Free Seed of South Sudan by Majok Marier

were told the night before that tomorrow we were going to find material for our houses and beds. We were excited because we didn’t know how bad it was in the forest. In the morning we woke up early, at 4 a.m., and we went together before the others, proud to know that we were going to the forest first. We were about one thousand children that morning walking to find the materials—large sticks and grasses mostly. We stayed with everyone until 7 a.m., and then at 8 o’clock, we left the group, because we knew each other and we thought we could gather our materials together. By 10 o’clock we had all our grasses and sticks of wood. And then we tried to return back to the group, but we had lost our way back home.
    We were lost for the whole day. We were trying to go back home early, but we just went deeper inside the dark forest. The big problem was that, because of tall grass, we could not see anything, no familiar natural markers, to help us find our way home. We climbed up on a tree to see if we could tell which way to go, but we couldn’t. We were very thirsty because there was no water to drink for the whole day, not to mention no food.
    From the trees around us came the frightened screeches of monkeys—calling to alarm other monkeys. This is the sound they make when there are wild animals around. I was very used to paying attention to animals’ alarm sounds back in my home village. We had gone a long way from home—not one of the trees in that place had any cuts on them from humans taking limbs from trees. When we heard the cries of the monkeys, we made the decision immediately to go back and follow the way that we came from. After about a three-hour walk, we ended up getting back to camp that night at 9 p.m. We’d been gone on our own since 8 a.m. Teachers and group leaders were preparing to search for us in the morning, but we arrived safely, and everybody was happy to see us.
    I keep remembering that day. I don’t think I’ll forget that hard day in my whole life. I still remember my three friends I went looking for grass and limbs with. Mangar Ayii was a Cic Dinka (the Cic live to the southeast near Bor, in South Sudan). I think he may have returned to his home. Yel Garang was a Malual Dinka; he is in Seattle, Washington. And Yai, another Malual Dinka boy, is in Texas. (The Malual Dinka are in the Bahr el Ghazal region of South Sudan, but much farther west than my home.)
    We were sure that other children were not so lucky, that they did not return from that trip, because there was no adult making sure each group traveled and returned safely. That was another incident where we feel the camp organizers should have been more careful in preventing children from becoming lost and dying in the forest. I know there were some losses, as I had a cousin who was on that trip, and his friend who went with him was never found.
    We made our houses out of sticks and mud, with a grass roof. The grasses also were used for our beds. All of us worked to build our own shelter. Once we did this, we also went out to gather grasses to build our classroom.
    Just as the group leaders had come from the older Sudanese there in Pinyudo Refugee Camp, so did the idea for starting schools so that we could receive our education. We began classes under a tree in the camp, led by those older Sudanese who had received schooling themselves, and this soon led to constructing a classroom building.
    This classroom was one large open building made of tree poles for support and a very big single roof made of grasses laid on pole framing and lashed down to secure it.
    When we started having school, we used charcoal from our fires instead of chalk, and cardboard cut from the large boxes our cooking oil came in became a blackboard. The classes were really big. A teacher would teach 100 children in that large classroom building, and then we would go outside in circles and in small groups, we would each take turns