A Long Walk to Water: Based on a True Story

by Linda Sue Park

The nurse, a white woman, was talking to Nya’s mother. “Her sickness came from the water,” the nurse explained. “She should drink only good clean water. If the water is dirty, you should boil it for a count of two hundred before she drinks it.” Nya’s mother nodded that she understood, but Nya could see the worry in her eyes. The water from the holes in the lakebed could be collected only in tiny amounts. If her mother tried to boil such a small amount, the pot would be dry long before they could count to two hundred. It was a good thing, then, that they would soon be returning to the village. The water that Nya fetched from the pond in the plastic jug could be boiled before they drank it. But what about next year at camp? And the year after that? And even at home, whenever Nya made the long hot walk to the pond, she had to drink as soon as she got there. She would never be able to stop Akeer from doing the same.

I need only to get through the rest of this day, he told himself. This day and no other. If someone had told Salva that he would live in the camp for six years, he would never have believed it. Six years later: July 1991

Salva made up his mind. He would walk south, to Kenya. He did not know what he would find once he got there, but it seemed to be his best choice. Crowds of other boys followed him. Nobody talked about it, but by the end of the first day Salva had become the leader of a group of about fifteen hundred boys. Some were as young as five years old. Those smallest boys reminded Salva of his brother Kuol. But then he had an astounding thought. Kuol isn’t that age anymore—he is a teenager now! Salva found that he could only think of his brothers and sisters as they were when he had last seen them, not as they would be now. They were traveling through a part of Sudan still plagued by war. The fighting and bombing were worst during the day, so Salva decided that the group should hide when the sun shone and do their walking at night. But in the darkness, it was hard to be sure they were headed in the right direction. Sometimes the boys traveled for days only to realize that they had gone in a huge circle. This happened so many times that Salva lost count. They met other groups of boys, all walking south. Every group had stories of terrible peril: boys who had been hurt or killed by bullets or bombs, attacked by wild animals, or left behind because they were too weak or sick to keep up. When Salva heard the stories, he thought of Marial. He felt his determination growing, as it had in the days after Uncle’s death. I will get us safely to Kenya, he thought. No matter how hard it is. He ...

I wonder how I would have been able to learn about this when I learned about the children’s crusades... this is current, not something from the Middle Ages.

But there was no work. There was nothing to do but wait—wait for the next meal, for news of the world outside the camp. The days were long and empty. They stretched into weeks, then months, then years. It was hard to keep hope alive when there was so little to feed it.