We watched him one day, tall and swan-like in a white shirt and pants, trailed by four smaller, duller ducklings—his assistants, in tan uniforms, who busily demarcated vast swaths of uncultivated land. The next day he returned, with Ethiopians and tractors in tow, and with incredible speed they turned over the soil and created dozens of neat rectangles extending from the water. Mayen Ngor was a man of great efficiency, and he liked very much to talk about about his knack for efficiency.

—Do you see how quickly this is happening? he asked us. He had assembled about three hundred of us by the river to explain his plans and our role in them.

—All of this land you see before you is potential food, all of it. If we can work this land wisely, all the food we’ll ever need can be provided by this land, by this river and the care we invest in it.

We thought this was a fine idea, but of course we knew that the most difficult aspects of working the land would be left to the unaccompanied minors, and indeed they were. For weeks, Mayen Ngor instructed us in the use of hoes, spades, wheelbarrows, axes, and sickles, and we went about doing the manual labor after the large Ethiopian machinery was long gone. While we worked and eventually planted seeds for tomatoes, beans, corn, onions, groundnuts, and sorghum, Mayen Ngor, his eyes alight with visions of the bounty of the land, walked among us, proselytizing.

—What is your name, jaysh al-ahmar? he asked me one day. The Eleven, who worked close to me, all took notice of the great man’s presence among us. I told Mayen Ngor my name. He chose not to use it.

—Jaysh al-ahmar, do you have a sense of what this land will look like when you’re finished? Do you see that all this earth is potential food?

I told him that I did, and that the thought excited me greatly.

—Good, good, he said, standing and looking out at the rows of hundreds of boys beyond, all bent over their hoes and spades. The sight of these emaciated boys working under the summer sun gave him much pleasure.

—All of it! he exclaimed.—All of it, potential food!

And then he strode on, down the row.

When he was out of earshot, the laughter broke out all around me, with the Eleven unable to contain themselves. That was the day Mayen Ngor became known as Mr. Potential Food. For months afterward, we would point to anything—a rock, a shovel, a truck—and say ‘Potential food!’ Achor Achor did the best imitation, and took his performance the farthest. He would point at random objects and, while gazing out at the horizon, proclaim: ‘You see that tree, jaysh al-ahmar? Potential food. That tire? Potential food. That lump of manure, that pile of old shoes? Potential food!’

When the fall came, the transformation of the camp grew more complete—it was now a militarized place, with rigid rules, more constant and varied chores for us all, and far more intimations that we were there for one primary purpose: to be fed and fattened such that we might fight once we were large enough to do so, or the SPLA was desperate enough to use us—whichever came first. Many teachers had returned from their training at Bonga, and the marching began. Each morning, we were brought to the parade grounds and we were lined up in rows, and made to do calisthenics, counting with the elders. Then, using our farm implements to simulate AK-47
s
, we marched up and down the parade grounds, all the while singing patriotic songs. When the marching was done, we were given the announcements for the day, and were informed of any new rules and regulations. There seemed to be no shortage of new guidelines and prohibitions.

—I know that most of you boys are learning English now, said a new teacher one day. He was fresh from Bonga, and he came to be known as called Commander Secret,—and a few of you are becoming proficient. I need to warn you, though, that this does not mean you can use your English to speak to any of the aid workers here. You are not permitted to talk to any non-Sudanese, whether they’re black or white. Is that understood?

We made clear that this was understood.

—If for any reason you do find yourself asked a question by an aid worker, observe these guidelines: first, you should act as shy as possible. It is better for this camp and for you personally if you do not talk to an aid worker, even if they ask you a question. Is that understood?

We told Commander Secret that it was understood.

—One last thing: if you’re ever asked anything about the SPLA, you are to say you know nothing about it. You do not know what the SPLA is, you have never seen a member of the SPLA, you don’t know the first thing about what those letters stand for. You are merely orphans here for safety and schooling. Is that clear?

This was less comprehensible to us, but the dichotomy of the UN and the SPLA would become clearer as the months went on. As the UN presence grew, with new facilities and more equipment arriving each month, the SPLA influence on the camp grew, too. And the two factions evenly divided up the day. Before nightfall, the camp was dedicated to education and nutrition, with us attending classes and eating healthfully and in all ways seeming to the UN observers a mass of unaccompanied minors. But at night, the camp belonged to the SPLA. It was then that the SPLA took their share of the food delivered to us and the other refugees, and it was then that operations were undertaken and justice meted out. Any boy who had shirked or misbehaved would be caned, and for many of these boys, skeletal as they were, canings could prove debilitating, even fatal. The canings, of course, were done at night, out of sight of any international observers.

The boys at the camp were split in their opinions about our rebel leaders. Among us were plenty, perhaps even a majority, of boys who could barely wait to leave for Bonga to train, to be given a gun, to learn to kill, to avenge their villages, to kill Arabs. But there were plenty like me, who felt apart from the war, who wanted only to learn to read and write, who waited for the madness to end. And the SPLA did not make it easy to fight with them, for their army. For months I had been hearing rumors of hardship at Bonga, about how difficult the training was, how harsh and unforgiving. Boys were dying over there, I knew, though the explanations were shifting and impossible to confirm. Exhaustion, beatings. Boys tried to escape and were shot. Boys lost their rifles and were shot. I now know that some of the news from Bonga was false, but between what was hidden and what was exaggerated there is some truth. Those who had gone to fight the Arabs had to fight their elders first. Still, every week, boys willingly left the relative safety and comfort of Pinyudo of their own accord to train at Bonga. We lost four of the Eleven that way, between the summer and winter, and all of them were eventually killed. Machar Dieny fought and was killed in southern Sudan in 1990. Mou Mayuol joined the SPLA and was killed in Juba in 1992. Aboi Bith joined the SPLA and was killed in Kapoeta in 1995. He was probably fourteen years old. Boys make very poor soldiers. This is the problem.

Our days were now entirely reconstituted. Where before there had been studying and soccer and simple chores like water-fetching, now there was manual labor—in addition to the farm work—and jobs we were much too young to be expected to do.

Each morning, when we were lined up on the parade grounds, the elders would indicate one group:—You will help Commander Kon’s wife build a pen for her goats. Another group:—You will find firewood in the forest. Another:—You will help this elder build a new house for his cousins. When school was over and lunch had been eaten, we would know where to go.

I spent two weeks building a house for a friend of my biology teacher. We were hired out for any task, no matter how great or small. We planted seeds in gardens, we built outhouses. We did the wash for any elder who demanded it. Many SPLA members had brought their families to Pinyudo to live while they trained nearby at Bonga. So we did their wash in the river, and brought water to the officer’s wives, and performed whatever task they could concoct. There was no payment for our work, and we could not ask for or expect even a glass of water from the beneficiary of our labor. I asked once for a drink, after me and the Eleven—ten of them, actually; Isaac was playing sick—had completed the home for the family of a newly arrived officer. We came to the door of the hut, a door we had just installed, and the officer’s wife stepped through it, looking angrily at us.

—Water? Is this a joke? Get out of here, mosquitoes. Drink from a puddle!

Often the work lasted until dark. Other times, we were released in the late afternoon, and could play. Soccer was played everywhere at Pinyudo, in games that often had no discernible boundaries or even goals. One boy would take the ball—there were always new soccer balls available, gifts of John Garang, it was said—and dribble off with it, and would soon be trailed by a hundred boys, who wanted only to touch it. Even then, though, in the late afternoon, an elder might have an inspiration.

—Hey you! he could call out to the mass of barefoot boys chasing the ball across the dust—You three, get over here. I have a job for you.

And we would go.

No one wanted to enter the forest, for in the forest, boys disappeared. The first two who died were well-known for having been devoured by lions, and thus hunting in the forest for building materials became the job everyone chose to avoid. When our number was called for forest duty, some boys went mad. They hid in trees. They ran away. Many ran to Bonga, to train as soldiers, anything to avoid having to enter the forest of disappearing boys. The situation became worse as the months wore on. The forest’s bounty was depleted daily, so boys searching for grass or poles or firewood had to venture further every day, closer to the unknown. More boys failed to come back, but the work continued, the construction spread wider and wider.

The winds came one day and blew down the roofs of dozens of the elders’ homes. Six of us were assigned the task of reconstructing the roofs, and Isaac and I were busy with this assignment when Commander Secret found us.

—Into the forest with you two. We have no kindling. I tried to be as formal and polite as I could when I said:

—No sir, I cannot be eaten by a lion here.

Commander Secret stood, outraged.—Then you’ll be beaten!

I had never heard such delicious words. I would take any beating over the risk of being devoured. Commander Secret took me to the barracks and beat me on the legs and backside with a cane, with force but without great malice. I suppressed a smile when it was over; I felt victorious and ran off, unable to hold off a song I sung to myself and to the night air.

Soon after that, no boys would enter the forest, and the beatings multiplied. And when the beatings multiplied, so did the methods to reduce the impact of each. An extensive system of clothes-borrowing was instituted for those anticipating a caning. Usually the recipient would have a few hours’ notice at least, and could borrow as many pairs of underwear and shorts he could convincingly wear. The canings usually took place at night; we thanked God for that, because our additional padding was that much less detectable.

After a few weeks, the teachers, out of sloth or an interest in instilling a sort of military discipline in us, ordered us to cane each other as punishment for whatever offense arose. Though initially a few boys actually followed through with the beatings—they paid in the end for their enthusiasm—overall a system was devised whereby the caner struck the ground, not the victim’s backside, and caner and canee still made the expected sounds of effort and pain.