A Long Walk to Water: Based on a True Story

by Linda Sue Park

The ritual scar patterns on her forehead were familiar: They were Dinka patterns, which meant that she was from the same tribe as Salva. Salva let out his breath in relief. He was glad that she was not Nuer. The Nuer and the Dinka had a long history of trouble. No one, it seemed, was sure where Nuer land ended and Dinka land began, so each tribe tried to lay claim to the areas richest in water. Over the years, there had been many battles, large and small, between Dinka and Nuer; many people on both sides had been killed. This was not the same as the war that was going on now, between the rebels and the government. The Dinka and the Nuer had been fighting each other for hundreds of years.

Nya’s mother took the plastic container from her and emptied the water into three large jars. She handed Nya a bowl of boiled sorghum meal and poured a little milk over it. Nya sat outside in the shade of the house and ate.

There was a big lake three days’ walk from Nya’s village. Every year when the rains stopped and the pond near the village dried up, Nya’s family moved from their home to a camp near the big lake. Nya’s family did not live by the lake all year round because of the fighting. Her tribe, the Nuer, often fought with the rival Dinka tribe over the land surrounding the lake. Men and boys were hurt and even killed when the two groups clashed. So Nya and the rest of her village lived at the lake only during the five months of the dry season, when both tribes were so busy struggling for survival that the fighting occurred far less often.

“We are walking into the morning sun.”

Don’t you know that if we keep walking east, we’ll go all the way around the world and come right back here to Sudan?

The lions in the Atuot region were said to be the fiercest in the world.

Nya could see the questions in her mother’s face every morning: Would they be lucky again? Or was it now their turn to lose someone?

If he were older and stronger, would he have given water to those men? Or would he, like most of the group, have kept his water for himself?

Salva felt a tiny spark of hope.

“We are going to Itang, to the refugee camp.”

You had to have water to find water.

The rain was still pouring down—and now bullets were pouring down as well.

The rain, the mad current, the bullets, the crocodiles, the welter of arms and legs, the screams, the blood. . . .

One step at a time . . . one day at a time. Just today—just this day to get through . . .

And one day at a time, the group made its way to Kenya. More than twelve hundred boys arrived safely. It took them a year and a half.

Salva was now twenty-two years old. For the past five years he had been living in refugee camps in northern Kenya: first at the Kakuma camp, then at Ifo.

Kakuma had been a dreadful place, isolated in the middle of a dry, windy desert. Tall fences of barbed wire enclosed the camp; you weren’t allowed to leave unless you were leaving for good.

Salva felt fortunate that at least he was in good health.

“They only want healthy people. If you are sick, you won’t be chosen.” “They won’t take you if you have ever been a soldier with the rebels.” “Only orphans are being chosen. If you have any family left, you have to stay here.”

Perhaps America doesn’t want anyone too old, he thought.

He might be wrong. It might be another person named Salva. I won’t look too soon. . . . From far away I might see a name that looks like mine, and I need to be sure. Salva shouldered his way through the crowd until he was standing in front of the list. He raised his head slowly and began reading through the names. There it was. Salva Dut—Rochester, New York. Salva was going to New York. He was going to America!

Now that Salva was learning more than a few simple words, he found the English language quite confusing. Like the letters “o-u-g-h.” Rough . . . though . . . fought . . . through . . . bough—the same letters were pronounced so many different ways! Or how a word had to be changed depending on the sentence. You said “chickens” when you meant the living birds that walked and squawked and laid eggs, but it was “chicken”—with no “s”—when it was on your plate ready to be eaten: “We’re having chicken for dinner.” That was correct, even if you had cooked a hundred chickens.

At last, all the forms were filled out, and all the paperwork was in order. Salva flew in a jet to New York City, another one to Amsterdam, and a third to Kampala in Uganda. In Kampala, it took him two days to get through customs and immigration before he could board a smaller plane to go to Juba, in southern Sudan. Then he rode in a jeep on dusty dirt roads into the bush.

How familiar everything was and yet how different!

No one was ever to be refused water.

The United Nations and the International Red Cross supported my life when I was in danger of starvation. The Moore family, St. Paul Episcopal Church, and the community of Rochester, New York, welcomed me to the United States. I am also grateful for the education I have received, especially at Monroe Community College.

Quitting leads to much less happiness in life than perseverance and hope.

In 2002, nearly twenty years after the war began, the United States government passed the Sudan Peace Act, officially accusing the Sudanese government of genocide in the deaths of more than two million people. Three years later, a peace accord was signed between the north and south. The south was granted autonomy—the ability to govern itself—for six years. In 2011, a referendum took place in which the citizens of southern Sudan voted to secede, gaining their independence from the north. Unrest over South Sudan’s oil and its political leadership have roiled its infancy of the world’s newest nation.

As of Spring 2014, Salva Dut’s nonprofit organization Water for South Sudan has drilled more than 250 wells in southern Sudan for Dinka and Nuer communities, supplying fresh water for hundreds of thousands of people.

www.waterforsouthsudan.org