Running for My Life Read online

  I awoke to the sound of the cows talking among themselves. They sounded angry. How can cows talk? I wondered as I opened my eyes. Only then did I remember how far away I was from my mat and my fireplace and my cows and my family.

  The door opened on the far side of the hut. “Eat,” a soldier called out. He shoved a large plastic bucket into the hut and slammed the door. All the boys rushed over to the bucket and dug in. Everyone was pushing and shoving so much that I didn’t know if I would be able to get close enough to it to find out what was inside. My three teenage friends, my three angels, found me. “Follow us, Lopepe,” one said. He pushed his way through the crowd. I held onto him and followed behind.

  The bucket contained cooked sorghum. It is a common food in Africa. The plant looks like corn in the field, but the grain looks a lot like millet. Most people cook it into a porridge, or at least they soak the grains to soften them before they cook them. The rebel soldiers did neither. Normally cooked sorghum looks a little like oatmeal. This stuff looked like dirty mush.

  When the soldiers slopped the sorghum into the bucket, they didn’t even drain off the excess water. It looked disgusting, but I was too hungry to care. I plunged both hands into the bucket and grabbed all my hands could hold. I sat down not far from the bucket and shoveled the grains into my mouth as fast as I could. Something hard crunched between my teeth. I spit it out, then went right back to shoveling food in. “Slow down, Lopepe,” my friend said. “This stuff is half sand. Eat it like this.” He sifted through the sorghum and ate grains individually. Other boys around the room weren’t as careful. A short time after we finished eating, I noticed several holding their stomachs and groaning. The food had made them sick.

  A boy went over and knocked on the door. The guard opened it slightly. “I need to go to the restroom,” the boy said. He was a little older than me, but not much.

  “Oh you do, do you?” the guard said.

  “Yes sir, very badly,” the boy said.

  The guard reached in and yanked the boy out by the arm. I heard the sound of a cane crashing down on the boy. I’d heard the sound before, but never on a boy. Farmers used canes to keep their cattle in line. The boy cried out, but the cane kept slapping down on him until he had received ten whacks. A short time later the sound echoed through the hut a second time. The door flew open, and the boy tumbled back inside. Blood ran down from a split lip, and his eye had nearly swollen shut.

  “What did they do to you?” someone called out.

  “They beat me as soon as they dragged me outside,” he said. “They said I was trying to escape and they wanted to show me what they did to anyone who tried to escape. Then they led me out into the woods at gunpoint. I did my business and never acted like I was going to run away. That didn’t matter. They led me back at gunpoint and beat me again before throwing me back in here.”

  Everyone must not have heard his story because other boys went to the guard to go to the restroom. They all came back bleeding and bruised. It didn’t take long for us to figure out that we shouldn’t ask to go out to the restroom. Instead, everyone just went inside the hut wherever they could. Before long the smell was overwhelming, but what could we do? None of us wanted to be beaten up by soldiers every time we had to go to the restroom.

  Days went by. The first day became routine. Soldiers never came inside the hut. Each morning they shoved food through the door for us. The food never changed: cooked sorghum mixed with sand. Desperate boys devoured both. We placed the empty bucket beside the door when we were finished, and someone reached in and took it away. The rest of the day we sat and did nothing until night fell. Then we slept in the cold, huddled up against one another, waiting for the sun to come up and warm us.

  By the third or fourth day I noticed something new: not everyone got up when it was time to eat our one meal. At first I thought these boys were sleeping in, which surprised me because it was so hard to sleep in these conditions. Looking closer I noticed these sleepy boys did not stir at all. They were dead. I’d never seen a dead boy before. I wanted to cry, but I did not dare. Instead I sat and stared at the dead boys, horrified, wondering if that would be me soon.

  Soldiers entered the room a short time later, one of the rare occasions when they actually came inside the prison hut. They carried the dead boys outside and slammed the door. That’s the last I saw of those dead boys, but they were not the last to die. Every morning boys did not wake up. More than once I went off in search of a friend I’d made the day before, only to discover he was one of the ones who did not wake up.

  After a few days of boys dying, I heard shouting outside. The room became quiet. We all wanted to hear what was going on.

  “Why are we keeping these boys if they’re dying on us like this?” a man yelled.

  “We thought we needed more time to break their wills before we start the training,” someone replied.

  “If you wait much longer, they’ll all be dead. Get it started. Now! ”

  “But some of them are too small.”

  “How is that my problem?” the man shouted back. “Pull out the ones strong enough to hold a rifle and start training them.”

  “What about the rest?”

  “What about them?” the man snapped back. “The way things are going in there, we won’t have to worry about them much longer anyway.”

  The conversation ended. The door flew open. Five or six soldiers came in, angry. Each one grabbed a boy and sized him up. They pushed the older boys toward the door, where another soldier took charge of them. The rest were shoved toward the far side of the room.

  A soldier came up to me. He didn’t even bother looking me over. Immediately he grabbed my shoulders, turned me toward the rejection pile, and shoved me out of his way. “Over there!” he yelled and then moved on to the next boy.

  My three angels were standing near me when the soldiers stormed in. The soldiers pushed all three of them toward the door. One of them made eye contact with me before he left the hut. He nodded. I guess he wanted to let me know that everything would be all right. I didn’t know if I would see him again. None of us knew what was happening.

  I walked over to the rejects, most of whom were still older than me. We sat and waited. When the soldiers finished with the last boy, they stormed out of the hut and slammed the door behind them. Many of the boys left behind began to cry. I moved over by the wall to try to hear what was going on outside. All I could hear was yelling and the sound of people running around here and there. Later I heard gunfire, which was followed by more yelling and running.

  Eventually the crying stopped. I struck up a conversation with one of the other boys. That’s how I am. I love to talk and to talk a lot. Not everyone was so talkative, but before long we not only talked, but we made up games. It beat sitting and crying. We were still boys, after all.

  That evening, the door opened, and the boys who were taken out earlier in the day returned. I watched for my three angels. The moment they walked through the door, I ran over to them.

  “Don’t worry,” one of them said to me. “We won’t go anywhere without you.” That made me feel better, although, given what was going on around us, I did not know how they could deliver on their promise.

  That night the room was alive with new conversations. Boys talked about the training. I could tell some of them were into it. Their voices got excited when they talked about shooting an AK-47. Although I had no desire to shoot a gun, I envied them because they at least got to go outside. I had not left the hut in all my days in the rebel prison camp.

  The next morning after our one meal, the soldiers came back into the hut and separated the strong boys from the young and weak. Like the day before, I was in the latter group. The strong ones spent their day training to become soldiers. The rest of us tried to keep ourselves busy. Every morning I did my best to clean up my small corner of the hut. I swept it and carried off any garbage that happened to fall in my spot. It wasn’t much, but I had to find something to do to fill my
time.

  Back at home, I bugged my parents constantly to let me help. When I asked my dad to let me go to the farm with him, he said, “No, you’re too small. Stay home with your mother.” I did not take no for an answer. I ran as fast as I could to the farm. When my dad walked up, I was already there. He was right. I was too small to do most of the work, but I did what I could. Working made me very happy, especially working alongside my father on the farm.

  Keep in mind, farming in South Sudan is not like farming in the United States. There, everything is done by hand, from breaking up and plowing the ground with long poles, to planting the seed, to harvesting the grain. When I came to the United States and saw tractors and combines for the first time, I wondered why we did not have those in Sudan. If we did, no one would ever go hungry.

  On the days I did not go to the farm, I followed my mother around and did whatever I could to help her. If she was in the kitchen cooking, I was in the kitchen asking, “What can I do to help?”

  “Lopepe,” she said to me, “boys are not supposed to be in the kitchen. Go outside with your friends.”

  “No, Mother, I want to help you,” I said.

  My mom looked down at me, smiled, and said, “Okay, stir this,” or, “Run over to the neighbor and borrow some salt.” When she didn’t have anything else for me to do, I went out in the forest and scavenged for vegetables. I was very close to my mother and father. Every day I loved the love they poured out on me. I was a very happy boy.

  I didn’t work every day. My friends and I spent many a day playing hide-and-seek in the forest until the sun went down without a care in the world. Whenever we bored of hide-and-seek, we made up other games. Sometimes we let the girls in on the fun and played house with them. We boys became men. “I’m going hunting,” we’d tell the girls and go back to the forest. When we returned, we dropped our “kill” in front of them. The kill usually consisted of a big rock. The girls pretended to clean and cook the rock, while we boys sat down in the hut, propped up our feet, and rested from our hard day in the forest, just like we saw our dads do in the evening. It was a good life. As a small boy in a small village in a remote section of Sudan, I thought everyone in the world lived this way.

  Now I found myself in a very dark place with nothing to do. If I spent too much time thinking about home and my mom and dad, all I wanted to do was cry. I figured out very quickly that I could not do that and survive.

  As the days went by, the number of boys in my group grew smaller and smaller. The soldiers did not take any of us out for training and our group grew smaller because boys kept dying. I did not sit and stare in horror at the dead boys any longer. Death was just a part of life in the prison camp. With time, I got used to it.

  I got used to most things in the prison camp. Before long, I had no trouble going to sleep at night. Some mornings I slept right through the strong boys leaving to go out and train. I got used to picking through my sorghum every day, separating the grains from the sand. I got used to being left in the weak group where the soldiers waited for us to die. I got used to not feeling the sunshine on my skin or breathing fresh air.

  But I never got used to the smell. With each passing day the place stunk worse and worse.

  Some changes began to take place around me though. The strong boys, who started out as captives like me, became more and more like the soldiers who brought us here. The way they walked, the way they talked, and the way they looked at the young and weak became indistinguishable from the soldiers outside the hut. I could tell many of these boys liked the idea of becoming rebel soldiers. The guards did not have to separate us each morning. These boys were up waiting to go out and train and shoot.

  My three angels were not like that. They went outside for the training just like all the rest, but it was just an act.

  For others, though, it was not an act. The transformation for these boys was nearly complete. Soon they would be soldiers, ready to go off and fight. The question now was, when their training was complete, what would become of the boys left behind?

  What would they do with me?

  THREE

  Escaping with the Angels

  You’re going to see your mom again.”

  “What?” I nearly shouted.

  “Shh, not so loud,” one of my three teenage friends said. “You can’t tell anyone.” He looked around the room. Most of the boys had settled down for the night, although one or two were up walking around. “This is our secret, okay, Lopepe?”

  “I won’t say a word.”

  My friend gave me a look.

  “No, really. I know I talk a lot, but I won’t say anything. I promise.”

  “Good. You won’t have to keep the secret for long,” he said with a grin. “Come here.” He motioned for me to come between the three of them. “Sleep over here between us tonight.”

  “Okay,” I said. Since we slept on the floor, one spot was about the same as any other. By now, I was used to sleeping on the cold floor.

  However, on this night, I was so excited I could hardly go to sleep. I’m going to see my mom again! It felt as though I had not seen her in years, when in reality only three weeks had passed since the soldiers invaded our church service. It won’t be much longer! I told myself over and over. The more I thought about home, the more excited I became and the harder it was for me to sleep.

  Because I was six years old, I did not think to ask the obvious. Even at six, I should have asked how I was going to get to see her again. How did not matter. My friends, my three angels, told me I was going to see her, and that was good enough for me.

  My eyes finally grew heavy and I slipped off to sleep. I awoke to someone shaking me. I opened my eyes and started to speak, but my angels held fingers over their mouths. “Shh, don’t say a word,” one whispered so softly I could hardly hear him. He motioned for me to stand. I did what I was told. No one else in the hut stirred. The air was full of the sounds of deep breathing as all the boys slept very soundly.

  Even though several boys had died during the past three weeks, we were still packed tightly in the hut. Once everyone lay down, there was barely room to move. That did not stop my three angels. The first stepped over a sleeping boy, gently placing his foot on the far side, and then he pulled himself over. He reached out his arms. The second boy picked me up and handed me across. The first boy set me down in the small sliver of space between the sleeping boys. The next one stepped over to us and then climbed over the next sleeping boy. They passed me across and repeated the process again and again toward the door.

  Over the next ten or fifteen minutes, we worked our way across the room. Once we reached the door, we stopped dead still. My three friends leaned with their ears toward the door and outside wall. After what felt like an eternity, one nodded toward another. He reached over and opened the door ever so slightly. Normally, any time the door moved so much as an inch, it whined with a loud creak. Not on this night. Real angels were with us. God kept the door from creaking.

  One of my friends poked his head out the door for a quick look around. The coast was clear. The guard who normally sat at the door had left his post. My friend opened the door just wide enough for us to squeeze through. One went outside, then another. I started to jump through the doorway after him. I wanted to get out fast before the guard returned, but my friend at the door motioned for me to get down flat on the ground. I did as I was told. I pressed myself against the ground as low as I possibly could and slithered through the doorway into the night air.

  Nothing ever smelled as sweet as the air outside that doorway. Over the past three weeks, the prison hut had turned into a foul-smelling toilet. For the first time since I was blindfolded out of the back of the truck, fresh air filled my nose. I had almost forgotten what it smelled like.

  I didn’t have time to take in the moment. My two friends who were already outside pulled me between them. The third quickly joined us. The door behind us was closed. Again, it did not make a sound. Its familiar squeak fell silent
.

  One of my friends pointed along the side of the hut and swept his hand in an arc. The others nodded like they understood. I did not. I didn’t need to. One pushed me flat against the ground, then mouthed, “Follow me.” Off we went, crawling flat on our bellies along the side of the hut like cobras through the grass. All around us voices talked and laughed and cursed. My friends did not seem to notice. They kept crawling.

  I looked up and saw little orange circles in the night perhaps ten or fifteen feet away from me. Then I heard the sound of a match striking hard against something. My eyes went immediately toward the flame. I watched as it went up, then it lit up a face of one of the guards. He held the flame up to a cigarette, lit it, and then let the match fall to the ground.

  A hand pressed down on my head. I glanced to the side. One of my friends shook his head at me. He mouthed, “Stay down.”

  I nodded and kept on crawling after him.

  A soldier laughed. He sounded like he was standing right on top of me. I wanted to look up but I froze instead. My friends on either side of me pulled me along. I kept going. The guards’ voices seemed to get louder and louder. I could not see them—only the nearby glow of their cigarettes. And they could not see us in the moonless night. We blended into the darkness.