2006 - What is the What (68 page)

Stewart Goodall, can you imagine a letter like that? Everyone I knew had left for a place expected to be paradise many times over, and I remained behind, and now even Tabitha was gone, having slipped away while I slept.

After a week recuperating, I went back to the Wakachiai Project. Because it was a two-person staff, if I did not return quickly, the project would wither. Most of Noriyaki’s possessions were still there—his letters, his sweatsuit, his computer, his picture of Wakana in her white tennis dress. I was not prepared for the reality of being there without him. I put all of his things in a box but still the room spoke his name all day. I knew I would have to leave very soon.

I was charged with finding a replacement for Noriyaki. The Japanese wanted to continue funding the project, and to keep it running, I had to pick a new officer. I interviewed many candidates, most of them Kenyan. It was the first time a Sudanese refugee had interviewed a Kenyan for a job at Kakuma.

I found a Kenyan man named George and he became my assistant. We continued to plan activities for the youth of Kakuma, and soon after my return we received a large shipment of soccer balls, volleyball uniforms, and running shoes from Tokyo. Noriyaki had been trying to find the funding for this shipment for months, and now seeing all of it spread around the office, so many new things—it was so difficult.

The doctor checked on my progress once a week. I was sore in my bones and joints, but the symptoms the doctor had worried about—dizziness, blurred vision, nausea—did not occur. It was only the headaches, of varying severity throughout the day, that affected me, and they were worst at night. I lowered my head to my pillow and as I did, the pain grew. My friends and family checked on me and watched me warily. I had lost ten pounds at Lopiding, so they gave me extra rations and anything they could find to distract me—a handmade chess set, a comic book. When I did fall asleep, I fell deep, and my breathing was hard to detect. More than once I woke up to Gop poking me in the shoulder, making sure I was alive.

After a month, my body had recovered and mentally I had reached a certain numbness that was hard for me to define or for others to detect. Outwardly I performed my duties at work and at home, and my appetite had returned to normal. I alone knew that I had decided on a change. A few days earlier, I decided definitively, though against the advice of virtually everyone, to return to Sudan to rejoin my family. There was no reason to stay at Kakuma, and remaining there was a daily punishment. It was God and the earthly powers that be saying this was the best I deserved, that this life was good enough for the insect known as Valentine Achak Deng. But Tabitha’s letter had ruptured something inside me, and now I did not give a damn about Kakuma, about my duties, about what was expected of me. I decided I would go first to Loki, then buy my way to Marial Bai. I had enough money, I surmised, to bribe my way onto an aid flight. I had heard of this being done before, and with less money than I had already saved.

Gop inadvertently reinforced my way of thinking about leaving the camp. He had been making many remarks at that time about imminent peace in the south of Sudan. He pointed to many positive developments, including the 2000 Libyan⁄Egyptian Joint Initiative on the Sudan. Though it was later invalidated, it provided for the establishment of an interim government, power-sharing, constitutional reform, and new elections. And just a few days earlier, President Bush had designated John Danforth, a former senator, as Presidential Envoy for Peace in the Sudan. He would, they said, certainly see that peace was necessary, and with American might, make sure it was achieved.

—You look better today, my new assistant George said one day. We were on our way to replace the nets on the basketball courts, and George was wearing a whistle tied around his neck. He loved to wear his whistle.

When I told George my plan to leave, he almost punched me. He raised his hand to me and then stopped, his whistle in his mouth.

—Are you crazy? he said.

—I have to.

Now he blew the whistle in my face.

—Sudan’s still a war zone, man! You said yourself that the murahaleen were still active in your region. How are you going to fight them? Are you going to read to them? Write a play for them? No one in the world, not one person in southern Sudan, would leave this place to go there. And I’ll personally see to it that you don’t. I’ll tie you up with these nets. I’ll cut off one of your feet.

I smiled, but George had not changed my mind. People still went back to Sudan. Strong young men like me could do so, and I was older and smarter than I was when I attempted my recycling. Staying at Kakuma was an untenable idea. Everyone would see me as having been rejected—four thousand are taken to America and I was deemed not worthy. It would be too difficult to live with that stigma. George blew his whistle again, this time to get my attention.

—Listen. I bet Wakachiai will hire you full-time if you want it. You’ll make ten thousand shillings a month, be able to eat at the UN restaurants, drive one of their Land Rovers. Pick a nice bride and live pretty well here.

—Right, I said, and smiled.

—Don’t be crazy.

—Okay, I said.

—Don’t be stupid.

—I won’t, I said.

—This is your home, he said.

—Fine.

—Accept it and thrive here.

I nodded and we installed the new nets.

Six-thirty is when the real crush begins at the Century Club. The rooms become crowded, the exercise machines are all occupied, people become tense. The members are determined to work out and it is frustrating to them when they cannot do it on the timetable they have planned. I check in a dozen people within a five-minute span. They are all working people, professional-looking people. They smile at me and some exchange a few words. One middle-aged man, who has told me he teaches high-school history, asks me how my classes are coming. I lie and tell him they’re all fine.

‘Headed to college?’ he asks.

‘Yes sir,’ I say.

The last woman of the rush is Dorsetta Lewis, one of the few African-American women who works out at this club. She is about forty, very appealing, at once confident but with a shy way of carrying her head, a perpetual rightward tilt.

‘Hey there, Valentine,’ she says, and hands me her card.

‘Hello, Dorsetta,’ I say, and swipe it. In her photograph, she seems to be in the middle of a belly laugh. Her mouth is open wide, all of her teeth visible. I have never heard her laugh and have occasionally thought of trying a joke on her.

‘Still hanging in there?’ she asks.

‘I am, thank you,’ I say.

‘All right then,’ she says, ‘that’s what I like to hear.’

She disappears into the locker room.

The truth is that I do not like hanging in there. I was born, I believe, to do more. Or perhaps it’s that I survived to do more. Dorsetta is married, a mother of three, and manages a restaurant; she does more than hang in there. I have a low opinion of this expression, Hang in there.

The club goes quiet again for a spell, and instinctively, I find myself checking my email. There is a note from my brother Samuel.

‘Will you call her yet?’ he asks. ‘Here is a picture.’

Samuel has recently taken a trip from Nairobi to Khartoum, and joined my father there. They planned the trip so my father could buy goods to reconstitute his business in Marial Bai. Phil Mays had sent my father $5,000, and with this money he planned to buy enough goods to open his shop again. While in Khartoum, Samuel heard about a certain young single woman—she was from a prosperous family and was currently studying English and business in Khartoum. Samuel went to see her and thought immediately that she was meant for me. I have no doubt that he first pursued her himself, but nevertheless, he has been pestering me since, insisting that I call her, so she and I can realize we’re meant to be married. I look at the picture he has attached, and she certainly is attractive. Very long hair, an oval face, a V-shaped smile, remarkable teeth. This woman, Samuel assures me, would jump at the chance to move to the United States to be my wife.

Now that I’m online, I decide that I should send an email to those whose addresses I can remember. I would call, but my stolen phone contains all of my phone numbers; I have memorized only a few. I conjure the email addresses of Gerald and Anne, of Mary Williams and Phil, and Deb Newmyer, and Achor Achor; he will forward the message to everyone else. At this point I do not care who knows.

Hello friends,

 

I am writing to inform you that I have recently been assaulted by two dangerous persons in my apartment. The attackers asked me to let them use my phone and when I opened the door, they held me at a gunpoint, kicked me in the cheek, forehead, and back, until I lost consciousness. They took my cell phone, digital camera, checkbooks, and over five hundred dollars in cash. Thank God they didn’t shoot me. For some time, I was guarded by a boy who I believe to be their son, Michael.

As I write to you, I do not have a cell phone and do not have your contact information. Please send me your numbers and I will call you tomorrow. I need to get all my information back.

 

Have a blessed day.

Sincerely,

Valentine Achak

 

P.S. Please remind me of your birthday.

Dorsetta, I pretend that I know who I am now but I simply don’t. I’m not an American and it seems difficult now to call myself Sudanese. I have spent only six or seven years there, and I was so small when I left. I can return to Sudan, though. Perhaps I should. The country has been very vocal about needing the Lost Boys to return to southern Sudan. ‘Who will rebuild this country if not you?’ they ask. It is the most incredible turn of events that we boys, who were shuffled from camp to camp and who lost half our ranks along the way, are now considered the hope of the nation. Though we are working jobs such as this, hovering near $8.50 an hour, we are far wealthier than most of the residents of our country. We live in apartments and houses that would be reserved only for rebel commanders and their families. And as fraught with peril as our journeys were, in the end, we have become the best-educated group of southern Sudanese in history.

My friends who have returned to Sudan, to visit their families and find a bride, uniformly gape at the primitive nature of life there. A life without cars, roads, television, air conditioning, grocery stores. There is very little electricity in my hometown; most of the power, when they have it, is provided by generators or solar devices. Certain amenities like satellite phones are becoming more common in the larger towns, but on the whole the country is many hundreds of years behind the standard of living to which we are now accustomed. One man I know drank the water from the river, as all of the people do, and he was in bed for a week, vomiting a year’s worth of meals. We have been weakened by our time in America, perhaps.

Dorsetta, what was I doing getting on another vehicle, again heading to Kitale, so soon after my accident? My bones still ached everywhere and I had no desire to get on that road again, but there had been a trip planned for many months, and I could not disappoint the boys. Thirty of them, two squads of nine-year-olds, were traveling to Kitale to play against the local boys’ teams. Usually such games were exhibitions only; our kids were roundly defeated by any of the Kenyan squads. But the score never mattered, only leaving the camp mattered, so there I was, just weeks after the accident, on September 5, getting on the bus again.

I stood by the vehicle, a closed-top UN bus this time, with George, and we watched the boys run from all sides of the camp. They were good boys, smiling boys—about a third of them had actually been born here, in this camp. To be born here! I never would have thought it possible. The others had come from many regions of Sudan, many brought here as infants, starving and barely alive. I occasionally wondered if one of them could be the Quiet Baby, now grown. Perhaps the Quiet Baby was a boy. It was possible, of course it was. In any case, I loved all of the boys equally.

As they boarded, each of them giddy and touching every inch of the bus, I checked their names against the team roster.

Two were missing.

—Luke Bol Dut? I called out.

The boys laughed. On a day like this, they laughed at anything.

—Luke Bol Dut?

I looked out the window. The day was bright, light as linen. Two boys were running toward the bus. It was Luke and Gorial Aduk, the other missing boy. They were in their uniforms and were racing toward us as if reaching the bus would save them from certain death.

—Dominic!

It was Luke. He leaped onto the bus, almost hysterical. He couldn’t get his next words out.—Dominic! he said again.

Another fifteen seconds as he caught his breath.

—What is it, Luke?

—Your name is on the board!

I laughed and shook my head. It was not possible.

—Yes it is! And not just on the board! Your name’s on the list for cultural orientation. You got it! You’re going!

Cultural orientation was the final step. But before that step were so many others: first a letter, then another interview, then the name on the board. Then another notice for cultural orientation. All of this usually took months. But this wild boy was telling me that the board was telling me all this at once.

—No, I said.

—Yes! Yes! yelled Gorial. He was trying to pat my back.

—Wait, I whispered.

I asked the bus driver to wait, and I told the boys to stay with the bus. I turned to George. I stammered for a second, asking him to wait a moment while I…

He blew his whistle.—Go!

I ran toward the board. Could this be true? Noriyaki had been right! They really wanted me! Of course they did! Why wouldn’t they want me? They would not have waited so long if they didn’t want me.

I ran.

Halfway there, I caught myself. What was I doing? I stopped. I looked like a fool, running to the board because some nine-year-olds told me my name was listed. False reporting had become a joke; it happened all the time, and was never funny. I slowed down and considered turning around.