Middle of Everywhere - Mary Bray Pipher [103]
PART THREE
The ALCHEMY of HEALING-TURNING PAIN into MEANING
Chapter 9
AFRICAN STORIES
THE KAKUMA REFUGEES
"Education is our mother and father."
On Christmas Day 2000, Lincoln received its first refugees from the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya. The family was part of a group called the Lost Boys of Kakuma, although I didn't like that name. First, who would want to be labeled a lost boy? It seemed condescending and it made the refugees seem hopeless. Second, in this case, there was a girl, Martha, the sister of Joseph, Abraham, and Paul.
By now the story of the Kakuma refugees is well known. They were children whose parents were killed in the Sudanese civil war, which began in 1983 when the government of the north attacked the southern tribal peoples. Eventually the south formed its own army, the Sudanese People's Liberation Army; both sides used a scorched-earth policy. Caught between armies, 2 million ordinary people lost their lives. Generally, girls were kidnapped by the soldiers, while boys fled into the wild.
The orphaned children banded together and walked first to a camp in Ethiopia, where they stayed for many months. But when new rulers came to power in Ethiopia, they wanted to get rid of the refugees. They bombed the camp and ordered soldiers to herd the refugees out of their country. The fleeing orphans had to cross the Gilo River. Many children drowned or were eaten by crocodiles crossing that river. The refugees walked to various places in Sudan, but in 1992 they ended up in Kenya in the Kakuma Refugee Camp. Of the roughly seventeen thousand kids who began the march, ten thousand made it to Kakuma. The others were killed by soldiers, starved to death, or were eaten by predators.
Kakuma was a large sprawling place with primitive huts and muddy roads. The temperature hovered around one hundred degrees. There was only dirty water that looked like tea and one meal a day, a porridge of lentils and grain. Disputes over food and territory broke out after dark. Of Kakuma, Abraham would later tell me, "I never knew if I would wake up in the morning."
Yet the camp officials deserve some credit. They took in thousands of children no one else wanted and organized schools for them. Many of the boys learned to read and write in English. Kakuma refugees were taught to say, "Education is my mother and father." Still, it was a place with too few resources and too many orphans. In explaining their situation, Joseph said, "We were worth even less than weeds."
The family, who came to our town, had lost their parents when Joseph, the oldest, was twelve and Paul, the youngest, was five. Their father had been killed when their village was first raided. They lost their mother as they all ran from the attack at the Ethiopian camp. She stopped for a moment, there were explosions, and they never saw her again. The children managed to stay together for ten years, crossing back and forth across three countries, eating weeds to stay alive, running from people who wanted to kill them, and finally living in the refugee camp in Kenya.
Our First Visit
The Kakuma family had arrived in Lincoln by plane, what the tribal Dinka and Nuer called "sky boats." The airplane meals had been strange to them. They hadn't seen vegetables or forks in the camps. At our small airport, they were greeted by a large contingent of Sudanese and they experienced their first escalator, cell phone, vending machine, and revolving door. Outside it was snowing and the wind chill was twenty-five degrees below zero. As soon as they arrived, the family began to shiver and really never warmed up until spring.
On a cold sleety day, my husband and I went to meet the family in their two-bedroom apartment near our downtown. Their apartment was furnished with donated furniture, but it was neat and clean. There was a television set in the corner, already turned on. The temperature in the apartment hovered around ninety degrees, but even so, the family