Free Seed of South Sudan by Majok Marier Page A

writing “1” or “8” or our letters or whatever was the lesson. Later, they tried to give us sheets from exercise books, but there were not enough materials for each to have a booklet. They gave us an exercise sheet and we cut this in two. All pencils were broken in half to give to students. Sometimes in the group they would learn the material. But it was really slow.
    I was going to school. At Pinyudo, I learned my numbers and letters and some basic math. This was the school information I wanted to learn. Back in our villages, only a few (one boy out of a family) would be spared the hard work of cattle grazing and farming. If the war had not come to my village, I would have eventually gone to school in Arabic, as the schools were supported by the Sudanese government, which is predominantly Arab and Muslim. What a different fate and schooling I had, there with 15,000 Sudanese children from all across southern Sudan, learning my letters in English by writing in the dirt with a stick. But I was glad to learn English and to have this be the start of my education, which was completed in those refugee camp schools.
    This is what I was to do in my family, become educated. But my family was not with me. It was painful to think of being away from my family.
    Laat, who was with me on my journey from southern Sudan, was in Group 3. I knew my uncle was in Pinyudo somewhere. There were other boys I was meeting, but I was missing my mother and my grandmother and my brothers and sister. Were they safe? Where were they? I didn’t know these things. And in my group there were a thousand other boys who were wondering the same things about their families.

    The dance became more important to me at this time. I was very popular as a partner for the pretty girls, and it felt good to be selected to dance. We performed dances called Ayelyom and Kelle. I was even selected to dance for the UNHCR officials when they visited Pinyudo Refugee Camp. It was a way to welcome the officials; it was fun and enjoyable for me. The dancing made me focus without thinking about my parents at that time. I thank my parents for their help to let me know how to dance our traditional dances. I did it for fun and to keep myself out of trouble thinking about my mother and my home. When I came back home from activities, I felt tired and I fell asleep immediately. I did not have time to think about home, or about those colleagues who had died or who had been lost on the hunt for shelter and bed materials.

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Seed of Sudan

    For the first six months of our stay at Pinyudo Refugee Camp, we were plagued by a lack of food. It was one thing not to have food on our long journey when our enemies were also thirst, exposure, wild animals, and soldiers. It was quite different to be in a large camp, sheltered by homes we’d built ourselves of mud, sticks, and grass, row upon row of dwellings organized in subgroups of a thousand, 12 to 15,000 children in all, children suffering and dying for lack of food.
    We arrived probably in late 1987, and that was a time of no food probably for a month until the first truck was finally able to get through. Children perishing from starvation and loss of hope, as well as illness, was a daily event. I will never forget this time. It was probably in May of 1988, six months later, that food started coming more regularly, but we still were limited to one meal a day. We ate no breakfast or lunch, but only dinner, and that was also very little, usually beans or corn, very little meat. The uncertainty of distributions made people hopeless. We in our group tried to encourage each other not to lose hope, just as we had on our journey.
    Eventually, malaria began to attack some refugees. That was added to the problem of diarrhea, a continuing tragedy where people became dehydrated and died. Dysentery was a problem. There was also a disease caused by some meats. Dinka call it agui or magui . If you eat meat with this