What Is The What

CHAPTER 22

When Tabitha was taken, Phil called me often, Anne and Allison called, only to talk, to listen, they said, but I knew they were worried about my health and state of mind. I suspect that they had lost their grasp of me. They knew now that the Sudanese in America were capable of murder, of suicide, and so what, they wondered, might Valentine do? I admit that I spent many weeks largely unable to move. I rarely went to class. I asked for time off from work and spent that time in bed or watching television. I drove aimlessly. I tried to read books about grief. I turned off my phone.

Bobby had suggested that Tabitha's murder was made possible by the madness of this country, and on occasion in those dark weeks after her death I allowed myself to find America complicit in the crime. In Sudan, it is unheard of for a young man to kill a woman. It had never happened in Marial Bai. I doubt that anyone in my clan could remember it ever happening, anywhere or at any time. The pressures of life here have changed us. Things are being lost.

There is a new desperation, a new kind of theatricality on the part of men. Not long ago, a Sudanese man in Michigan, I do not know the town, killed his wife, his innocent child, and then himself. I do not know the full story, but the one that blows through Sudanese society holds that this man's wife wanted to visit her family in Athens, Georgia. He refused. I do not know why, but in traditional Sudanese society, the husband does not need a reason why; held over the woman's head is the possibility of a beating, perhaps months of beatings. So they argued, she was beaten, and he thought he had made his point. But the next day she was gone. She had, weeks before, bought a plane ticket to Athens for her and their daughter, even before discussing it with him. She had either assumed she would have her way, or she simply didn't care. But the man in Michigan cared. While his wife and daughter visited aunts and cousins in Athens, he boiled at home. The loss efface, I tell you, can do awful things to a man. When his wife returned with her daughter, he met them at the door with a knife he bought that weekend. He killed them in the foyer and an hour later, himself.

I cannot help but think that Duluma got the idea from this man, this notion of being able to punish she who left you without having to be punished yourself. That, too, would be impossible in Sudan. A man does not kill his child, does not kill himself. In southern Sudan, too many men abuse their wives; wives are beaten, wives are abandoned. But never this sort of thing.

Some say it is the fault of the women here, the clash of their new ideas and the old habits of men unwilling to adapt. Tabitha may or may not have had an abortion-I did not ask her, for it is not my right-and then she left Duluma on her own accord. Both choices would be unprecedented in traditional Sudanese society, and still quite rare in the relaxed moral context of Kakuma. In southern Sudan, even a sexual relationship before marriage is unusual, and very often precludes that woman being married at all. Virgins are preferred, and for a virgin, the bride's family receives a far higher dowry. Telling Americans about this yields fascinating reactions. They cannot conceive of how one's virginity could even be determined in the absence of a gynecological examination.

The Sudanese way is simple. On the eve of the wedding, two or three members of the bride's family, usually the bride's aunts, bring to the marriage bed the cleanest white sheets. On the first night that the groom is permitted to visit his bride, these women hide inside the home, or just outside the door. When the groom first penetrates his bride, the women ululate, and as soon as they are able, they go inside to inspect the sheets for the blood of a broken hymen, to prove that their niece was indeed a virgin. With this evidence in hand, they return to the relarives of both bride and groom.

But here there has been premarital sex, and there was an assertive young woman who decided to break off a relarionship with an angry young Sudanese man. He thought she was leaving him for money. He assumed that because my name was well-known at Kakuma that I was a wealthy man here in Atlanta. And it began to twist his head in knots. He made furious calls to her, during which he gave her terrible names. He threatened her and even warned her that should she choose me over him he would do something drastic, something irrevocable.

This is where I direct some frustration toward Tabitha. She did not take his threats seriously, and this seems, to me, madness. Duluma had been in the SPLA, he had fired a machine gun, he had walked over corpses and through fire. Would he not act on a threat? But she did not tell me of these warnings. I knew that he would act on such a threat, but had been placated by our phone call, assuring me he had accepted that she was no longer interested in him.

When Phil called me, he apologized for what had happened to me in his country, just as Bobby had. Bobby was not a religious man, but Phil is a man of faith, and we talked at length about our beliefs when tested. It was interesting to hear Phil talk about those instances when his faith wavered in times of great crisis or needless suffering. I am not sure if what I've felt is doubt. My inclination is to blame myself: what have I done to bring such calamity down upon myself and those I love? Not long ago, a gathering of Lost Boys in the Southeast was scheduled to take place in Atlanta. On the way, a carload of representatives from Greensboro, North Carolina, spun off the highway, killing the driver and injuring two others. The next day, another Lost Boy of Greensboro, distraught by the accident and other disappointments in his life, hanged himself in his basement. Is the curse upon me so great that it casts a shadow over everyone I know, or do I simply know too many people?

I do not mean to imply that these deaths were simply trials for me, for I know God would not take these people, would not take Tabitha in particular, simply to test the strength of my own faith. I will not guess His motivations for bringing her back to Him. But her death has proven to be a catalyst for me to think about my faith and my life. I have examined my course, whether or not I have made mistakes, whether I have been a good child of God. And though I have tried to remain on course, and I have redoubled my efforts to pray and to attend Mass regularly, I have also realized that it is time to start my life again. I have done this before-each time one life has ended and another has begun. My first life ended when I left Marial Bai, for I have not seen my home or family since. My life in Ethiopia also ran its course. For three years we lived there and I became aware of my place in the grand plan of the SPLA and the future of southern Sudan. And finally, with our arrival at Kakuma, I started again.

After my walk to Kenya, when Maria found me on the road wanting to be lifted back to God, I spent many months thinking about why I should have been born at all. It was a grave mistake, it seemed, a promise that could not be fulfilled. There was a musician at Kakuma, the only musician in those early days, and he would play one song, day and night, on his stringed rababa. The melody of his song was cheerful but the lyrics were not. 'It was you, mother, it was you,' he sang, 'it was you who birthed me, and it is you I blame.' He went on to blame his mother, and all the mothers of Dinkaland, for giving birth to babies only to have them live in squalor in northwest Kenya.

There is a perception in the West that refugee camps are temporary. When images of the earthquakes in Pakistan are shown, and the survivors seen in their vast cities of shale-colored tents, waiting for food or rescue before the coming of winter, most Westerners believe that these refugees will soon be returned to their homes, that the camps will be dismantled inside of six months, perhaps a year.

But I grew up in refugee camps. I lived in Pinyudo for almost three years, Golkur for almost one year, and Kakuma for ten. In Kakuma, a small community of tents grew to a vast patchwork of shanties and buildings constructed from poles and sisal bags and mud, and this is where we lived and worked and went to school from 1992 to 2001. It is not the worst place on the continent of Africa, but it is among them.

Still, the refugees there created a life that resembled the lives of other human beings, in that we ate and talked and laughed and grew. Goods were traded, men married women, babies were born, the sick were healed and, just as often, went to Zone Eight and then to the sweet hereafter. We young people went to school, tried to stay awake and concentrate on one meal a day while distracted by the charms of Miss Gladys and girls like Tabitha. We tried to avoid trouble from other refugees-from Somalia, Uganda, Rwanda-and from the indigenous people of northwest Kenya, while always keeping our ears open to any news from home, news about our families, any opportunities to leave Kakuma temporarily or for good.

We spent the first year at Kakuma thinking we might return to our villages at any moment. We would periodically receive news of SPLA gains in Sudan and the optimistic among us would convince ourselves that a surrender from Khartoum was imminent. Some of the boys began to hear about their families-who was alive, who was dead, who had fled to Uganda or Egypt or beyond. The Sudanese diaspora continued and spread throughout the world, and at Kakuma I waited for news, any news, about my parents and siblings. The battles would continue and the refugees arrived without pause, hundreds per week, and we came to accept that Kakuma would exist forever, and that we might always live within its borders.

This was our home, and Gop Chol Kolong, the man I considered my father at the camp, was a wreck on a certain day in 1994. I had never seen him so flustered.

— We really have to get this place in order, he said.-We have to clean this place up. Then we have to build more rooms. Then we need to clean up again.

He had been saying this every morning for weeks. Mornings were the time he worried most. Every morning, he said, he was leapt upon by the snarling hyenas of his many responsibilities.

— You think two more rooms will be enough? he asked me. I said it seemed like plenty.

— Whatever it is it won't seem like enough, he said. He could not believe they were coming.

— I can't believe they're coming here! To this rathole!

At that point I had been living in Kakuma, with Gop Chol, for almost three years. Gop was from Marial Bai, and had come to Kakuma by way of Narus and various other stopovers. Kakuma had been born with the arrival of ten thousand boys like me who had walked through the dark and dust, but the camp grew quickly, soon encompassing tens of thousands of Sudanese-families and portions of families, orphans, and after some time, also Rwandans, Ugandans, Somalis, even Egyptians.

After months of living in squat shelters like the ones we customarily built when first arriving at a camp, we eventually were given, by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, poles and tarpaulins and materials to build more presentable homes, and so we did. Eventually many boys like me moved in with families from our hometowns and regions, to share resources and duties and to keep alive the customs of our clans. As the camp grew to twenty thousand people, to forty thousand and upward, as it grew outward into the dry wind-strewn nothingness, and as the civil war continued unabated, the camp became more permanent, and many of those, like Gop, who first considered Kakuma a stopover until conditions improved in southern Sudan, now were sending for their families.

I said nothing to Gop about the prospect of bringing his wife and three daughters to such a place, but privately I questioned it. Kakuma was a terrible place for people to live, for children to grow. But he really did not have a choice. His youngest daughter had been diagnosed with a bone disease at the clinic in Nyamlell, east of Marial Bai, and the doctor there had arranged for her transfer to Lopiding Hospital-the more sophisticated clinic near Kakuma. Gop did not know precisely when the transfer would take place, and so spent an inordinate amount of time searching for information from anyone at Lokichoggio, anyone involved in medicine or refugee transfer in any way.

— Do you think they'll be happy here? Gop asked me.

— They'll be happy to be with you, I said.

— But this place…is this any kind of place to live?

I said nothing. Despite its flaws, from the beginning it was clear that this camp would be different from those at Pinyudo and Pochalla and Narus and everywhere else we had been. Kakuma was preplanned, operated from the start by the UN, and staffed almost entirely, at first, by Kenyans. This made for an orderly enough operation, but resentment festered from within and without. The Turkana, a herding people who had occupied the Kakuma District for a thousand years, were suddenly asked to share their land-to cede a thousand acres in an instant-with tens of thousands of Sudanese and, later, Somalis, with whom they shared few cultural similarities. The Turkana resented our presence, and in turn the Sudanese resented the Kenyans, who seemed to have seized every paying job available at the camp, performing and being compensated for tasks that we Sudanese were more than capable of in Pinyudo. In turn, the Kenyans, in their less charitable moments, thought of the Sudanese as leeches, who did little more than eat and defecate and complain when things didn't go as desired. Somewhere in there were a handful of aid workers from Europe, the United Kingdom, Japan, and the United States, all of whom were careful to defer to the Africans, and who cleared out when the camp erupted into temporary chaos. This did not happen too often, but with so many nationalities represented, so many tribes and so little food and so great the volume and variety of suffering, conflict was inevitable.

What was life in Kakuma? Was it life? There was debate about this. On the one hand, we were alive, which meant that we were living a life, that we were eating and could enjoy friendships and learning and could love. But we were nowhere. Kakuma was nowhere. Kakuma was, we were first told, the Kenyan word for nowhere. No matter the meaning of the word, the place was not a place. It was a kind of purgatory, more so than was Pinyudo, which at least had a constant river, and in other ways resembled the southern Sudan we had left. But Kakuma was hotter, windier, far more arid. There was little in the way of grass or trees in that land; there were no forests to scavenge for materials; there was nothing for miles, it seemed, so we became dependent on the UN for everything.

Early in my days at the camp, Moses again appeared in and departed from my life. When Kakuma was still being shaped, I would take daily walks around its perimeter, to see who had made it and who had not. I saw arguments between the Sudanese and Turkana, between European aid workers and Kenyans. I saw families being re-formed, new alliances forged, and even saw Commander Secret talking passionately to a group of boys just a few years older than me. I kept clear of him and any SPLA officers, for I knew their intentions. While walking the camp's borders in the first few weeks, I learned that Achor Achor had made it after all, and that three of the original Eleven were with him.

When I saw Moses, it was not very dramatic. Early one morning in the first months of Kakuma, as I stepped over a group of young men sleeping, sharing one long blanket, their feet and heads exposed, I simply saw him. Moses. With another boy our age, he was attempting to cook some asida in a pan, over a fire in a small can. He saw me just as I saw him.

— Moses! I yelled.

— Shh! he hissed, and came to me quickly.

He turned me away from his companion and we took a walk around the perimeter of the camp.

— Don't call me Moses here, he said. Like many others at the camp, he had changed his name; in his case, it was to avoid any SPLA commanders who might be looking for him.

He was a different boy than the last time I had seen him. He had grown many inches, was built like an ox, and his forehead seemed more stern and severe-the forehead of a man. But in essential ways, in his wide crooked smile and bright smiling eyes, he was still very much Moses. He wanted immediately to tell me about his time as a soldier, and he did so with the sort of breathless excitement one might use in describing a particularly attractive girl.

— No, no, I wasn't a fighter. I never fought. I only trained, he said, answering my first question. I was greatly relieved.

— But the training! Achak, it was so different than the life here, than in Pinyudo. It was so hard. Here we have to worry about food and insects and the wind, but there they were trying to kill me! I'm sure they were trying to kill me. They killed boys there.

— They shot them?

— No, no. I don't think so.

— Not like Pinyudo, the prisoners?

— No, not like that. No bullets, they just drove them to their deaths. So many boys. They beat them, ran them into the ground, chased them back to Heaven.

We walked past a small tent, inside of which a white photographer was taking pictures of a Sudanese mother and her emaciated child.

— Did you get to shoot a gun? I asked.

— I did. That was a good day. Have you shot a gun? I told him I had not.

— It was a good day when they gave us the guns, the Kalashnikovs. We had waited so long, and finally they had us shoot at targets. Oh man, the guns hurt! They shoot you while you're shooting the targets! They call it kickback. My shoulder is sore right now, Achak.

— Which shoulder?

He indicated his right shoulder, and I punched it.

— Don't!

I did it again. This was hard to resist.

— Don't! he said, and tackled me.

We wrestled for a few minutes and then, because we were tired and underfed, realized we had no energy to wrestle properly. We were hungrier than we had been in Pinyudo. We ate one meal a day, at night, and the rest of the day we tried to conserve our energy. I do not know why it was easier for the UN to feed the refugees of Pinyudo than it was those of Kakuma. We stood and continued walking, past a group of shelters were the SPLA's families lived.

— They gave us five bullets and they held us steady while we shot. We lay down on our stomachs to help keep still. It was very painful but I was happy to see the bullets come from my gun. I hit nothing. I don't know where my bullets went. I never saw them again. They went into the sky or something.

I told him the training sounded good.

— No, no, Achak. It wasn't good. No one thought it was good. And I was singled out for punishment. In their eyes, I did something wrong, Achak. I was late to the parade one day and they thought I was a troublemaker. They had me confused with another Moses, I later discovered. But they thought I was a bad guy so I was punished. They put me in a pen, like the pens where you keep livestock. I had to stay there for two days. I couldn't sit down. I stood for every minute until I slept. They let me sleep from dawn until the sun was up, maybe two hours. It was worse than the Arab's house. When I was with the Arab it was easy to hate him and his family and those kids. But this was so confusing. I came to Bonga to train and fight but they were fighting me. They were trying to kill me, I swear, Achak. They said it was training. They said they were making us men but I know they wanted to kill me. Have you ever felt like people were really trying to kill you, you in particular? I pondered this question and realized I didn't know for sure.

— We ran all day, Achak. We ran up the hills and then ran down. While we ran, the trainers were hitting us, yelling at us. But the boys weren't strong enough. Those trainers were not very smart. They had their training methods and they were using them but they forgot that these boys were very sick and weak and skinny. Can you start running up hills while being beaten, Achak?

— No.

— So the boys fell. The boys fell and they broke bones. I watched one boy fall. We were running down the hill and one of the trainers started yelling at this boy, whose name was Daniel. He was my size, but thinner. I knew when I saw him that he should not have been at Bonga. He was one of the youngest and he was so slow! He ran slower than you can walk. It was funny to watch but it was real, it was stupid the way he ran. This made the trainers so angry. They didn't want him in the camp, like they didn't want me at the camp. So they yelled at Daniel and they called him Shit. That was his name at Bonga: Shit.

We both laughed for a second about this. We couldn't help it. We had never known someone named Shit.

— We were always running up and down this hill and one time when we did this it was almost dark. The sun was down and we were having trouble seeing. There was a trainer named Comrade Francis who was cruel to everyone, but I had not seen him interact with Daniel before. This night he was everywhere Daniel was. He ran alongside him, he ran backward in front of him, always blowing a whistle. Comrade Francis had a whistle and he just blew and blew it into Daniel's face.

— And Daniel? What did he do?

— He was so sad. He didn't get angry. I think maybe he made himself deaf. He didn't seem to hear anything. He just did his running. Then Comrade Francis kicked him.

— Kicked him?

— The hill was steep, Achak. So when he kicked him it was like he flew. He flew twenty feet I think, because he was already running and had momentum. When he began to fly, Achak-sorry, I mean Valentine-when he was in the air my stomach got sick. I felt so sick. Everything dropped into my knees. I knew this was bad, that Daniel was flying down the hill with all the rocks. The sound was like the snapping of a twig. He just lay there. He lay there like he'd been dead forever.

— He was dead?

— He died right there. I saw the ribs. I didn't know this could happen. Did you know your ribs could come out of your skin?

— No.

— Three of his ribs had come through his skin, Achak. I walked up to him right after it happened. The trainer was doing nothing. He thought the boy would get up, so he was still blowing his whistle but I had heard the sound so I went to Daniel and saw his eyes open, like they were looking through me. They were dead eyes. You know what those look like. I know you do.

— Yes.

— And then I saw the ribs. They were like bones on an animal. When you slaughter an animal you can see the bones, and they're white and have blood around them, right?

— Yes.

— This was like that. The ribs were very sharp, too. They had been broken so the parts coming through his skin were very sharp, like curved knives. I was there and then the trainer yelled at me to keep going. I turned around and there were two other trainers there. I think they knew something was wrong. They beat me until I ran down the hill and I saw them surrounding Daniel. Three days later they told us all that Daniel had died of yellow fever. But everyone knew it was a lie. That's when boys began to escape. That's when I left.

Moses and I had made a circle of the camp and now were back at the site of his fire and companion and asida.

— I'll see you around, Achak, right?

I told him of course I would see him around. But we didn't actually see each other much. We spent a few weeks making journeys together in the camp, talking about the things we had seen and done, but after telling his story, Moses was not very interested in discussing the past. He saw our presence in Kenya as a great opportunity, and he seemed constantly to be thinking of ways to take advantage of it. He became a trader of goods in those early days, silverware and cups and buttons and thread, starting with a few shillings and tripling their value in a day. He was moving faster than I could, and he continued to do so. One day not long after our reunion Moses said he had some news. He had an uncle, he said, who had long ago left Sudan and was living in Cairo, had located Moses at Kakuma and was arranging for him to go to private school in Nairobi. He was not alone in this arrangement. A few dozen boys every year were sent to boarding schools in Kenya. Some had won scholarships, some had located or were located by relatives with means.

— Sorry, Moses said.

— It's okay, I said.-Write me a letter.

Moses never wrote a letter, because boys don't write letters to boys, but he did leave one day, just before refugee-camp school would begin for the rest of us. I would not hear from him for almost ten years, until we found that we were both living in North America-myself in Atlanta and he at the University of British Columbia. He would call once every few weeks, or I would call him, and his voice was always a salve and an inspiration. He could not be beaten. He went to school in Nairobi and Canada and always looked courageously forward, even with with an 8 branded behind his ear. Nothing about Moses could be defeated.

Maria was living with foster parents, with a man and his wife from her hometown, in the area of Kakuma where the more or less intact families had set up their homes. Maria had lived with three other young women and an old man-the grandfather of one of the women-until the man died and the women were either married off or returned to Sudan, leaving Maria available for the claiming. One day I spent a morning looking for her, and finally saw her shape in a corner of Kakuma, arranging men's garments on a clothesline.

— Maria!

She turned and smiled.

— Sleeper! I was looking for you last week in school.

She called me Sleeper and I did not mind. I had so many names at Kakuma and this was the most poetic. I would allow Maria to call me anything she wished, for she had saved me from the road at night.

— What class are you in this year? I asked.

— Standard Five, she said.

— Ooh! Standard Five! I bowed deeply before her.-A very special girl!

— This is what they say.

We both laughed. I hadn't realized she was so extraordinary in her academics. She was younger than I, and to be in Standard Five! She was surely the youngest in the class.-Are these all your clothes?

I pointed to a pair of pants that reached the ground. Whoever owned them was at least six-and-a-half feet tall.

— My father here. He was the bicycle man in my town.

— He fixed bicycles?

— He fixed them, sold them. He says he was close to my father. I don't remember him. Now I'm with them. He calls me his daughter.

There was so much work, Maria said. More work than she'd ever done or heard of. Between the chores and school, after sunset she was too exhausted to speak. The man she lived with expected two sons to join them soon at the camp, and Maria knew her workload would increase threefold when they arrived. She finished hanging the clothes and looked into my eyes.

— What do you think of this place, Achak?

She had a way of looking at me that that was very different than most Sudanese girls, who did not often meet your eye so directly, did not speak so plainly.

— Kakuma? I said.

— Yes, Kakuma. There's nothing here but us. Don't you find that weird? That it's only people and dust? We've already cut down all the trees and grass for our homes and firewood. And now what?

— What do you mean?

— We just stay here? Do we stay here always, till we die? Until that moment I hadn't thought of dying in Kakuma.

— We stay till the war ends, then we go home, I said. It was Gop Chol's constant and optimistic refrain, and I suppose I had been fairly convinced. Maria laughed loudly at this.

— You're not serious, are you, Sleeper?

— Maria!

It was a woman's voice coming from the shelter.

— Girl, come here!

Maria made a sour face and sighed.

— I'll look for you at school when we start again. See you, Sleeper.

Gop Chol was a teacher loosely affiliated with the SPLA, and was a man of vision and careful planning. Together, we had constructed our shelter, considered one of the better homes in our neighborhood. With the UN-provided poles and plastic sheeting, we built a home, with palm-tree leaves on top, keeping it cool during the day and warm at night. The walls were mud, our beds assemblages of sisal bags. But it was so hot in Kakuma most nights that we slept outside. We slept under the open sky, and I studied outside, under the light of the moon or the kerosene lamp we shared.

Like Mr. Kondit, Gop insisted that I study constantly, lest the future of Sudan be in jeopardy. He too imagined that once the war was over, and once independence for southern Sudan had been achieved, those of us educated in Pinyudo and Kakuma, and benefiting from the expertise and materials of the international community hosting us, would be ready to lead a new Sudan.

But it was difficult for us to see this future, for at Kakuma, all was dust. Our mattresses were full of dust, our books and food were plagued with dust. To eat a bite of food without the grind of sand between one's molars was unheard of. Any pens we borrowed or were given worked sporadically; the dust would clog one in an hour and that was that. Pencils were the standard and even they were rare.

I blacked out a dozen times a day. When I stood up quickly the corners of my vision would darken and I would wake up on the ground, always, strangely, uninjured. Stepping into darkness, Achor Achor called it.

Achor Achor was better connected to the prevailing expressions of the young men at the camp, for he still lived among the unaccompanied minors. He shared a shelter with six other boys and three men, all former soldiers in the SPLA. One of the men, twenty years old, was missing his right hand. We called him Fingers.

There was not enough food, and the Sudanese, an agrarian people, were not allowed to keep livestock in the camp, and the Turkana would not allow the Sudanese to keep any outside the camp. Inside Kakuma, there was no room to grow crops of any kind, and the soil was unfit for almost any agriculture anyway. A few vegetables could be raised near the water taps, but such paltry gardens went almost nowhere in meeting the needs of forty thousand refugees, many of whom were suffering from anemia.

Every day in school, students would be absent due to illness. The bones of boys my age were attempting to grow, but there were not enough nutrients in our food. So there was diarrhea, dysentery, and typhoid. Early on in the life of the school, when a student was ill, the school was notified, and the students were encouraged to pray for that boy. When the boy returned to school, he would be applauded, though there were some boys who felt it best to keep their distance from those who had just been sick. When a boy did not recover, our teachers would call us together before classes, and tell us that there was bad news, that this certain boy had died. Some of us would cry, and others would not. Many times, I was not sure if I had known the boy, and so I just waited until the crying boys were done crying. Then the lesson would continue, with those of us who did not know the boy hiding our small satisfaction that this death would mean that school would be dismissed early that day. A dead boy meant a half day, and any day that we could go home to sleep meant that we could rest and be better able to fight off disease ourselves.

After some time, though, there were too many boys dying, and there was no time to mourn each one. Those who knew the dead boy would mourn privately, while the healthy would hope we would not get sick. Class would go on; there were no more half days.

This made study difficult, and academic achievement near impossible. Frustrated with it all, many boys would simply not go to school. Of sixty-eight boys in my junior-high class, only thirty-eight went on to high school. Still, it was safer than being in Sudan, and we had nothing else. I was hungry, but I was thankful every day that I seemed to be free, for the time being, from the threat of SPLA enlistment. There were fewer canings, fewer reprisals, less militarism in general. We were, for a time, no longer Seeds, no longer the Red Army. We were simply boys, and there was, after a time, basketball.

I discovered basketball at Kakuma, and I quickly came to believe that I was very good, that like Manute Bol, I would be brought to the United States to play professionally. Basketball would never become as popular as soccer in the camp, but it attracted hundreds of boys, the tall ones, the quick ones, those who liked the chance to get more touches than we would in one of the mass herdings that passed for soccer. The Ugandans were good with basketball strategy-they knew the game-the Somalis were quick, but it was the Sudanese who dominated, our long legs and arms simply outclassing the rest. When a pickup game came together, and the Sudanese banded against whatever team could be assembled against us, we invariably won, no matter how good the outside shooting was, no matter how quick the guards were, no matter how much will the opponents could muster. It gave us great pride to think of ourselves as we once had, as the kings of Africa, the monyjang, the chosen people of God.

In the days before his family was to arrive, Gop began to posit various scenarios by which his wife and daughters would not make it to Kakuma. They could be shot by bandits, he would suggest. I would tell him that that was not possible, that they would be coming with many others, would be safe, perhaps even in a vehicle. Gop would be content for an hour or so, and then he would get positively manic, taking apart his bed and putting it together again, and sliding back into crushing doubt. 'What if my daughters don't recognize me?' he asked six times each day. To this I could not muster an answer, given that I no longer could remember what my own parents looked like. Worse, the daughters of Gop were younger, far younger, than I had been when I left home. His three daughters had all been under five, and now it was eight years later. None would know Gop by sight.

— Of course they'll know you, I said.-All girls know their father.

— You're right. You're right, Achak. Thank you. I'm thinking too much.

Each day, Gop waited for news about those who were coming to Kakuma. We occasionally received word about a movement of refugees, and would anticipate their arrival and prepare for it. Even after three years, any given week could bring a thousand new people, and the camp continued to grow outward by miles, such that I could walk a new avenue each morning. Kakuma grew to encompass Kakuma I, II, III, and IV. It was a refugee city with its own suburbs.

But most of the arrivals came from regions of Sudan, and particularly those villages closer to Kenya. Few were from anywhere near Marial Bai. Most of those I asked had never heard of my village. And when they knew anything of northern Bahr al-Ghazal, they provided sweeping news of its elimination from the planet.

— You're from northern Bahr al-Ghazal? one man said.-Everyone there is dead. Another man, elderly and missing his right leg, was more specific.

— Northern Bahr al-Gazhal is now the home of the murahaleen. They've taken over. It's their grazing land. There's nothing there to go back to.

One day, news of my region came from a boy I did not know well. I was at the water tap before school when the boy, named Santino, ran to me, explaining that there was a man at Lopiding Hospital who was from Marial Bai. Another boy had been at the hospital for malaria and had begun talking to the man, who mentioned my hometown, and this man said he even remembered me, Achak Deng. So I was obligated to find a way to Lopiding, quickly, I thought, for this was the first time in many years that someone had come to Kakuma from Marial Bai.

But then I thought of Daniel Dut, another boy I knew who had awaited news of his own family, only to learn that they were all dead. For months afterward, Daniel had insisted that he wished he'd never found out, that it was far easier to walk through life in doubt and with hope than knowing that everyone was gone. Knowing your family was dead brought on visions of how they died, how they might have suffered, how their bodies might have been abused after death. So I didn't immediately seek out the Marial Bai man in the hospital. When I heard, a week later, that he was gone, I was not unhappy.

The announcement of the census was made while Gop was waiting for the coming of his wife and daughters, and this complicated his peace of mind. To serve us, to feed us, the UNHCR and Kakuma's many aid groups needed to know how many refugees were at the camp. Thus, in 1994 they announced they would count us. It would only take a few days, they said. To the organizers I am sure it seemed a very simple, necessary, and uncontroversial directive. But for the Sudanese elders, it was anything but.

— What do you think they have planned? Gop Chol wondered aloud.

I didn't know what he meant by this, but soon I understood what had him, and the majority of Sudanese elders, greatly concerned. Some learned elders were reminded of the colonial era, when Africans were made to bear badges of identification on their necks.

— Could this counting be a pretext of a new colonial period? Gop mused.-It's very possible. Probable even!

I said nothing.

At the same time, there were practical, less symbolic, reasons to oppose the census, including the fact that many elders imagined that it would decrease, not increase, our rations. If they discovered there were fewer of us than had been assumed, the food donations from the rest of the world would drop. The more pressing and widespread fear among young and old at Kakuma was that the census would be a way for the UN to kill us all. These fears were only exacerbated when the fences were erected.

The UN workers had begun to assemble barriers, six feet tall and arranged like hallways. The fences would ensure that we would walk single file on our way to be counted, and thus counted only once. Even those among us, the younger Sudanese primarily, who were not so worried until then, became gravely concerned when the fences went up. It was a malevolent-looking thing, that maze of fencing, orange and opaque. Soon even the best educated among us bought into the suspicion that this was a plan to eliminate the Dinka. Most of the Sudanese my age had learned of the Holocaust, and were convinced that this was a plan much like that used to eliminate the Jews in Germany and Poland. I was dubious of the growing paranoia, but Gop was a believer. As rational a man as he was, he had a long memory for injustices visited upon the people of Sudan.

— What isn't possible, boy? he demanded.-See where we are? You tell me what isn't possible at this time in Africa!

But I had no reason to distrust the UN. They had been feeding us at Kakuma for years. There was not enough food, but they were the ones providing for everyone, and thus it seemed nonsensical that they would kill us after all this time.

— Yes, he reasoned, — but see, perhaps now the food has run out. The food is gone, there's no more money, and Khartoum has paid the UN to kill us. So the UN gets two things: they get to save food, and they are paid to get rid of us.

— But how will they get away with it?

— That's easy, Achak. They say that we caught a disease only the Dinka can get. There are always illnesses unique to certain people, and this is what will happen. They'll say there was a Dinka plague, and that all the Sudanese are dead. This is how they'll justify killing every last one of us.

— That's impossible, I said.

— Is it? he asked.-Was Rwanda impossible?

I still thought that Gop's theory was unreliable, but I also knew that I should not forget that there were a great number of people who would be happy if the Dinka were dead. So for a few days, I did not make up my mind about the head count. Meanwhile, public sentiment was solidifying against our participation, especially when it was revealed that the fingers of all those counted, after being counted, would be dipped in ink.

— Why the ink? Gop asked. I didn't know.

— The ink is a fail-safe measure to ensure the Sudanese will be exterminated.

I said nothing, and he elaborated. Surely if the UN did not kill us Dinka while in the lines, he theorized, they would kill us with this ink on the fingers. How could the ink be removed? It would, he thought, enter our bodies when we ate.

— This seems very much like what they did to the Jews, Gop said.

People spoke a lot about the Jews in those days, which was odd, considering that a short time before, most of the boys I knew thought the Jews were an extinct race. Before we learned about the Holocaust in school, in church we had been taught rather crudely that the Jews had aided in the killing of Jesus Christ. In those teachings, it was never intimated that the Jews were a people still inhabiting the earth. We thought of them as mythological creatures who did not exist outside the stories of the Bible.

The night before the census, the entire series of fences, almost a mile long, was torn down. No one took responsibility, but many were quietly satisfied.

In the end, after countless meetings with the Kenyan leadership at the camp, the Sudanese elders were convinced that the head count was legitimate and was needed to provide better services to the refugees. The fences were rebuilt, and the census was conducted a few weeks later. But in a way, those who feared the census were correct, in that nothing very good came from it. After the count, there was less food, fewer services, even the departure of a few smaller programs. When they were done counting, the population of Kakuma had decreased by eight thousand people in one day.

How had the UNHCR miscounted our numbers before the census? The answer is called recycling. Recycling was popular at Kakuma and is favored at most refugee camps, and any refugee anywhere in the world is familiar with the concept, even if they have a different name for it. The essence of the idea is that one can leave the camp and re-enter as a different person, thus keeping his first ration card and getting another when he enters again under a new name. This means that the recycler can eat twice as much as he did before, or, if he chooses to trade the extra rations, he can buy or otherwise obtain anything else he needs and is not being given by the UN-sugar, meat, vegetables. The trading resulting from extra ration cards provided the basis for a vast secondary economy at Kakuma, and kept thousands of refugees from anemia and related illnesses. At any given time, the administrators of Kakuma thought they were feeding eight thousand more people than they actually were. No one felt guilty about this small numerical deception.

The ration-card economy made commerce possible, and the ability of different groups to manipulate and thrive within the system led soon enough to a sort of social hierarchy at Kakuma. At the top of the ladder as a group were the Sudanese, because our sheer numbers dominated the camp. But on an individual basis, the Ethiopians were the top social caste-a few thousand representatives of that country's middle class who were forced out with Mengistu. They lived in Kakuma I, and owned a good portion of the prosperous businesses. Their rivals in trade were the Somalis and the Eritreans, who found a way to coexist with the Ethiopians, though their countrymen were at odds with each other at home. Meanwhile there was tension between the Somalis and the Bantu, a long-suffering group who had been transplanted from another Kenyan camp, Dadaab. The Bantu had first been made slaves in Mozambique and in the 1800s migrated to Somalia, where they endured two hundred years of persecution. They were not allowed to own land, or given access to political representation at any level. When civil war engulfed Somalia in the 1990s their situation worsened, as their farms and homes were raided, their men killed, and their women raped. There were eventually some seventeen thousand Bantu in Kakuma, and even there they were not always safe, as their numbers brought resentment from many Sudanese, who considered the camp theirs.

Just below the merchants were the SPLA commanders, and under them, the Ugandans-only four hundred or so, most of them affiliated with Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army, a rebel group at odds with the ruling National Resistance Movement. The Ugandans couldn't go back; most were well-known at home and had prices on their heads. Sprinkled around the camp there were Congolese, Burundians, Eritreans, and a few hundred Rwandans who many suspected had been participants in the genocide and were unwelcome in their homeland.

Somewhere near the bottom of it all sat the unaccompanied minors, the Lost Boys. We had no money, no family, and little means to attain either. One step up from this low rung could be gained if one found his way into a family. Living with Gop Chol had afforded me some status and a few privileges, but I knew that once Gop's family arrived, it would be difficult to spread the family's rations around, and the many items necessary-with so many young girls in the home-would mean that there needed to be more income in our home, and an extra ration card was the beginning of the flow of wealth.

— One of us will have to recycle once the girls get here, Gop said one day.

And I knew this to be true. I received my own rations every week, and when his wife and daughters arrived, Gop would qualify for a family ration. But the rations for a family of five would be insufficient, and we knew that the prime time to recycle again would be immediately after the census, when there would be extra vigilance about how much food we would be given.

— I will go, I said, and I was sure of it.

I would go as soon as his wife and girls arrived, I announced. Gop pretended to be surprised by my offer, but I knew he expected this of me. Recycling was always done by the young men at Kakuma, and I wanted to prove my worth to the family, to earn their respect shortly after they arrived.

For the weeks that followed, Achor Achor and I spent many nights lying outside my shelter, doing our homework in the crisp blue light of the moon, plotting my recycling trip.

— You'll need extra pants, Achor Achor said.

I had no idea why I would need pants, but Achor Achor enlightened me: I would need pants because with the pants I would get the goat.

— One pair of pants should do it, he surmised. I asked Achor Achor why I needed a goat.

— You need to get the goat to get the shillings.

I begged him to start at the beginning.

I needed the pants, he said, because when I left Kakuma, I would be traveling to Narus, in Sudan, and in Sudan, they cannot find the sort of new, Chinese-made pants that were available in Kakuma Town. If I were to bring such pants to Narus, I could trade them for a goat. And I needed a goat because if I were to bring a healthy goat back to Kakuma, where goats are scarce, I would be able to sell the animal for two thousand shillings or more.

— You might as well make some money while you're out there risking your life.

This is the first I had heard of the trip still being dangerous. Or rather, I knew that in the past, if one left Kakuma, and traveled the roads to Lokichoggio and past Lokichoggio, there were bandits one might encounter, Turkana and Taposa bandits, and they would, at best, steal everything you had, and at worst, steal all you had and kill you afterward. I had thought that those dangers were in the past, but apparently not. Nevertheless, the plan continued to develop, and Gop joined in.

— You should bring more than one pair of pants! Gop huffed one night over dinner. Achor Achor was eating with us, which he often did, because Gop knew how to cook and Achor Achor did not.

— More goods, more goats! Gop bellowed.-You might as well really make it worthwhile, since you're risking your life and all.

From then on, the plan expanded: I would bring with me two shirts, a pair of pants, and a blanket, all new or seemingly new, and with all this I would be able to trade for at least three goats, which would bring six thousand shillings in Kakuma Town, an amount that would keep Gop's family in necessities, even in luxuries like sugar and butter, for many months. The money, combined with the extra ration card, would make me a hero in the family, and I dreamed of impressing my soon-to-be-sisters, who all would look up to me and call me uncle.

— You can start your own store, Achor Achor said one night.

This was true. Immediately I liked the idea, and thereafter this too became part of the larger plan. I'd long wanted to start a small retail outfit, a canteen, outside my shelter, where I would sell foods and also pens, pencils, soap, slippers, dried fish, and whatever soda I could get my hands on. Because I was trusted by those who knew me, I was confident that if I offered my goods at a fair price I would do well, and once I had some capital, the stocking of the canteen would be no problem. I remembered lessons from my father's store in Marial Bai, and knew that in such matters customer relations were crucial.

— But you'll need more than the two shirts and pants, Achor Achor noted.-You'll need two pairs of pants, three shirts, and at least two blankets, wool ones.

Finally the plan became real. I would be leaving at the next opportunity, the next time the roads were considered safe. I was given a backpack by Gop's cousin, a sturdy vinyl apparatus with zippers and many compartments. Inside I placed the two pairs of pants, the three shirts, the wool blanket, and a bag of nuts and crackers and peanut butter for the trip. I planned to leave early in the morning, to sneak out from Kakuma IV, and then walk the mile or so to the main road to Loki, which I would follow, avoiding Kenyan police, camp guards, and passing cars.

— But you can't leave during the day! Gop sighed when he heard of this part of the plan.-You leave at night, you dope.

So the plan was altered again. At night I would not be seen by anyone. The official way to leave Kakuma was with an approved refugee travel document. But I had no legitimate business leaving, and even if I did, applying for such a document could take months. If I had connections at the UNHCR, I might be able to get my application expedited, but I knew no one well enough that they would risk anything for me.

That left one remedy, the most popular and speedy, that being the bribing of the Kenyan guards along the road. Kakuma was never a gated camp; the refugees could walk out of the camp if they wished, but very soon, along the main road, they would be stopped by Kenyan police at stations or in Land Rovers, and the traveler would have to present his or her refugee-travel document. It was at that moment that a traveler without a document would have to present an appropriate incentive for the officer to look the other way. Night travel was recommended, for the simple fact that the less upstanding officers were given the night shifts, and there were fewer of them.

So finally I was ready to go. But first we would wait for Gop's family, to make sure there were still three daughters and one wife. Though they had sent word months before that the four of them would be arriving together, there were no such guarantees in Sudan. Gop and I did not talk about this, but we knew it to be true. Anything can happen during so long a trip.

In the end they arrived, everyone intact, though they appeared without warning. One morning, Gop Chol and I walked to the tap to get more water, so that no one would have to retrieve it for a few days. As we approached the tap, we saw, in the distance, a Red Cross van steaming through the dust. We both stood, knowing that it was unusual to see a van in our part of the camp, and at the same time, we both wondered, Could it be? Gop had received word a week earlier that his family might be transferred sometime soon, but there had been no news since. We watched the van slow as it approached our home, and when it came to a stop it was in front of our door and Gop was running. I ran after him. Gop was not a fast runner, so I overtook him quickly. When we were within sight of the van, Gop began yelling. He sounded maniacal and unwell.

— Aha! Aha! You are here! You are here!

They couldn't hear us yet. We were a few hundred yards away.

A tiny girl, frail and in a white dress, stepped out of the van first, followed by two more girls, each taller than the last but both under eight years old, also in white. They stood, squinting in the sunlight, flattening their dresses over their legs. They were followed by a beautiful woman in green, the green of rain-soaked elephant leaves. She stood, guarded her eyes from the sun, and looked around at Kakuma.

— You are here! You are here!

Gop was yelling but wasn't close enough to be heard. He ran, waving his arms wildly. Soon he was near enough for the woman in green to see him, but only as a vague shape in the dust. I had run ahead and could see his family clearly.

— Hello! he yelled.

She turned her head to him and gave him the kind of disgusted look reserved for drunkards and the raving mad. The driver helped them with a few bags he retrieved from the back, and deposited them on the ground in front of the house.

— It's me! It's me! Gop was screaming, and it was evident that his running toward them was making the girls, and their mother, uncomfortable.

Gop was no more than one hundred yards away when he seemed to change his mind. He slowed and then stopped, and then ducked out of the road. I followed him as he dodged between the anarchic maze of homes nearby. We were now out of sight of the road and Gop's family. He leaped over the low fences of the neighboring homes and under the clotheslines and around the sad stringy chickens kept by our neighbors, until he was at the back door of the home we shared. He entered his home and I followed him. I could hear someone at the front door, and guessed it was the Red Cross driver, whose knocking was loud and impatient.

Gop was in his bedroom.

— Don't answer the door! he begged me.-Let me change. I waited by the door.

— I don't want them to know I was the man screaming down the road.

By now, I had guessed as much. I waited by the door as Gop splashed and straightened and cleaned. In a minute he emerged, freshened and wearing his finest white shirt and clean khakis.

— I'm ready, yes?

I nodded, and opened the door. Gop strode through, his arms wide.

— My wife! My daughters!

And he lifted the girls, one after the other, starting with the oldest and finishing with the youngest and most delicate, a tiny girl he kept on his arm for the better part of the day, as they unpacked and ate. The family had brought many foods from Sudan, and he and I showed the women the house we had constructed for them.

— There was a crazy man running down the road, his wife eventually said, as she arranged sheets on the girls' beds.-Did you hear him?

Gop sighed.-There are all types here, my darling.

I became close with Gop's wife, Ayen, and their daughters, Abuk, Adeng, and Awot. The restructuring of the household, which was extensive, changed my life and worked to everyone's advantage. Because Gop and his wife now needed a bedroom of their own, we built another one, and the girls moved into the one that he and I used to share. Gop and his wife wouldn't have me sleeping in the room with the girls, so a separate bedroom was built for me, and in the middle of building it, we had an idea: it was unusual for a boy my age to have his own room, and Gop and I knew of plenty of boys who would gladly move in with us and would help bring in more income and food, so invitations were extended to Achor Achor and three other boys, all students of Gop's, and my bedroom was built to accommodate five boys. When we were done, the household had grown from two to ten in one week.

There were four shelters now, all of them attached, and a kitchen and common room in the middle and it made for a very large household with many young people moving within it. It was never a question of whether or not all us kids would get along; there was no choice but to become a perfect machine, all of us parts moving in sync, peacefully and without complaint.

Every day, all eight of us kids would wake up at six o'clock and together go to the water tap to fill our jerry cans for our showers. The water would run from the tap starting at six o'clock; it was then that everyone in our region of the camp, about twenty thousand people, had to get their own water for washing; the water for cooking and cleaning was retrieved later. The line at the tap was always long, until years later, when the UN dug more taps. But at that time, there were commonly over a hundred people in line when the taps came alive. At home we would all shower and dress for school. During those years, breakfast was not eaten at Kakuma-it was not until 1998 that there was enough food for morning meals-so if we consumed anything before leaving the house it was water or tea; there was enough for one meal a day, and that came at dinner, together, after school and work.

We all attended the same school, a short walk away, with an enrollment just under one thousand. First there would be an assembly, where announcements would be made, and we all would be given the advice of the day. Often the advice pertained to hygiene and nutrition, an odd subject given how poorly we were fed. Just as often, it would cover malfeasance and punishment. If any students had been misbehaving, there would be retribution then and there, with a quick caning or verbal reprimand in front of the student body. Then there would be prayer, or the singing of a hymn, for all of the students in that school were Christians, at least as far as we could tell. If there were Muslims, they were very quiet about their faith, not protesting then or during the regular sessions in what they called Christian Religious Instruction.

There were sixty-eight students in my class. We stayed in one classroom throughout the day, sitting on the dirt, as our instructors, specialists in English, Kiswahili, Math, Science, Home Science, Geography, Agriculture, and Arts & Crafts & Music moved in and out. I enjoyed school and was well liked by my teachers, but many of my friends had stopped attending classes. They were impatient with it, could not see the point, and went into the markets to make money. They would trade their rations for clothes, sell the clothes in the camp and turn a profit. And of course they continued to leave Kakuma for the SPLA, and we would hear soon enough about who had been shot, who had been burned, who had been separated from his limbs by a grenade.

On the days food was distributed, we kids would be sent to the UN compound, where we would line up. The UN workers or the LWF workers would scoop food from the trucks, first checking the ID cards and ration cards of each recipient. On the way back, we would carry the bags of grain or sorghum the mile home, either on our heads or shoulders, resting frequently. We all complained about retrieving the rations, and on the rare occasions when someone missed the distribution, when they slept late or were late getting into line, the ration would not be brought home and the family would be affected. Backup plans had to be made and carried out, to ensure the family ate. It was time for my recycling trip.

I had my backpack and good shoes and-

— Do you have a hat? Gop's daughter Awot asked me.

— Why would I need a hat?

— What if there's someone at Loki who knows you when you come back?

She was a brilliant girl, this Awot. So I included Achor Achor's prized Houston Astros hat in the backpack and finally I was ready. It was midnight when the family saw me off. Gop did not seem to fear for my life, so I took our goodbye lightly and the girls followed suit. Achor Achor walked me to the border between Kakuma and the great beyond, and when I turned to the leave, he grabbed my arm and wished me luck.

— Did you bring your ration card? he asked me.

And I had indeed brought my ration card, a grave mistake. If I was robbed by the Turkana, or interrogated by the Kenyan police, or asked to empty my pockets by the officials at Loki, my original ration card would be taken, and the entire point of the trip would be lost. So I gave my ration card to Achor Achor, we patted each other on the back like men, and I was off into the night, with no identifying papers on me. I was new, I was no one.

I had been told that if I came upon any Kenyan police along the road, a bribe would be requested and I soon would be on my way. And this is precisely what happened: within a few miles of Kakuma it happened three times. Each set of guards were bought with fifty shillings and were exceedingly polite and businesslike about the transaction. I might as well have been buying fruit from a sidewalk grocer.

I walked through the night perhaps too cheerfully, thinking my trip charmed and knowing I would be successful. With any luck I would be back at Kakuma, with six thousand shillings and another ration card in three days' time.

I arrived at Loki in the early hours, found the dirt roads empty, and slept inside a compound maintained by Save the Children, an NGO we knew well: they had been supplying food to the starving in southern Sudan for years. Loki is dotted with these NGO staging areas, which are in most cases no more than small shacks or adobe houses, surrounded by wooden fences or gates of corrugated steel. Save the Children, back then and still today, works closely with the Sudanese, and their people are always willing to help those of us coming to Kakuma or leaving for Sudan.

When I woke up I saw first the feet of a man standing over me, talking to another man on the other side of the fence. The man almost stepping on me, I learned, was named Thomas. He was a bit older than me, had been SPLA, but left during the split between Garang and Machar. When he was done speaking to the man over the fence, he turned his attention to me.

— So what's your situation? he asked. I told him a general version of my plan.

— How much money do you have?

I told him I had only fifty shillings left.

— Then how do you intend to get your papers from the SPLM?

I had not been told that these papers would cost money. I knew if I entered SPLA-controlled territory, I would need an SPLA/SPLM-issued identification card, but I thought they would provide it for free. The SPLA/SPLM, I had been told, would put any name you wanted on the document, and I had planned to give them a name similar enough that it would be regionally correct; that way I would be able to answer any questions about clans in my part of Sudan. With the new document, I would ride back to Loki, sell the goats, and, at the Loki immigration office, I would hand them my documents and claim to be in danger if I returned to Sudan. I would be processed as a refugee, and under my new name be granted admission to Kakuma.

— No money left, huh? Thomas said.-You just left last night! Thomas gave me a curious smile, his head tilted.

— Poor planning, Achak. Do you have a new name chosen? No doubt you'll be glad to be rid of Achak.

I told him Valentine Deng would be my new name.

— Not bad. I like that, Valentine. There are a few other Valentines around. It won't look suspicious. Listen, here's fifty shillings. You can pay me back next time you come through. I'm here a lot; I do some business here and there. You take the fifty shillings, combine it with yours, you have one hundred. That might be enough if the SPLM takes pity on you. Give me a pitiful face, Valentine Deng.

I turned my mouth downward into a pout, and teared my eyes.

— Wow, not bad, Valentine. Impressive. You have a ride? I did not have a ride.

— Oh lord. Never have I encountered such an unprepared traveler. If you give me the face again I'll tell you where to get a ride into Narus. I gave him the look again.

— That is really a pitiful look, son. I congratulate you. Okay. There's a truck coming from Sudan right now. It's down the road and one of the drivers is a friend of mine, cousin to my wife. It's going back to Sudan in a few minutes. You ready?

— I am, I said.

— Good, he said. Here it comes.

And indeed a truck pulled up at that moment, a standard flatbed truck, the sort I was accustomed to seeing full of passengers. It was a dream, it seemed, to have found a direct ride so quickly. I had only been awake five minutes. The truck shook to a halt in front of Save the Children. Thomas spoke to the driver for a few minutes and then gave me the signal. The engine rumbled awake and the tires chewed the gravel.

— Go, fool! Go! Thomas yelled to me.

I gathered my bag and ran after the truck and jumped onto the back bumper. I turned to wave to Thomas, but he had gone inside the compound, finished with me. I threw my bag in and climbed over the back door. My first foot landed on something soft.

— Excuse me! I gasped.

It was then that I saw that I had stepped on a person. The truckbed was filled with people, fifteen or more. But they were grey, white, covered in blood. These people were dead. I was stepping on the chest of a man who made no protestation. I jumped off his chest and onto the hand of a woman who also offered no objection. I stood on one foot, my other foot hovering over the exposed innards of a boy only a bit older than myself.

— Careful, boy! There are a few of us still alive.

I turned to find a man, an elderly man, lying prone and twisted like a root, near the back of the truck.-I'm sorry, I said.

The truck jerked and the old man's head hit the back hatch. He moaned.

We were moving, and the truck quickly picked up speed. I gripped the side of the truck and tried not to look at its cargo. I looked into the sky but then the smell overtook me. I gagged.

— You'll become accustomed to it, the man said.-It's a human smell.

I tried to move my foot but found it stuck; blood covered the truck floor. I wanted to jump but the truck was traveling too fast. I looked forward, wanting to get the attention of the driver. A head emerged from the passenger side of the truck cab. A cheerful man hoisted himself so he was sitting on the window ledge, looking back at me. He seemed to be an SPLA soldier, but it was difficult to tell.

— How are you back there, Red Army?

— I'd like to get out please, I stammered. The maybe-rebel laughed.

— I'll walk back. Please. Please, uncle. He laughed until tears filled his eyes.

— Oh Red Army. You are too much.

Then he slipped back into the cab.

A moment later, the truck swerved and I lost my footing, and for a second I found my knee in the broken thigh of a dead soldier, whose open eyes stared into the sun. As I raised myself, I glanced over the contents of truckbed. The corpses were arranged as if they had been thrown. Nothing held them in place.

— It's pitiful, it is, the old man said.-Many of us were alive when we left Sudan. I've been keeping the vultures away. A dog jumped aboard yesterday. He was hungry. The truck jumped again and my foot slipped on something viscous.

— The dogs now, they have a taste for people. They go straight for the face. Did you know that? It was lucky that one of the men in the cab heard the dog. They stopped the truck and shot it. Now it's just the four of us, he said.

Four aboard were yet alive, though it was difficult to find them, and I was not sure the old man was correct. I glanced to a body next to him. At first it seemed that this man's arms were hidden. But now it was clear, because I could see the white bones of his shoulders, that the man's arms had been removed.

The truck swerved wildly again. My right foot landed on the arm of a teenage boy, wearing a blue camouflage uniform and a floppy hat.

— He's still alive, I think, the old man said.-Though he hasn't spoken today.

I raised myself again and heard wild laughter from the truck cab. They'd swerved on purpose, each time. The cheerful man's head again appeared from the passenger window.

— The driver is very sorry, Red Army, he said.-There was a lizard in the road and he was very concerned about killing such a creature of God.

— Please uncle, I said. I don't want to be here. I want to leave. If you could only slow down a bit, I'll jump off. You don't need to stop.

— Don't worry, Red Army, the maybe-rebel said. His face and tone were suddenly serious, even compassionate.-We only have to drop the wounded at Lopiding Hospital, and then bury the bodies over the hill, and we'll have an empty truck all the way to Sudan. Wherever you need to go.

The truck had taken a bump and the man's head had struck the top of the window frame. Soon he was inside the truck again, yelling at the driver. For a moment the truck slowed and I thought I had a chance.

— Take the ride, boy. It was the old man.

— How else will you get to Sudan? he said. He looked at me then, as if for the first time.

— Why are you going back, anyway, boy?

I did not consider telling the man the truth, that I was trying to recycle, to get another ration card. It would seem ridiculous to a man struggling to live. The people of southern Sudan had their problems, and by comparison the mechanisms of Kakuma, where everyone was fed and was safe, were not worth mentioning.

— To find my family, I said.

— They're dead, he said.-Sudan is dead. We won't ever live there again. This is your home now. Kenya. Be glad for it. This is your home and it will always be your home.

A sigh came from below my feet. The teenage boy turned over, his hands praying under his ear as if he were comfortably at home on a pillow of feathers. I looked down at him, determined that I should focus on him, for he seemed most at peace. My eyes assessed him quickly-I could not control them, and cursed them for their speed and curiosity-and realized that the boy's left leg was missing. It was now a stump covered with a bandage fashioned from a canvas tarpaulin and rubber bands cobwebbed to his waist.

The ride, I now know, was less than an hour, but it is impossible to convey how long it seemed that day. I had covered my mouth but still I gagged continuously: I felt chills, and my neck seemed numb. I felt sure that this truck represented the devil's most visible deeds, that in every way it symbolized his work on Earth. I knew I was being tested, and I rode until the truck finally slowed upon reaching the driveway to the Lopiding Hospital.

Without hesitation I jumped over the side and tumbled onto the ground. I meant to outrun the truck and find safe haven in the clinic. Upon landing on the hard dirt, I needed a moment to re-engage with the world, to know that I was not dead myself, that I had not been cast into Hell. I stood and felt my legs and arms working and so I ran.

— Wait, Red Army! Where are you going?

I ran from the truck, which was slowly traversing a series of potholes. I ran and outpaced the vehicle easily, aiming myself for a building on the end of the compound.

Lopiding was a series of tents and a few white brick buildings, sky-blue roofs, acacia trees, plastic chairs set outside for waiting patients. I ran to the back of a building and almost knocked over a man holding a false arm.

— Careful, boy!

The man was Kenyan, middle-aged. He spoke to me in Kiswahili. All around him were the makings of new feet, legs, arms, faces.

— Hey Red Army! Come now. It was the soldier from the truck.

— Take this. Put it on.

The Kenyan gave me a mask, red, too small for me. I sank my face into it. I could see through the holes for eyes and the Kenyan tied it closed.

— Thank you, I said.

He was a constant-smiling man, heavy-jowled and with great sloping shoulders.

— No need, he said.-Are they still looking for you?

I peered around the corner. The two men from the truck were walking toward the building. They went inside for a moment and returned to the truck with a canvas stretcher. They first unloaded the old man, and brought him inside. They returned to the truck and retrieved the teenage boy with the missing leg, and he lay on the stretcher just as he had in the truck, looking as comfortable as could be. These were the only two passengers who disembarked at Lopiding. The rest were dead or would soon be dead. The men threw the stretcher into the back of the truck and the driver climbed into the cab. The other man, maybe-rebel who taunted me, stood with one hand on the door handle.

— Red Army! Time to go! You can ride in the cab this time! he yelled.

Now I was unsure. If I did not take this ride I would probably not get another. I stepped out from the building. The maybe-rebel looked directly at me. He dropped his hand from the truck, and tilted his head. He was staring into me, but made no movement, and neither did I. I felt safe behind the mask. I knew he would not know me. He turned from me and yelled up into the trees, looking for the boy who had been in the truck.

— I'm sorry, boy! the man yelled.-I promise we'll take you to Sudan. Safe and sound. Last chance.

I stepped forward, toward the truck. The Kenyan grabbed my arm.

— Don't go. They'll get a price for you. The SPLA would be happy to have a new recruit. Those guys would be paid well for delivering you. It was an impossible decision.

— I'll get you back to Sudan if you need to go, the Kenyan said.-I don't know how, but I will. I just don't want you getting killed over there. You're too skinny to fight. You know what they do, right? You train for two weeks and then they send you to the front. Please. Just wait here a second till they leave.

I wanted so badly to join the men in the truck, wanted to believe their promise to keep me with them, in the cab, to deliver me safely over the border. And yet I found myself trusting the Kenyan, whom I did not know, more than my own countrymen. This happened occasionally and always it was a conundrum.

I was still standing in full view of the man from the truck, and again he fixed his eyes on me. It was so pleasing to wear that mask, to be invisible!

— Final chance, Red Army! he said to the boy he thought he was looking for.

The man shielded his eyes from the sun, still trying to figure out why this boy with a mask seemed so familiar. And still I stood, emboldened, until he finally turned back to the truck, lifted himself into it, and left in a cloud. The Kenyan and I watched the truck disappear into the orange dust.

I didn't want to remove the new face. I knew that the Kenyan would not give it to me, and I wondered briefly if I could escape with it at that moment. Perhaps the mask would make it possible to run-back to Kakuma or into Sudan-undetected. I luxuriated in the thought of presenting this new face to all the world, a new face, without marks, blemishes, a face that told no tales.

— Doesn't fit you, boy, the Kenyan said. His hand was on my shoulder, his grip strong enough that I knew escape was impossible. I took the mask off and handed it to the Kenyan.

— Where will they bring the bodies? I asked.

— They're supposed to bring them back to Sudan, but this is not done. They'll drop them in the creek and take paying passengers back to Sudan.

— They'll bury them at the creek?

— They won't bury them. Does it make a difference? They get buried, they're eaten by worms and beetles. They don't bury them, they're eaten by dogs and hyenas.

The man was named Abraham. He was a doctor of sorts, a maker of prosthetics. His shop was behind the hospital, under a yawning tree. He promised me lunch if I could wait an hour. I was happy to wait. I did not know what doctors ate for lunch but I imagined it was extravagant.

— What are you making now? I asked.

He was fashioning something like an arm or shin.

— Where do you live? he asked.

— Kakuma I.

— Did you hear an explosion last week?

I nodded. It had been quick, a pop, like the sound of a mine coming alive.

— A soldier, SPLA, a very young one, was visiting his family in the camp. This was Kakuma II. He had brought some souvenirs home to show his siblings. One of the souvenirs was a grenade, so here I am, making a new arm for the soldier's little brother. He is nine. How old are you?

I didn't know. I guessed that I was thirteen.

— I've been doing this since 1987. I was here when they opened Lopiding. It was fifty beds then, one big tent. They thought it would be temporary. Now there are four hundred beds and they add more every week.

Abraham carved the plastic as it cooled.

— Who is this for? I said, picking up the mask I had worn.

— A boy's face was burned off. There's much of that. The kids want to look at the bombs. One boy last year had been thrown onto a fire.

He held his creation to the light. It was a leg, a small one, for a person smaller than me. He turned it around and around, and seemed satisfied.

— Do you like chicken, boy? It's time for lunch.

Abraham brought me to a buffet line, arranged in the courtyard. Twenty doctors and nurses lined up in their uniforms, blue and white. They were a mixed bunch: Kenyans, whites, Indians, one nurse who looked like a very light-skinned Arab. Abraham helped me with my plate, filling it with chicken and rice and lettuce.

— Sit over here, son, he said, nodding his head to a small bench under a tree.-You don't want to sit with the doctors. They'll ask questions, and you never know where that might lead. I don't know what kind of trouble you're in.

He watched me tear into my chicken and rice; I hadn't had meat in months. He took a bite of a drumstick and stared at me.

— What kind of trouble are you in?

— I'm in no trouble, I said.

— How did you get out of Kakuma? I hesitated.

— Tell me. I'm a man who makes arms. I'm not an immigration officer. I told him about sneaking away and bribing the police officers.

— Amazing how easy it is still, right? I love my country, but graft is as much part of life as the air or soil. It's not so bad to live in Kenya, right? When you're old enough, I'm sure you'll find a way out of the camp, and to Nairobi. There you can find some kind of job, I'm sure, maybe even go to school. You seem smart, and there are thousands of Sudanese in the city. Where are your parents?

I told him I didn't know. I was dizzy with the taste of chicken.

— I'm sure they're fine, he said, examining his chicken and choosing the location for his next bite. With his mouth full, he nodded.-I'm sure they lived. Did you see them killed?

— No.

— Well then, there's hope. They probably think you're dead, too, and here you are in Kenya, eating chicken and drinking soda.

I believed the words of Abraham, simply because he was educated and Kenyan and perhaps had access to information that we did not inside the camp. The separation of life inside Kakuma and in the rest of the world seemed completely impenetrable. We saw and met people from all over the world, but had virtually no hope of ever visiting any other place, including the Kenya beyond Loki. And so I took Abraham's words as those of a prophet.

We finished our lunch, which was delicious and by volume too much for me to consume; my stomach was not accustomed to this much food in one sitting.

— How will you get back to Kakuma? Abraham asked. I told him I still intended to try to make my way to Narus.

— Not this time, son. You've seen enough for this trip.

He was right, of course. I had no will left. I was broken for now, and the plan was broken and all I could do now was return to Kakuma, with nothing gained or lost. I thanked Abraham and we promised to meet again, and he put me on an ambulance going to Loki. There, I waited for any trucks going to Kakuma whose drivers would not ask questions. I saw no sign of Thomas and so did not venture into the Save the Children compound. I walked up and down the dirt roads of Loki, hoping an opportunity would reveal itself before nightfall, when I knew that the Turkana would see me as a target.

— Hey kid.

I turned. It was a man, his nose broken and bulbous. He seemed Turkana but might have been anything else-Kenyan, Sudanese, Ugandan. He spoke to me in Arabic.

— What's your name?

I told him I was Valentino.

— What do you have there?

He was very interested in the contents of my bag. I gave him a brief look inside.

— Ah yes! he said, suddenly grinning, his smile as broad as a hammock. He had heard, he said, that there was a very smart young Sudanese man who possessed clothing from Kakuma Town. He seemed a kind and even charming man, so I told him about the trip, the truck, the bodies, Abraham, and the broken plan.

— Well, maybe it's not a total loss, he said.-How much would you take for all of it, the pants and shirts and the blanket?

We volleyed a few prices until we settled on seven hundred shillings. It was not what I had hoped for, but it was far more than I would have gotten in Kakuma, and double what I had paid for the clothes.

— You're a good businessman, the man said.-Very shrewd. I had not thought of myself as a good businessman until that moment, but certainly this man's comment seemed true. I had just doubled my money.

— So seven hundred shillings! he said.-I have to pay it, you've got me over a barrel. I haven't seen pants like this here in Loki. I'll bring you the money tonight.

— Tonight?

— Yes, I have to wait here for my wife. She's at the hospital, too, having an infection checked on. She's with our baby, who we fear has some kind of dangerous cough. But they said she'll be back in a few hours and then we return to Kakuma. Will you be around at eight o'clock?

The man was taking the bag from my hands and I found myself saying yes, of course, that I would be there at eight o'clock. There was something trustworthy about him, or perhaps I was just too tired to be sensible. In any case, I wished the man well, sent my blessings to the man's wife and baby, improved health to the three of them. The man walked away with my clothes.

— Don't you need to know where I live? I asked him as he shrank into the crimson light of one of the shops.

The man turned and did not seem at all flustered.

— I assumed I would ask for the famous Valentino!

I gave him my address anyway, and then went out to the road leading back to Kakuma. After walking for a short while, I realized that I had been swindled, and that the man would never come to Kakuma. I had just given my clothes to a stranger and had sent to the wind the only commodity I had. I walked the entire distance back to Kakuma, watching trucks pass; I did not ask for a ride and did not have bribe money. I moved only in shadows, for I knew if I were caught all would be lost, and I would lose all my benefits, such as they were, as a refugee. I darted from bush to bush, ditch to ditch, crawling and scraping and breathing too loudly, as I had when I first ran from my home. Each exhalation was a falling tree and my mind went mad with the noise of it all, but I deserved the turmoil. I deserved nothing better. I wanted to be alone with my stupidity, which I cursed in three languages and with all my spleen.

CHAPTER 23

The dream came to me once a month, with startling regularity. Usually it arrived on Sunday afternoon, when I had a chance to nap. All week would be work and school but on Sunday I had no responsibilities at all and it was then that I read and roamed the camp and, in the late afternoon, lay with my head in the shade of my shelter, my legs naked to the sun, and I slept a deep and satisfying sleep.

But the river dream kept me from my rest. When I dreamt it, I woke up troubled and I woke up driven.

In the dream I was many people in the way in a dream one can be many people at once. I was myself, I was my teacher, Mr. Kondit, and I was Dut. I knew this in the dream as one always knows who one is and isn't in a dream. I was a combination of these two men and I was floating in a river. The river was partly the river of my home, Marial Bai, and partly the river Gilo, and in the river with me were dozens of boys.

They were young boys I knew. Some were the boys under my charge at Kakuma, some of them born in the camp, and there were boys who had never left boyhood: William K, Deng, the boys taken back to God along our walk. We were all in the river, and I was trying to teach my students in the river. All of the students, about thirty boys, were treading water in the river, and I was treading water, too, shouting lessons about English verb forms to the boys floating in the river. The water was rough, and I was frustrated with the difficulty of trying to teach these boys under such circumstances. The boys, for their part, were trying their best to concentrate while also treading water and ducking the waves that periodically upset the calm of the river. The boys periodically disappeared behind a wave and then reappeared when the wave was gone. And all the while I knew the water was cold. It was so wonderfully cold, like the water given to me by the man who did not exist in the desert of the barbed wire.

I would float high on a wave of cold water and was then able, for a few moments, to see the heads of all of my students as they tried their best to see me and hear me, but then I would descend into the wave's valley, and could see only a wall of coffee-colored water. Always at this point in the dream, when the waves had become walls, I would return to be myself again, and from here on, the dream would take place largely under the coffee-colored water. I would find myself on the river's bottom, among the green tentacles of the underwater plants, and there at the bottom were bodies. Those boys who were trying to listen to me were at the river's bottom now, and it was my job to send them again to the surface. I knew it was my job and I performed it with a workmanlike efficiency. I would find a boy underwater, not dead, but sitting on the floor of the river, and I would put my hands under his arms and then send him upward. It was simple work.

I would see a boy and would position myself under him, placing my hands under his arms and then I would lift him upward. I did this knowing that once I did so, that boy would be safe. He would live and breathe the air above again once I had sent him to the surface. While I did this, a part of me worried that I would tire. There was so much sending-up to do, and I was underwater for so long-surely I would tire and some boys would be lost. But my worries were unfounded. In the dream I never tired, and I did not need to breathe. I moved under the water, from boy to boy to boy, and I lifted them to the air and the light.

— Achak, they whispered to me, and I pushed them to the surface.

— Valentine, they whispered, and I pushed them up.

— Dominic! they whispered, and I pushed them up and up.

I was now eighteen years old. I had been at Kakuma six years. I was still living with Gop Chol and his family, and during that time I had dreamt this dream perhaps a hundred times, and its message was clear to me: I was responsible to the next line of boys. We were all treading water together, and I was meant to teach. So at Kakuma camp, I became a teacher, and at the same time, I became Dominic.

The name Valentine had been supplanted, at least in the minds of many, by the name Dominic, and though I did not prefer this nickname, it stuck to me tenaciously. It was my association with Miss Gladys, my own teacher and by all accounts the most desirable woman at Kakuma, that brought the name Dominic upon me, and so I made no complaints. Miss Gladys was my drama instructor and later my history teacher, a young woman of extraordinary light and grace. It was Miss Gladys who brought me in touch with Tabitha, and it was Miss Gladys who brought me to the lights of Nairobi and to the potential for escape from the winds and drought of Kakuma. It was while holding the hand of Miss Gladys that I listened to Deborah Agok, a traveling midwife who knew the fate of my family and my town. This was an eventful time for me and for so many young men at Kakuma, even though that year in southern Sudan, the Dinka who remained would know a horrible famine, created by God and helped along by Khartoum.

El Nino had brought about two years of drought, and aid was desperately needed in the south. Hundreds of thousands in Bahr al-Ghazal faced starvation, and Bashir took this opportunity to ban all flights over southern Sudan. The region was effectively cut off from relief, and when it did make its way through, it was first intercepted by the SPLA and local chiefs, who did not always see to its equitable distribution. All this made the prospect of living at Kakuma even more attractive, and the camp's population swelled. But once a person had escaped the mayhem of Sudan, and once that person was legitimately recognized as part of Kakuma, entitled to its services and protection, there was little to do but pass the time. Besides school, this meant clubs, theatrical productions, HIV-awareness programs, puppetry-even pen pals from Japan.

The Japanese were very interested in Kakuma on many levels, and it started with the pen pal project. The letters from the Japanese schoolchildren were written in English, and it was difficult to know whose English was worse. Just how much information was actually transmitted from Kenya to Tokyo and Kyoto was debatable, but it was important to me, and to the hundred others who participated. After a year of letters, the Japanese boys and girls who had been writing arrived at Kakuma one day, blinking in the dust and shielding their eyes from the sun. They stayed for three days and visited our classrooms and watched traditional dancing from the Sudanese and Somali zones of the camp, and I was not sure how much stranger the camp could become. I had seen Germans, Canadians, people so white they looked like candles.

But the Japanese continued coming, and continued giving, with a particular interest in the youth at the camp, which of course accounted for about 60 percent of Kakuma's residents. The Japanese built the Kakuma Hospital, which could treat the cases that couldn't wait for Lopiding. They built the Kakuma community library and donated thousands of basketballs, soccer balls, volleyballs, and uniforms so the youth might play these sports with a degree of dignity and panache.

The Lutheran World Federation was the primary administrator of many of the cultural projects, and found their instructors among the Kenyans and the Sudanese. I first joined the LWF's public speaking and debating club, hoping it would help with my English. Soon after, I joined the Youth and Culture program, and this would grow into a job for me. In 1997 I became Kakuma I's youth leader. This was a paying occupation, something very few of my friends, and none of the children in my Kakuma family, possessed. Youth was considered anyone between seven and twenty-four years old, so in our part of the camp, this was six thousand youths. I was the liaison between the UNHCR and these kids, and Achor Achor was more impressed by this job than he had been years before, when I was a burial boy.

— I'll be here if you need advice, he said.

Achor Achor had just acquired glasses, and looked very studious and far more serious than before. Everything that left his mouth seemed suddenly to carry the weight of deep contemplation and far-reaching intellect.

— I will, I said.

As the youth leader and coordinator of Kakuma I's youth activities, I came into contact with Miss Gladys, who soon every boy at Kakuma would know and would think about often at night and alone.

She was assigned to be the instructor for the Drama Club, of which I was a member and the ostensible student director. Twelve members of the group were present on our first day, ten boys and two girls, and for this one meeting I was the director. We were told by the LWF that the group's adult sponsor and instructor would arrive for our second meeting. It was because I was the director by default that I could try to convince Maria to attend. I went to visit her one afternoon after school, two days before the first meeting. I found her hanging the laundry behind her adoptive family's shelter.-Hello Sleeper, she said.

She did not hide her foul mood. She never did. When she was down, her shoulders slumped, and her face frowned almost comically. She had not been to school in weeks; the man acting as her father had decided it was too problematic for her to both attend classes and properly help with the chores at home. His wife was pregnant, and he insisted that Maria be on hand should she need anything. As the baby grew within the womb of his wife, he said, she would need more help as the weeks and months went on. School, he said, was a luxury an orphan girl like her could not afford.

Neither Maria nor I had hopes that she would be a long-term member of the drama group, but I convinced her to come to the first meeting. We arrived together and, with the other members, we read aloud the first few scenes of a play Miss Gladys had written. Maria, playing the lead, a woman beaten by her husband, took to it immediately. I knew she was a spirited person, for she had saved my life on the night of the spilled stars. But I did not suspect she had the soul of an actress.

Maria attended the second meeting of the group, but I do not remember much about what she said or did, for this heralded the arrival of Miss Gladys. When Miss Gladys emerged, I ceded all authority and thereafter barely spoke at all.

Miss Gladys was a young Kenyan, long necked and favoring floor-length skirts that swished flamboyantly as she walked. She immediately admitted that she did not have vast theatrical experience, and yet was in every way a performer, a woman who knew the power of every word she breathed and gesture she made. In her mind and in reality, there were no moments when she was not being watched.

She was very adept at writing, we learned, having been educated for two years in England, at the University of East Anglia, where she had polished the English she'd learned in Nairobi's best private schools.

— What is that accent? we asked each other later.

— It sounds very well-educated.

— One day she will be my wife, we said.

We could not understand why someone as regal and clean as Miss Gladys-she did not perspire! — would spend her time with refugees such as us. That she actually enjoyed our company, and she really seemed to, was too much to contemplate. She smiled at the boys among the group in a way that could only be considered flirtatious, and she clearly appreciated the attention she received. The girls, meanwhile, did their best to like her despite it all.

The purpose of the club under her stewardship was to write and perform one-act plays that would illuminate problems at Kakuma and offer solutions in a non-pedantic manner. If there were misunderstandings, for example, about the risks of HIV infection, it was not possible to print flyers or air public-service announcements on television. We had to communicate first through dramatizations, and then hope that our messages would be entertaining, would be learned, internalized, and disseminated from person to person, mouth to ear.

But Miss Gladys could not remember who, among us boys, was who. Among the ten boys was a boy named Dominic Dut Mathiang, who was by far the most humorous boy at Kakuma. The funniest Sudanese boy, at least; I did not know how humorous the Ugandans were. Very soon, at the first meeting of the club under Miss Gladys's direction, she took to Dominic Dut Mathiang and laughed at every joke he made.

— Your name is what again? she asked.

— Dominic, he said.

— Dominic! I love that name!

And so the fate of the ten boys of our drama company was sealed, for she could not remember the names of the rest of us. She said she was not good at names, and this seemed to be true. She rarely referred to the girls by name, and it seemed the only name she could access readily was Dominic. And so we all became Dominic. At first it was a mistake. One day she absentmindedly referred to me, too, as Dominic.

— I'm sorry, she said.-You both have both Italian names, correct?

— Yes, I said.-Mine is Valentine.

She apologized, but called me Dominic again the next day. I didn't care. I did not care at all. I agreed with her that our names were very similar. I agreed very much with everything she said, though I did not always listen to the words coming from her beautiful mouth. So she called me Dominic, and she called the other boys Dominic, and we stopped correcting her. She began to simply call us all Dominic. Not one of us cared, and besides, she didn't need our names very often. We never took our eyes off her, so she needed only to direct her eyes, guarded by lashes of remarkable length and curvature, to whomever she was speaking.

We boys talked about her during all our available hours. We held special meetings, in the home of the real Dominic, Dominic Dut Mathiang, to discuss her merits.-Her teeth aren't real, one boy suggested.

— Yeah. I heard she had them fixed in England.

— In England? You're crazy. People don't do that in England.

— But they can't be real. Look at our teeth and then at hers.

Our first play was called Forced Marriage, and it sought to dramatize and offer alternatives to the traditional Sudanese way. I played the part of an elder who disagreed with the idea of forcing young women into loveless marriages. In the play, my position was opposed by many other elders, who thought the existing system was best. The majority won in the end, and the girl in the play in question was given away. We left it to our youth audiences to decide that allowing this system to remain was unacceptable.

We performed this first play dozens of times all over Kakuma, and because it was occasionally humorous and in large part because Miss Gladys made an appearance-as the sister to the bride-it was very well liked and we were urged to continue. So we wrote and performed dramas about AIDS and how to prevent it. We wrote a play about anger management and conflict resolution. One play concerned castes and social discrimination in the camp, another covered the effects of war on children. We performed a one-act proposing gender equality-that the boys and girls of Sudan, like those in Kenya, should be treated the same-and to our continual amazement, the plays were appreciated and we received very little resistance, at least overtly, to our message.

But some elders did not appreciate our irreverence, and the man under whose care Maria lived was one of those who did not support our efforts. One day, Maria did not come to rehearsal after school, and when she had missed three days in a row, I went to look for her. I found her at home in the evening, crouching by the fire outside, cooking asida.

— Not now! she hissed, and rushed inside.

I waited for a few minutes, and then left. It was not until many days later that I saw her again, by the water pump.

— He won't let me, she said.

Her caretaker had been outraged, it seemed, when Maria was gone in the afternoons, given that it was that time when the women prepared meals and retrieved all the water for the night and the next morning. Women were not expected to venture out of their homes after dark, so the hours between school and sunset were vital for the performing of Maria's duties.

— I can talk to him, I offered.

I had spoken to other families since I had become a youth leader. If there was a gap in understanding between generations, I was often asked to mediate. 'The boy who keeps his hands clean eats with his elders,' Gop had taught me, and this lesson informed my behavior every day and served me well. When another girl in the troupe, a rail-thin actress named Adyuei, had been prevented from attending our meetings, I intervened. She first told her parents that I would like to talk to them. When they agreed to see me, I arrived the next evening with a gift of writing pads and pens, and sat with them for some time. I explained that Adyuei was essential to our group, and that she was doing very important work for the youth of the camp. Knowing that her parents, like Maria's, were depending on the windfall of her bride price, I appealed to their mercenary interests. I told her father that Adyuei would be far more attractive to her future husband with the skills of an actress, and that her increased visibility would only bring a more competitive market for her when she was ready to be married. All of my arguments worked on her father; they worked far better than I expected. Adyuei was not only allowed to attend all the rehearsals, but her father came with her occasionally, too, insisting that she receive prominent roles and specialized instruction from Miss Gladys. All this had worked, and so I thought it would work for the man who called Maria daughter, but she would not have it.

— No, no. Forget it. He's not that kind of man, she said.

Nothing would work for this man, she said. She had no plans to defy her caretaker, for she knew she would be beaten. And anyway, she said, being unable to perform in the troupe was the least of her worries. It was evidence of her openness and trust in me that she told me, that day at the water pump, that only three days prior, she had received her first period. As a youth educator, I had access to a good deal of information about health and hygiene, so I knew what this meant physiologically for Maria. More importantly, I knew it meant that in Sudanese society, she was now considered a woman. When Sudanese girls first menstruate, they are considered available for marriage and are very often claimed within days.

— Does anyone know? I asked.

— Shh! she whispered.-Not yet.

— Are you sure? How could your mother not know?

— She doesn't know, Sleeper. She asks me about it but she doesn't know. I'm too young to have it, anyway. No one else I know has had it. Now shh. I shouldn't have told you. Forget I said anything.

And she walked off.

That day Maria insisted that I not tell a soul of her status; she had not decided how to keep her discharges secret from her caretakers, but she was determined to do so as long as possible. This was not unprecedented at Kakuma, but it was uncommon. Most girls, even if they plan to fight off the prospect of an arranged marriage, do not conceal their womanhood. Most accept it, and some celebrate it. There are certain clans in southern Sudan who celebrate a girl's first period with a party attended by family and suitors from villages near and far. It serves as a coming-out event, alerting the bachelors of the region that a girl has become a woman. To some men, plucking their bride at that moment is ideal, for it provides for an unquestionable purity.

If I were to guess Maria's age at that time, it would have to be fourteen. But in Sudan it is not the age that is important, but more so the shape and maturity of a woman's body. And even I, who had known Maria since she was a twig of a girl, had taken notice of her signs of womanhood. In another life, one where she was not under the care of an angry man expecting a return on his investment, I might have sought to romance her. There was no girl with whom I had such understanding, no girl who felt so like an extension of my own soul. But unaccompanied minors like me were not considered viable mates for young women like Maria. We only complicated the plans of their caretakers; if there was a young man like me circling a girl like Maria, questions of her virginity inevitably arose. People like Maria and I could be friends only, and even then, friends of occasional meeting.

SPLA soldiers and commanders were among the busiest of those who shopped Kakuma for a desirable young bride. They would sweep through the camp, ascertaining through rumor and sight which young women they might add to their families. The rebels also came to Kakuma, and other camps in the countries surrounding Sudan, looking for recruits. Thousands of potential soldiers lived peacefully at our camp, and this fact created some consternation on the part of the rebels, and no limit of handwringing on the part of men my age.

The Dominics of the drama group had begun to talk seriously about the possibility of joining the SPLA; many felt useless at Kakuma. This happened periodically, especially when there were great advances won or great losses incurred by the rebels. The young men attending school or simply idling at the camp would discuss, with varying degrees of intensity, enlisting, either to bolster the flagging efforts of the rebel army, or to be there when the job was ready to be finished.

As if fully knowing the minds of the men my age, a phalanx of soldiers and commanders arrived in Kakuma one day, looking for as many young men as they could carry to war. Officially, there was not to be an SPLA presence at the camp, but former and current commanders moved through without check. They came with enough troop trucks to carry hundreds of young men away, if they could be persuaded to leave the camp and return to southern Sudan to fight.

A meeting was called for ten o'clock one night, in a building made of corrugated steel and mud. There were five SPLA officers sitting at a table, and before them, two hundred young men who had been asked and coerced to attend this informational meeting. The SPLA had a very bad reputation among many young men, and so many were skeptical of their presence. Some felt betrayed because though the SPLA recruited heavily from northern Bahr al-Ghazal, they had done little to protect the region from attack. Others disapproved of their use of child soldiers, while still others were simply dissatisfied with how long it was taking to win the war against the government of Sudan. And so Achor Achor and I, and all of the young men we knew, came to the meeting that night, in part out of sheer curiosity about what they would say, what angle they might use in trying to persuade us to take up arms and leave the relative safety of the camp. The room was crowded, and though Achor Achor found a seat near the front, I did not, and instead stood by the window. And while the room was full that night, many young men stayed as far away as they could. For many years, the SPLA dictated that deserters were to be executed on sight, and there were certainly a good number of deserters at Kakuma.

The commander in charge that night, a squat and imperious man named Santo Ayang, walked in, sat at the blue wooden table before us, and addressed this particular point first.

— If there are boys here who have left the army, do not worry, he said.-The laws about desertion are different now. You will be welcomed back to the army without penalty. Please tell your friends.

This sent an approving murmur through the audience.

— This is a new SPLA, a united SPLA, Commander Santo said.-And we are winning. You know we're winning. We have won at Yambio, Kaya, Nimule, and Rumbek. We now control the majority of what's important in southern Sudan, and we need only to finish the job. You have a choice, boys…Well, you are not boys any longer. Many of you are men, and you are strong and have been educated. And now you have a choice. How many of you young men would like to stay in Kakuma for the rest of your lives?

None among us raised their hands.

— So then. How do you think you will leave this place? No one said a word.

— You expect to return home when the war is won, I suppose. But how will this war be won? Who will win it? Who is fighting this war? I ask you. You are here in Kakuma, having your food provided to you, buying expensive shoes…

Here he pointed to a boy standing on a chair in the corner. He was wearing new sneakers, of immaculate leatherette, white as bone.

— And you are waiting here, in safety, until we finish the work. Then you will return and benefit from the shedding of our blood. I take it from your silence that this is indeed your plan. It is a shrewd plan, I admit, but do you think we are an army of rabbits and women? Who is fighting this war, I ask you! Men are fighting this war, and I don't care if they call you Lost Boys here at this camp. You are men and it is your duty to fight. If you do not fight, this war is lost, southern Sudan is lost, and you will raise your children at Kakuma, and they will raise their children here.

A young man named Mayuen Fire jumped up.

— I will go!

The commander smiled.-Are you ready?

— I am ready, Mayuen Fire shouted. We all laughed.

— Quiet! the commander barked. The room grew quiet, in part because the commander had demanded it, and in part because we realized Mayuen Fire was serious.-At least there is one man among all these boys, Santo continued.-I'm very happy. We leave in three days. Thursday night there will be trucks outside the west gate. We'll see you there. Bring your clothes and other belongings.

The new recruit, in his excitement, did not know what to do at that point, and so walked out of the building. It was awkward, given the room was so crowded that it took him a few minutes to step over all of us to reach the door. Then, realizing he might miss important information at the meeting, he returned and watched from a window.

— Now, Commander Santo said.-We have a special guest tonight.

A man who had been sitting behind the commander now stepped forward, a twisted cane in his hand. He was a robust old grandfather, grey-haired and toothless, with a frail jaw and tiny eyes. He wore a black suit jacket and light-blue pajama pants, and a camouflage hat on his small wrinkled head. Commander Santo shook his hand and presented him to us.

— This man before you, a chief from Nuba, will illuminate how despicable are the methods of Bashir and his army. Perhaps he will convince the rest of you to follow the courageous young man who has already volunteered. Kuku Kori Kuku was a powerful and respected man. But he made a mistake: he allowed himself to trust the government of Khartoum. He's here to tell us the results of that demonstration of trust.

— Thank you, Commander Santo.

— Tell them the treachery you experienced.

— With your permission, Commander, I will.

— Tell them the deception and the murder you witnessed.

The chief opened his mouth to speak but did not get the chance. Not yet.

— When you're ready, please tell us. Take your time, Santo added. Finally the chief waited, his hands on his cane, eyes closed. When he was satisfied that Commander Santo would not interrupt him, he opened his eyes and began.

— Boys, I was the chief of a village called Jebel Otoro. As you know, we in Nuba were the victims of repeated attacks from the government and the murahaleen. I lost my son in one of the attacks; he was burned in our home while I was traveling to another village to mediate a dispute. And as you know, thousands of Nubans have been sent to the 'peace villages,' the internment camps you have heard about.

At this point I took notice of Achor Achor, who was sitting near the front. Watching his face became more interesting than watching the words come from the mouth of Kuku Kori Kuku. Already, from the man's first words, Achor Achor was rapt.

— This way, the government can watch us, and make sure we cannot fight against them. And these camps have attracted many Nubans who want no part of the conflict. There they are kept under the watch of soldiers, and are fed poorly. At these peace villages, the women are repeatedly abducted and raped. The government has made clear that if the people of Nuba do not bring themselves to live in the peace villages, they are therefore taking the side of the SPLA and are thus the enemy. Like you, the people of Nuba had suffered for some time and we longed for a way to end this.

Achor Achor's tongue extended from his lips, as if he were tasting the air for the next turn to the story.

— We were happy, then, when the government asked for a meeting. Bashir was said to have personally requested a meeting with all the chiefs of Nuba. And I must admit that this affected our pride; we were very impressed with ourselves. We were called by Khartoum for a meeting and we went willingly, like fools. We trusted, and we should not have trusted. Will we ever learn a lesson from this war, from the history of this country? We trusted! Our grandfathers trusted, and their grandfathers trusted, and look where it's gotten us.

The chief's voice was rising, and when it did, it cracked and wavered. I remembered the story of the chiefs who had originally agreed to stitch southern Sudan together with the north, a mistake most knew enough to regret.

— So yes, we were proud and so we went. All sixty-eight Nuban chiefs arrived for the meeting at the appointed day. Many of the chiefs traveled many days to get there, some by foot. When we arrived, we realized that we had not been brought to meet with representatives from Khartoum. It had been a trick. All of us, the chiefs of dozens of villages, were herded onto trucks and taken to a new prison, in a former hospital; I had been to the hospital as a young man. They held us in two small rooms for two days, with little food or water. We demanded that they free us. We thought that perhaps this was the action of a rogue group of government soldiers. We imagined that the government, who had organized this conference, would be outraged by this action and would soon intervene on our behalf. But not all of the chiefs were this optimistic.

I looked around me, and the faces of the boys in the room seemed already to know the fate of the assembled chiefs. Already they were ready to fight. Achor Achor's face was twisted into a terrible frown.

— We tried to plead with the guards, explaining that we were tribal chiefs who had committed no crime. You are enemies of the government, and that is crime enough, one guard said. That is when we knew that our future was in question. But we thought the worst they would do would be to keep us in a sort of peace camp for chiefs-perhaps more severe, perhaps just separated from our people. We expected that we might be detained there for years, even, until the end of the war. But the government had different plans. That night in the early hours, they roused us and pushed us out of the hospital prison and into the night. We were loaded onto military transport trucks, and as we sat in the back of these trucks, finally we were scared. They had tied our hands behind our backs, and we felt very helpless. In the truck, we tried to assist each other, tried to undo our bindings. But the truck was traveling up a rough mountain road and it was very dark. We could see nothing in the truck, and we were thrown about by the winding and poorly made road. Also, many of these chiefs were old men, you must remember, and not very strong. So there we were: we were the leaders of Nuba, and we had no way to help each other. It was humiliating. Achor Achor was shaking his head slowly, tears in his eyes.

— Soon the trucks stopped. Get them out! the officer of the soldiers yelled. We stepped out of the truck one by one, and soon the soldiers lost patience. They threw the last chiefs from the trucks and those chiefs, one very old man, fell hard on the road, for his hands were bound. We all stood on the road and they made us march. The moon was half full and bright. We saw the faces of the soldiers, and among the soldiers saw one Dinka man. I remember looking at him for a long time, trying to see what had happened to him. I assumed he had become a Muslim, and then had been convinced that we were the enemy of his country and his faith. Still, though, I thought I saw him look away from us. I thought that perhaps he was ashamed. But I could be imagining all that. I wanted him to be ashamed but perhaps he was as committed to his task as were the rest of the soldiers.

Achor Achor was the picture of barely suppressed rage.

— We were taken to a ridge on the mountain, and they lined us up. There were twenty soldiers with automatic rifles. One chief attempted to run down the mountain. He was shot immediately. At that point the soldiers began to shoot. They shot each chief, in the back of the head if they could. A few men tried to fight with their feet and they were shot in the chest and face and anywhere else. It was the worst thing I have ever seen, to see such men fighting for their lives, kicking and jumping with their hands bound. This was no way to die. It was a terrible mess, all of it.

— This took some time, the executions? the commander asked.

— No, no. It was all over very quick. It was over in a few minutes.

— But they didn't shoot you. Why not?

The chief snorted.-Of course they shot me! They shot me with everyone else! I was a chief, and I had to die! They shot me in the back of the head, yes, but the bullet went through and came out my jaw.

Some of the boys in the room did not believe this and the chief took notice.

— You don't believe me? Look at this.

He revealed a jagged scar at the corner of his jaw.

— That is where the bullet left me. And here is the bullet. From his pocket he brought forth a rounded and rusted thing, looking nothing like something that could have penetrated a man's skull.

— It didn't hurt. I thought I was dead, so I felt little pain. I lay on the ground, wondering at the strangeness of my sight and my thoughts. I was dead, but I could still see. I was seeing the body of another man, another chief, and I could hear the boots of the soldiers. I could hear the truck starting again. And all the while I wondered why I was hearing all this. I did not expect to see and hear after death like this.

— I thought that perhaps I was not yet dead. That I was still dying. So I lay there, unable to move, waiting to die. I thought of my family, of the people of my village. Here was their chief, lying among sixty-seven more, all dead. All trusting fools. I thought of the shame of all this, all these chiefs dying in one place, killed by these young government soldiers who knew nothing about life. I cursed our stupidity. We were trusting and foolish, as our ancestors had been fifty years earlier. This would be the end of us, I thought. If it was this easy to kill all the chiefs, then certainly killing our children would be a very easy task indeed.

— I did not realize until later that I was still alive. The light came in the morning and I was still seeing and thinking, and this caused me to believe that I might still be alive. I attempted to move my arms. To my surprise, they moved. It occurred to me that there might be a new group of soldiers coming soon to bury us, the evidence of the massacre, so I rose and I walked away. I simply walked back to my village. It took me three days and I saw very few people along the way. When I reached the first village on my journey, I met the deputy chief there and he greeted me with great enthusiasm. He wanted to know how the meeting had gone. I had to tell him that it had not gone well.

— He and his people nursed me and brought me to a clinic nearby, where they sewed the hole in my face. After a week I walked on, escorted by the deputy, back to my village, where they had heard about what had happened. I wouldn't be safe there, so I was kept hidden until I could escape one week later. Eventually I met others traveling to Kakuma. It was decided this would be the only safe place for me.

— Boys, we can never be one with the north, with Khartoum. We can never trust them. Until there is a separate south, a New Sudan, we won't have peace. We can never forget this. To them we are slaves, and even if we are not working in their homes and on their farms, we will always be thought of as a lesser people. Think of it: the end result of their plan is to make the entire country an Islamic state. They plan to convert us all. They are doing it bit by bit already. Three-fourths of this country is already Muslim. They don't have far to go. So remember: we have independence, or we will no longer exist as a people. They will subsume those they can, and kill the rest. We cannot be one with them, and we cannot trust them. Never again. You promise me? We nodded.

— Now fight these monsters! he roared.-I beg you.

Twelve others pledged their support that night. Ten of those ended up leaving with the SPLA on Thursday, along with fourteen more who had not been at the meeting-mostly sons, brothers, cousins, and nephews of SPLA commanders. I cannot say that I ever seriously considered joining the SPLA at that time. I was busy in the camp, with my theater projects and Miss Gladys, but Achor Achor spent two days in turmoil, coming to me each night to help with his thinking.

— I think I have to go. Don't I? he asked.

— I don't know. I don't know if it makes a difference, I said.

— You don't think the war can be won.

— I don't know. It's been so many years already. I don't know if anyone would know if the war was won. How would we know?

— If we had independence.

— You really think that would ever happen? We sat with that thought for a moment.

— I think I need to go, he said.-It's me who should be fighting this war. I'm from Aweil. If I don't go back and fight, then who will?

— They won't station you at Aweil.

— Then I'll get my own gun and go back to Aweil.

— There won't be anyone in Aweil. No one will still be there.

— Commander Santo said the SPLA is different now.

— Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. But look at you. You've never fought in your life. You wear glasses now. How will you shoot if your glasses break?

I did not really think this argument would work, but it did. It worked immediately, and that was the end of Achor Achor's army career. I am fairly certain that he was simply looking for a good reason not to join, something he could say when or if he were ever asked. He never spoke of the SPLA again.

I do not want to be indelicate but it is important to note that we were not long past puberty, and some of the younger boys in the class were still in the thick of hormonal change and a deeper awareness of the opposite sex. Thus what Miss Gladys did next stirred havoc among us young men at a time when there was already sufficient physiological turmoil. My first hairs had recently appeared in small thickets, a few patches in my underwear, one in each armpit. I was later than many other boys, but we were all developmentally tardy, we were told, due to the trauma we had endured and our ongoing state of malnutrition. But at that juncture of our development, our Miss Gladys had a very strong impact on our lives. With her open and confident sexuality, she was the constant igniter of everything flammable within us. It was enough to see her twice a week with the drama group, but when she walked into our history class she took it too far.

— Ah, Dominic! Good to see you! she said.

This was a semester after she began with the Napata Drama Group. We had not been told that there would be a new history teacher. Our previous instructor, a Kenyan named George, seemed capable and permanent.

— You're teaching this class? I said.

— You sound unhappy to see me, she said with a theatrical pout.

I did not know what to say. Her presence in Napata was manageable, given I could mask my nerves and weak stomach under the guise of my acting. But with her as my history teacher, I knew immediately that I would not be able to concentrate; my grades would drop. All of the inherent problems issuing from her presence were doubled by a new wrinkle to her personality. Something about history brought out the provocateur in her, and this simply destroyed most of the fifty-eight boys who sat on the ground beneath her.

She didn't talk about sex outright, but she seemed to find a way, during her lectures, to include the sexual habits of whomever she discussed, no matter how incongruous the context.

— Genghis Khan was a very harsh dictator, she might begin.-He was cruel to his enemies but he loved women very much. He had a great appetite, it was said. The rumor is that he had impregnated over two hundred women with his seed, and often visited three or more women in one night. He was also known to take certain tools into bed with…

The first day, one boy fainted. We were utterly unprepared for both the discussion of sexual appetites and for such discussion to spring forth from the mouth of the goddess named Gladys. Why was she doing this? She controlled us all, fifty-eight boys, she possessed us utterly and sometimes without mercy. The discussion about the sexual mores of Genghis Khan and his ilk went on for the full period and left us spent.

Our confused and longing faces had an effect on her, and that effect was to spur her on, to the point where she made a point to insert some sexual fact or aside in each day's lesson, and we could count on it, and dressed appropriately. The fainting boy brought with him wads of paper to stuff in his ears when she began expounding on the subject, for his parents were in the camp and he was sure they would know if he returned home with that sort of information in his head.

Among the few girls in the class, there was a broad sort of annoyance with Miss Gladys's antics and the boys' obsession with her. But there was one girl, younger than the rest, who seemed to enjoy Miss Gladys, and laughed at her jokes even when we didn't recognize them as jokes. This girl was Tabitha Duany Aker. I had not seen her for a semester and a summer, since we had been in home economics together, but I was very happy to see her again, and to see that it was only she who laughed when Miss Gladys made the joke about Idi Amin in the sauna. The joke was met by silence by all except for a loud guffaw from the side row. Tabitha covered her mouth and exchanged a long look of mutual admiration with Miss Gladys, and from that day on I took an interest in her, and tried to see her outside of class, at any opportunity at all. In many ways she reminded me of Maria-in her wit, her quick way with words, her heart-shaped face-but she was more girlish than Maria. She had a wild femininity about her that she tamed and mastered, I believe, by studying every movement and gesture of Miss Gladys.

Meanwhile, the rest of the boys, those who had just become acquainted with our new history teacher, spent a good deal of time alone and together thinking about our new teacher, about her various lessons. Miss Gladys became the most famous and sought-after teacher at Kakuma, and with her, the notoriety of us Dominics grew. There were four Dominics in that history class, and because she seemed very familiar with us, the rest of the boys looked at us with murder in their eyes, for we clearly had an inside track to her heart. Whenever Miss Gladys was mentioned, her favorites were also noted, the four Dominics from the Drama Group. Our real names were all supplanted by Dominic only, and our notoriety bound us closer. When we played basketball together, our team was the Dominics. When we walked by, people said, 'There go the Dominics.' And the numbers of random boys wanting suddenly to study acting-and history, in our class, no matter where in the camp they lived-grew unabated. Miss Gladys allowed none of them to join, because we did not need more boys.

We had too many boys already, and it was becoming a problem that because the troupe had only two girls, the majority of the women in our plays had to be played by men. In particular, the women's roles were played by one of the Dominics, whose real name was Anthony Chuut Guot. He was fearless about wearing a dress, or any other female clothing, and was unafraid to walk and talk like a woman. It was for his courage that we nicknamed him Madame Zero, after a cross-dressing comic-book spy. This was a name he enjoyed, at least initially. It was when the nickname extended beyond the Dominics that he became less amused, and this led to his and Miss Gladys's insistence that we recruit or somehow find at least one young woman for the club.

Thus, on one glorious afternoon, Tabitha joined the Napata Drama Group.

Tabitha was a friend to Abuk, the oldest of Gop's daughters, so even outside of classes such as home ec and history, I had been able to observe her, and knew certain things about her. I knew first of all that she was permitted to join the group because her mother had been an actress herself, and was an enlightened woman who wanted Tabitha to take advantage of any opportunities in the camp. I also knew that she had a face unsettling in its perfection. When I first knew Maria, I had feelings for her, but looking at her, speaking to her, was not a challenge for me. She seemed as much a sibling as anything else, and I felt when standing before her that she was a young person like me, that we were both refugees, that nothing about her intimidated me.

But Tabitha was not like this. I was not alone in knowing that Tabitha's face was unparalleled in its symmetry. Her skin was without blemish, the lashes on her eyes of a length that defied any precedent. I knew all this from far away, and after observing her more closely I knew that when she walked she walked slowly and deliberately, no part of her body moving with any effort whatsoever. From a distance, it seemed that she floated, her head never bobbing, the movement of her legs barely detectable under her skirts. I knew this and I knew that she touched the forearms of her friends as she spoke. She did this frequently, and when she laughed she would grip the forearm and then pat it twice.

I knew all this, and I knew that I was for some time utterly hoarse and dim-witted in her presence. She was younger than I by a few years at least, and I was far taller than her, and yet near her I felt that I was a child, a child who should be playing with dolls in the shade of her skirt. I alternately wanted to be close to her, to have her always within sight, and then, a moment later, to exist in a world where she did not. It seemed the only way that I might be able to concentrate again.

The first few times she attended the meetings of the drama group, she, like everyone else, was captivated only by the antics of the humorous Dominic. She laughed at everything he said, placing her hand on his forearm repeatedly, even squeezing once or twice. I knew that Dominic's affections were committed elsewhere, but still, it was difficult to watch. If she ever took the hand of another young man, I was sure I would not recover. The only solace I had was in knowing that I would see her every week, in close quarters, as we wrote and produced our plays-whether or not she ever looked directly at me, or spoke to me. She had done neither.

The drama group was thriving, in part due to the efforts of Tabitha and the Dominics and our libidinous teacher, but also due to the generous funding we began to enjoy. Our Youth and Culture Program began to receive direct aid from an organization called the Wakachiai Project, a Tokyo nonprofit. Their goal was to instruct the youth of Kakuma in sports, drama, first aid, and disaster management, but they also found a way to outfit a full refugee marching band with clothes and instruments and a part-time instructor specializing in woodwinds. When the project began, they sent one of their own to Kakuma, a young man of twenty-four named Noriyaki Takamura, who would become one of the most important men I would ever know, and from whom I would learn about trying to love someone who was fragile and very far away.

Soon after the project started, I was chosen as Noriyaki's right-hand man. I had been working for the Youth and Culture Project for two years and was well-known among the Sudanese youth and the NGO workers. It did not seem controversial that I would be given such a position, but my appointment did not sit well then or later with the Kenyans, who, we presumed, wanted every job for themselves. I did not care, and happily accepted the job, which brought higher pay and even an office. For a Sudanese to work in an office! We were given a small office in the UN compound, and in it we had a satellite phone and two computers, one that Noriyaki had brought with him and one that he ordered for me. He did it the first day we worked together.

— So here we are, Dominic, he said.

As I said, the name Dominic had overtaken us all.

— Yes sir, I said.

— I'm not sir. I'm Noriyaki.

— Yes. I am sorry.

— So are you excited?

— Yes I am, sir.

— Noriyaki.

— Yes. I know this.

— So we need a computer for you. Have you used a computer?

— No. I have seen people work on them.

— Can you type?

— Yes, I lied. I don't know why I chose to lie.

— Where did you learn to type? On a typewriter?

— No, I'm sorry. I misunderstood. I cannot type.

— You can't type?

— No sir.

Noriyaki exhaled enough for three lungs.

— No, but I will try.

— We need to get you a computer.

Noriyaki began to make phone calls. An hour later he had reached his project's office in Nairobi and had ordered a laptop computer for me. I did not believe that the computer would come to Kakuma or to me but I appreciated Noriyaki's gesture.

— Thank you, I said.

— Of course, he said.

And that day we did very little outside of talking about his girlfriend at home, a picture of whom was set on his desk. Noriyaki had just unveiled the photo, in which she was wearing a white shirt and white shorts while holding a tennis racket. Her smile was small and brave, as if in defiance of tears she had just dried from her face.

— Her name is Wakana, he said.

— She looks like a very nice girl, I said.

— We're engaged.

— Oh good, I said. I had recently been told, in one of my English texts, that it was rude to say Congratulations in such a situation.

— It's not official yet, he said.

— Oh. Will you elope?

— No, we'll get married in a proper wedding. But I have to propose in person.

I did not know exactly how things worked in Japan, and was only vaguely familiar with the workings of marriage in the Western world.

— When will you do this? I asked.

I was not sure how many questions I was allowed along these lines, but there seemed to be nothing that offended Noriyaki in any way.

— When I go home, I guess. I can't get her to visit me here. We sat together for a moment, staring at the picture, at the young woman's sad smile.

Already I missed Noriyaki, on that first day. I had not pondered the idea that he would leave Kakuma someday, even though I knew well that no one stayed at Kakuma but the Kenyans, and even they didn't stay for more than a few years. Noriyaki became my good friend on that first day, but he was not only my friend; Noriyaki was loved by all. He was far shorter than any Sudanese men I knew, but he was athletic, very quick, and quite competent at any sport that was played at Kakuma. He joined pick*up games in soccer, volleyball, basketball. He seemed to replace the basketball net once a week; he always had new white nylon nets. And because he kept replacing the net, it was fairly clear to all that the nets were disappearing, to be sold at Kakuma Town, with the knowledge that they would quickly be replaced by the stocky Japanese man whose name everyone knew, or at least attempted.

— Noyakee!

— Noki!

From the start, Noriyaki was always with the Sudanese people, in the camp, walking the paths, asking what we needed. He ate with the refugees, moved among them. When he drove his car, he would stop and pick up anyone who asked. Any person who was going to the compound he would carry, until his truck was overfull with smiling riders who all loved Noriyaki, or however one interpreted his name.

— Nakayaki!

— Norakaka!

None of it mattered to Noriyaki, who walked through Kakuma with a shy grin, happy because he was doing essential work and because, I imagined, he knew that in Kyoto there was a very beautiful young woman waiting for him.

One week after Noriyaki arrived and ordered the computer for me, something interesting happened: the computer arrived. There was an air shipment that day from Nairobi, primarily emergency medical supplies, but on the plane there was also a box, its corners perfectly square, and in that box, there was a laptop that had been ordered for me. It was rare in Kakuma to find a box that well-formed, with corners so crisp, but there it was, on the floor of the office, and Noriyaki grinned at me and I smiled back. I always smiled when I looked at Noriyaki; it was difficult not to.

The box arrived when we were both in the office, eating our lunches, and when Noriyaki opened it for me-I did not trust myself not to damage it-I wanted to hug Noriyaki or at least shake his hand, which I did, with a good deal of enthusiasm.

Noriyaki opened two orange Fantas, and we toasted the arrival of the computer. Toasting with Fanta became a tradition between us, and that day we drank our Fantas slowly, looking down on the box and its extraordinary contents, wrapped in plastic and encased in black foam. The laptop computer was worth perhaps ten times the value of all of my possessions and those of my Kakuma siblings combined. To entrust me with such a thing gave me a feeling of competence that I had not known since I was perhaps six years old, allowed to hold my father's Chinese rifle. I thanked Noriyaki again, and then pretended to know how to operate the computer.

— Take it home and practice, Noriyaki said finally.

— Take it where?

— Take it home and practice.

Noriyaki had noticed, in the days since the laptop came, that I had no idea what I was doing. I spent an hour one day attempting to turn the machine on. When I did turn it on, typing took me an extraordinary amount of time, and my work was made more difficult because the nervous sweat coming from my forehead and arms and fingers was drenching the laptop's keys. This made any kind of training, much less work, impossible.

— We'll send you to train, he said.-You can take computer classes.

— Where?

— Nairobi. We'll write it into the budget.

Noriyaki was a magician. Nairobi! Write it into the budget! I did not understand why Noriyaki would come to Kakuma, and why he stayed in Kakuma, especially when he had a family and a ladyfriend in Japan. For a very long time, I tried to figure out what exactly was wrong with him, what might have prevented him from getting an actual job in Japan. What would have caused him to travel so far for such a poor-paying and difficult position as he had here, with us? But I knew that Noriyaki did everything well, so it did not follow that he would be forced to take a job in a refugee camp. He was skilled on the computer, was personable, and got along famously with the Kenyans, the Europeans, the British and Americans, and especially the Sudanese, who seemed uniformly to adore him. He had no physical deformities that I could discern. I discussed Noriyaki with Gop's family one night over dinner. I had brought the laptop home, and Gop had insisted on having it within view as we ate dinner together. It was indeed a strange object to see in the sort of place we lived. It was like a bar of solid gold resting in a mountain of dung.

— He could be some sort of criminal in Japan, Ayen offered.

— Japan is very competitive, Gop mused.-Maybe he got tired of that life.

But they did not want to spoil it and I did not want to spoil it. It was an odd thing: there were few jobs for adult Sudanese with the UNHCR and NGOs, but they needed someone young who would understand the needs of the youth, so I was getting one of the best NGO salaries of any refugee at Kakuma. The project purportedly only had funding for a certain amount of time, but Noriyaki always talked about extending it.

— The Japanese government has plenty of money, he said.

He said that he and I would have to make sure to use the existing funding well, though, to involve refugees in the planning and stretch every dollar.

I asked him why he came to Kenya in the first place. Why the Sudanese? I asked.

— When I was growing up, my teacher had us do a report on a country in Africa. He was very interested in the continent, so he spent probably too much time on Africa. I wasn't this teacher's favorite student, I have to say. So he went around the room, asking everyone which country they wanted to research, and he called on me last. By then, only Sudan was left.

I would have suspected as much, but still, this fact hurt my heart. I thought of it many times over the next years, that Sudan was not wanted by any of these Japanese schoolchildren.

— There wasn't too much information about your country, I have to say. It was a very short report, he said.

He laughed, and I managed to laugh. It was a goal of his, it seemed. He walked in the office every day, I am sure, determined to get me to laugh, no matter the subject matter. He talked about his family and about his girlfriend-his fiancee. Wakana he missed with an agony that was tangible. Many days I arrived at work to find him under his desk, on the phone. I am not sure why he chose to talk to her under his desk, but usually he did. After he was finished, I often found notes on the floor, as if he were consulting lists of things to say to her. When he would pine for her, I would listen until I could not listen any more.

— Your girlfriend? I would say.-You're complaining about missing your girlfriend? I don't have a family!

He would laugh and say, — Yeah, but you're used to it.

We found this very funny, and it became a refrain between us:-Yes, but you're used to it. And though I laughed about it, it also caused me to wonder whether this was a truth. It did seem to be true, that he missed his fiancee more than I missed my family, because he was certain she was alive. My feelings for my own family were more distant and vague, for I could not picture them, and did not know if they were alive or dead, in Sudan or elsewhere. Noriyaki, though, had his mother and father and two siblings, and he knew every day where they were.

— My family is your family now, he said one day.

They knew all about me, he said, and wanted very much to meet me. He added a picture of his parents and younger sister to the desktop, and he insisted I think of them as mine. It was a strange thing that his plan worked; I did grow to think of his family as people who were watching over me, expecting good things from me. I stared at the picture of his parents-his mother and father both in black, their hands clasped before them, standing before a giant statue of a charging soldier-and I believed that some day we would meet in their home, perhaps just before Noriyaki married Wakana, when I visited Japan as a prosperous man. I was not confident this day would come, but it pleased me to think about it.

One day a man came to Noriyaki. The man was a Sudanese elder, an educated man, respected among the Dinka. He had finished three years at the University of Khartoum, and his opinion was sought on any number of matters, political matters in particular. Today, though, he was agitated, and asked to speak to Noriyaki immediately. Noriyaki asked him inside, and gave him a seat.

— I would like to stand, he said.

— Okay, Noriyaki said.

— I need to stand because what I have to say is very important and upsetting.

— Okay. I'm listening.

— You need to talk to your people, your government, Mr. Noriyaki. It is the Chinese and the Malaysians who are making this war worse. These two countries alone own 60 percent of the oil interests in Sudan. You know how much oil they take? Millions of barrels a year, and it's growing! China plans to get half its oil from Sudan by 2010!

— But sir…

— And we all know that the oil is what is driving the war. Bashir wants only to keep the south in chaos and the SPLA away from the oil fields. He does this with weapons from where? From China, Mr. Noriyaki. China wants the south insecure, because this keeps out other countries who don't want their hands dirty with the human-rights abuses around this oil extraction! Your government is providing arms that are used against civilians, and they are also buying the oil that is ill-gotten and is the reason hundreds of thousands have died. I have come here to appeal to you, as a representative of your government, to speak out against these injustices!

When Noriyaki finally had a chance to speak, he told the man he was not Chinese. The man spent five minutes digesting this information.

— I do not mean to be rude, but you have the look of a Chinese.

— No sir. I'm Japanese. We're not such great friends of the Chinese, either.

The man left, confused and disappointed.

There was blame everywhere for what was happening to the Sudanese. And the more we understood how we were connected to so many of the problems of the world, the more we understood the web of money and power and oil that made our suffering possible, the more we felt sure that something would be done to save southern Sudan. And a series of bombings brought us, we thought, to the forefront of the world's mind.

I was refereeing a youth soccer game when I heard the news from a pair of boys passing on a bicycle.-They bombed Nairobi! And Dar es Salaam!

Someone had bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The camp ceased all activity. The Kenyans stopped working. Wherever there were televisions or radios, and there were not many of the former, they were surrounded. Hundreds dead, the reports said, five thousand injured. We watched for days as bodies were pulled from the rubble. The Kenyans at Kakuma raged for answers. When it was learned that it was the work of Islamic fundamentalists, there was trouble at Kakuma. It was not a good time to be a Somali or an Ethiopian. The Muslims of any nation kept themselves hidden those days, and made sure to be clear about their opposition to the work of these terrorists, to Osama bin Laden. This was the first I had heard his name, but soon everyone knew of him, and knew that he was living in Sudan. Gop spent every moment next to the radio, and lectured me at dinner.

— This is bin Laden's work. And it's Sudan that will pay for this crime. They helped him, and they will pay. And it's about time they did.

Gop seemed almost happy about this development. He was sure that bin Laden's bombings would turn the world's attention to Sudan, and that this could only be good for us.

— Finally they'll get this man! He's been everywhere. He was at the center of the Islamist revolution, Achak! He provided so much money to Sudan! This man funded everything-machinery, planes, roads. He was involved in agriculture, business, banking, everything. And he brought thousands of al Qaeda operatives to Sudan, to train and plan. The companies he set up in Sudan were used to get money to all the other terrorist cells all over the world. This was all because of the cooperation of Khartoum! Without a government sponsoring these things, it's much more difficult for someone like bin Laden, who is not satisfied with blowing up travel offices. So he owns a construction company in Sudan, and so he can buy explosives from anyone he wants, in whatever quantities he needs. It seems legitimate, right? And then with Khartoum's help, he can ship these explosives to Yemen or Jordan or anywhere else.

— But he wasn't the only terrorist in Sudan, right? I asked.

— No, there were groups from everywhere. Hezbollah had people there, Islamic Jihad, so many groups. But Osama is the worst. He claimed to have trained the guys in Somalia who killed the American soldiers there. He had issued a fatwa there against any Americans in Somalia. And then he financed the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. You know this building?

I shook my head.

— A huge building, as high as the clouds. Bin Laden paid to have a man drive a truck into the basement of the building to blow it up. And then he tried to kill Mubarak in Egypt. All the men involved in that plot were from Sudan, and bin Laden paid for everything. This man is a big problem. Terrorists could not do so much before him. But he has so much money that things become possible. He brings more terrorists into the world, because he can pay them, gives them a good life. Until they kill themselves, that is.

A few days later, Gop's expectations came true, or seemed to. Again I was refereeing a soccer game when a UN truck drove by with two Kenyan aid workers in the back, bringing the good news.

— Clinton bombed Khartoum! they yelled.-Khartoum is under attack!

The game stopped amid wild celebrating. That day and that night there was considerable excitement in the Sudanese regions of Kakuma. There was talk about what this might mean, and the consensus was that it indicated that the United States was clearly angry at Sudan, that they were being blamed for the bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. It proved, everyone thought, beyond any doubt, that the United States sided with the SPLA, and that they disapproved of the government in Khartoum. Of course, some refugee pundits were more ambitious in their thinking. Gop, for example, who thought that independence for southern Sudan was imminent.

— This is it, Achak! he said.-This is the beginning of the end! When the U.S. decides to bomb someone, that is the end. Look what happened to Iraq when they invaded Kuwait. Once the U.S. wants to punish you, there is trouble. Wow, this is it. Now the U.S. will overthrow Khartoum in no time at all, and then we will return home, and we will get money from the oil, and the border between north and south will be established, and there will be a New Sudan. I think it will all happen within the next eighteen months. You watch.

I loved and admired Gop Chol, but about political matters-about any matters concerning the future of Sudan-he was invariably wrong.

But in smaller ways, a great deal of change was afoot among the people of southern Sudan, and there were developments that might be considered hopeful. Sudanese customs were bent and broken at Kakuma with more frequency than they would have been had there been no war, had eighty thousand people not been in a refugee camp run by a progressive-minded international consortium. My own attitudes and ideas certainly would not have been as liberal as they became, but because I was a youth educator, I became well-versed in the language of health and the human body, of sexually transmitted diseases and prophylactic measures. Often I spoke too informally with young women, and confused the language of health class with the language of love. I once ruined my chances with a young woman named Frances by asking if she was developing correctly for her age. My exact words were:

— Hello Frances, I have just been to health class, and I was wondering how your feminine parts were developing.

It's one of the things that one says when young, and from which there is no escape. After that, she and her friends had a very low opinion of me, and the words have haunted me for many years after.

I learned many important lessons, first among them the fact that making forward statements in English was considered more acceptable than in Dinka. Because our grasp of English was tenuous, tone and precise meaning in that language was amorphous and shifting. I could never say 'I love you' to a new girl in Dinka, for she would know exactly its meaning, but in English, the same words might be considered charming. Thus I used English a good deal, always in the interest of appearing charming. It did not always work.

But I spent a good deal of time calibrating my approach to girls, and when I was ready to inquire about Tabitha's interest in me, I was anything but bold. I knew by then that Tabitha was that rarest of girls who was still allowed to go to school, whose mother was at Kakuma and was enlightened enough to afford her a range of opportunities, academic and even those related to friendships with boys like me.

There was a certain day each year called Refugee Day, and I am quite sure it was the day that half of all youth relationships at Kakuma began or ended. On this day, June 20 each year, from morning to dusk, all the refugees of Kakuma celebrated, and there was less adult supervision, and more mingling of nationalities and castes, than at any other time of year. They celebrated not the fact that they were refugees or were living in northwest Kenya, but instead the simple existence and survival of their culture, however tattered. There were exhibitions of art, demonstrations of ethnic dances, there was food and music and, from the Sudanese, many speeches.

This was my opportunity to speak to Tabitha, who I was tracking all day. When she watched a traditional Burundian dance, I watched her. When she sampled food from Congo, I watched her from behind a display of Somali arts and crafts. And when the day was waning, and there was only a few minutes before she and all the girls would be expected to retreat to their homes, I strode to her with confidence that surprised even me. I was four years older than she was, I told myself. This is a young person, someone around whom you should not feel like a child. And so I walked to her with a serious face and when I stood behind her-she had had her back turned to me during my approach, which made it far easier-I tapped her on the shoulder. She turned to me, very surprised. She looked to my left and right, surprised to find me alone.

— Tabitha, for a long time, I said, — I have tried to talk to you about something, but the opportunity never presented itself. I was not sure how you would react to what I wanted to propose.

She stared up at me. She was not very tall at the time. Her head barely reached my chin.-What are you talking about? she said.

There is no lonelier feeling than when a proposal you have rehearsed is rejected out of hand. But through adrenaline and plain stubbornness, I continued.

— I like you and would like to go on a date with you.

This was how we said things at that time, but it did not mean that a real date would ever take place. It was unacceptable for a young man and woman to go off alone together, to a restaurant or even for a walk. A date, then, might mean a meeting at church, or in another public setting, where it would be known only to Tabitha and myself that a date was taking place.

Tabitha looked at me and smiled as if she had been only trying to cause me suffering. She did this often, in those days and in the future-all the years I've known her.

— I'll let you know at a later time, she said.

I was not surprised. It was not customary for a girl to give her answer immediately. Usually, a time would be arranged, a few days later, when the answer would be given either in person or through an emissary. If no appointment was made, it would mean the answer was no.

In this case, the next day, I learned through Abuk that the answer would come at church on Sunday, at the south entrance, after Mass. Those intervening days were torturous but tolerable, and when the time came, she was exactly where she said she would be.

— How was the homework that you gave to yourself? This was my attempt at charm.

— What do you mean?

What I meant was that it might be considered humorous that instead of answering my first question, about a possible date, when I asked it, she went home to think about it for five days. But this was not very humorous, at least not the way I put it.

— Nothing. Sorry. Forget it, I said.

She agreed to forget it. She forgot a lot of what I said. She was merciful that way.

— I've been thinking about your question, Achak, and I have come to a decision. She was always spectacularly dramatic.

— And I've asked around about you…and I haven't heard anything bad. She had not talked to Frances, apparently.

— So I accept the date, she said.

— Oh thank God! I said, taking the Lord's name in vain for the first time in my life, but not at all the last.

I am not sure what might be considered our first date. After that day at church, we saw each other often, but never alone. We spoke at church and at school and, through my stepsister Abuk, I sent messages detailing the extent of my admiration for her, and how often I was thinking of her. She did the same, and so the volume of the messages kept Abuk busy. When the messages were deemed urgent, she would come running across the camp to me, her arms flailing and out of breath. She would finally regain herself and then relay the following:

— Tabitha is smiling at you today.

There could be little private contact between young people like ourselves, even if madly in love, as Tabitha and I were. Like most of the courtship, any interaction at all was done in plain sight, so as to draw no questioning eyes or murmuring among the elders. But even in plain sight, in daylight and in public, we were able to do quite enough to satisfy our modest desires. Those who knew me at Pinyudo, and suspected what happened in the bedroom of the Royal Girls, were surprised by the chaste courtship that Tabitha and I shared. But what had happened in Pinyudo seemed, now, outside of time. It was done by children who did not invest meaning in such explorations.

The first time I was able to hold Tabitha against me was one Saturday morning, amid many dozens of people, during a volleyball match. I was on a team with the Dominics, and we were playing against a group of overconfident Somalis this particular morning, and were being cheered on by a dozen Dinka girls our age and younger. There were no official cheerleading squads at Kakuma, and though many girls participated in sports, on this day Tabitha was there both to cheer for me and to hold herself against me. In any culture, there are certain loopholes that can be exploited by hormonally desperate teenagers, and at Kakuma we realized that under the auspices of the girls cheering us on, giving congratulatory hugs after a winning point was somehow acceptable.

There were five Dominics playing volleyball that day, and four of us had notified our ladyfriends that if they rooted us on, we would be able to hold each other between games or after successful points. So this is how I first held Tabitha. She had not done this cheering and hugging before, but she took to it immediately and very well. The first time I spiked a winning shot past the face of a certain overconfident Somali, Tabitha cheered as if she might explode, and came running over to me, jumping and hugging me with abandon. No one took notice, though Tabitha and I savored those jumping and hugging moments as if they were sacred honeymoon hours.

When it became more widely known that such hugs were available to athletes, the less romantically successful boys altered their priorities. 'I have to learn some sports!' they said, and then tried. The enrollment in intramural sports grew dramatically for a time. Of course, there was a crackdown, soon enough, on the cheering and hugging, when the ratio between sports and hugging became too close to 1:1. But it was very good, indescribably good, while it lasted.

— Tell me!

Noriyaki's appetite for details was insatiable.

— Tell me tell me tell me!

It was puzzling, because I had never asked him about the physical aspects of his relationship with Wakana-to whom he had recently become engaged-but he felt no shame in asking me to recount every meeting with Tabitha. I obliged, to an extent. There was a stretch of several weeks when I worried about the youth of Kakuma, because the two employees of the Wakachiai Project were doing little but discussing my meetings with Tabitha. Thankfully, he did not push me for smells and other sensations.

But they were extraordinary. After three months or so, Tabitha and I had mustered enough courage to visit each other in our respective homes on the rare occasions that they were empty. These opportunities were exceedingly rare, given her household held six people and mine eleven. But once a week we might find ourselves alone in a room, and hold hands, or sit on a bed together, our thighs touching, nothing more.

— But all this will change on the drama trip, right? Noriyaki prodded.

— I hope so, I said.

Did I really hope so? I was unsure. Did I want this sort of unsupervised time alone with Tabitha? The thought made me nauseous. Already I wondered if we had too much time alone, even in public. Her touch was more powerful than she knew. Or perhaps she knew it well, and was reckless with her touching; they sent every part of me into turmoil, and perhaps it was this control she found amusing and intoxicating.

But we would be going to Nairobi, and I would not and could not miss such an opportunity. The computer classes Noriyaki had suggested had not yet been manageable, with the schedule of the camp, and the permits necessary. I had never seen a city, had not left Kakuma for five years, and had no sense of being part of the real Kenya. Kakuma was, in a way, a country of its own, or a kind of vacuum created in the absence of any nation. For many of us at Kakuma, the desire to return to Sudan was replaced by a more practical plan: to go to Nairobi and live there, work there, establish new lives, become citizens of Kenya. I cannot say that I was close to achieving this, but I had more of a chance than most.

Our troupe had conceived of a play called The Voices, and we had performed it in Kakuma for many weeks. A theater writer from Nairobi, visiting a cousin who worked at the camp, saw the play and immediately invited us to perform the play in the capital, as part of a contest involving the best amateur theater groups in the country. We were to travel to Nairobi to represent the refugees in Kakuma; it would be the first time in the history of the competition-quite a long and robust history, we were told-that any refugees had participated in the contest. And so we would all go, Tabitha would be there, and with us only one chaperone, Miss Gladys.

Tabitha and I barely spoke about the trip in the weeks leading up to our departure. It was simply too much to think about, that we would have time alone together, that we would perhaps find the place for our first kiss. I believe we were both overwhelmed by the possibilities. I slept poorly. I walked around the camp fidgeting and smiling uncontrollably, all the while my stomach in a constant uproar.

— First Kiss! Noriyaki began to call me. I walked into work each day and these were his first words: Hello, First Kiss! To anything I would ask, he would answer, Yes, First Kiss. No, First Kiss.

I had to beg him, with the utmost seriousness, to stop.

Abuk, serving as the messenger of Gop Chol, came to our office one day with the urgent news that I was to come to dinner directly after work. I told her I would, but only if she told me what the occasion was.

— I can't tell you, she said.

— Then I can't come, I said.

— Please, Valentine! she wailed.-I had to swear I wouldn't tell. Please don't get me in trouble! They'll know if I told!

Abuk was passing through a period of great drama in her life, and emphasized far too many words, with far too much emphasis, than was necessary.

I let her leave without an answer, and I walked home that evening, attempting not to think about what awaited me there. I was fairly certain Gop would give me a lecture about being careful with Tabitha, given the time we might have together unsupervised. He had not yet given me such a talk.

When I arrived at home, Gop and Ayen were there, as were all the members of my Kakuma family, and a handful of neighbors, from the smallest children to the most senior adults. And among them all were two people who seemed particularly out of place in our shelter: first of all, Miss Gladys. It was a shock to see her standing in the room where we ate our meals. And though her beauty might be expected to suffer in such environs, she only radiated that much more powerfully. She was talking to a new woman, a sophisticated Dinka woman who held a small girl in her arms. This was, Ayen told me, Deborah Agok.

She was an important woman, I was told by Adeng, and would be bringing with her news that would change our lives. Adeng had insisted that these were the words her father had given her, but because Gop was not a stranger to this sort of hyperbole, I did not spend much time pondering just what the news might be. Gop had once gathered us all, atop a similar pedestal of unspeakable significance, to announce that he had acquired new sheets for his bed.

In any case, it was overwhelming to see all these people in one place. It was also somewhat difficult to move, as our shelters were not made for so many. I still had no idea what the occasion was that would bring all of these people to our home, but was immediately distracted by a familiar smell. It was a certain food cooking, the name of which I had long forgotten.

— Kon diong! Ayen said.-Don't you remember?

I did remember. It was a dish I hadn't tasted, or heard of, in years. Kon diong is particular to my region, and is not an everyday dish. It's a hard porridge made from white sorghum flour, cheese, and skimmed sour milk; these are not things easily attained. It's a dish favored by prosperous families, and only during the rainy season, when the cows produce milk in abundance.

— What's this all about? I finally asked. My Kakuma sisters were looking at me in a peculiar way, and everyone seemed to be stepping around me, being solicitous and overly deferent. I was not sure I liked the atmosphere.

— You'll learn soon enough, Gop said.-First, let's eat.

I still had not spoken to Miss Gladys, who was being quizzed and fussed over by the elderly women in the house. And Deborah Agok, our guest, would not look at me. She spent her time speaking to my sisters and attending to the girl now in her lap, who I learned was her daughter, Nyadi. She was a bone-thin girl wearing a pale pink dress, her eyes seeming far too large for her face.

Dinner was consumed at an impossibly slow rate. I knew that the purpose of the dinner, and of Deborah Agok's visit, would not be revealed until after dinner, until after the adults drank araki, a wine made from dates. All this is not uncommon among the Dinka, this sense of drama, but that night I felt that this sense of drama was perhaps overly precious.

Finally the food had been eaten, the wine had been drunk, and Gop stood. He looked down at Deborah Agok, sitting on the floor with the rest of us, and he insisted that she be given the home's one proper chair. Miss Agok refused, but he insisted. An elderly neighbor was moved from the chair to the spot on the ground previously occupied by Miss Agok, and now Gop continued.

— Most of you do not know Deborah Agok, but she has become a friend to our family. She is a respected midwife, trained in both the Sudanese and more technological birthing methods. She has been working at the Kakuma hospital, where she met the esteemed Miss Gladys, whom we have all heard about from Achak, who has been so grateful for her…instruction.

Everyone laughed, and my face burned. Miss Gladys glowed more than ever before. This was, it was clearer than ever, the sort of attention she relished.

— Miss Agok was recently sent by the International Rescue Committee into southern Sudan to teach new birthing techniques to the village midwives. Now, as it happens, one of the villages she visited was called Marial Bai.

All eyes fell upon me. I was not sure how to react. My throat shrunk; I could not breathe. So this was it, this was the reason for all the mystery, the special dish from my region. But the idea of receiving any news of my home this way seemed immediately wrong. I did not want to know anything about my family in the midst of such an audience. Deborah would be the first person in all my years at Kakuma with accurate and recent information about Marial Bai, and my mind spun with possibilities. Did the river still flow the same way as before? Had the Arabs cleared the region of its rich pastures and trees? Did she know anything of my family? But for this to be part of the theater of the evening! It was unacceptable.

I looked for the exit. There were twelve bodies I would have to step over to make my way to the door. Leaving would require too much effort, would create a scene unbecoming to me and disrespectful of my adoptive family. I stared hard at Gop, hoping to convey my displeasure with this sort of ambush. Though the atmosphere had been buoyant thus far, it seemed perfectly possible that this Miss Agok had tragic news of my birth family, and Gop had gathered everyone I knew to lift me up after the news knocked me to the ground.

Now Deborah Agok stood. She was a tall and muscular woman whose face gave away no answers about her age. She might have been a young woman or a grandmother, such were the crossed signals given by her taut skin, bright eyes encircled by hair-thin wrinkles. She remained sitting in the chair, her hands in her lap, and thanked Gop and Ayen for their hospitality and friendship. When she spoke, her voice was hoarse and low. By her voice, one might guess she had lived three lifetimes without rest.

— My friends, I have traveled throughout Bahr al-Ghazal, visiting Nyamlell, Malual Kon, Marial Bai, and the surrounding villages. I bring a heartfelt greeting from the people of Marial Bai, including Commander Paul Malong Awan, the senior-ranking SPLA officer there.

All the attendees of the dinner looked to me, as though it was a great honor to me in particular that Commander Paul Malong Awan had sent greetings.

— Yes, she continued, — I have been to your village, and I have seen what has become of it. Of course there have been the assaults from the murahaleen and the government army. And related to those attacks I found rampant malnutrition and a rash of deaths caused by controllable diseases. As you know, hunger is at its peak; hundreds of thousands will starve in Bahr al-Ghazal this year.

The Sudanese way of speaking was in full glory-the roundabout way to any given point. How could she do this to me? All I wanted to hear about was my family. This was cruelty, no matter how good her intentions.

Sensing my anxiety, at that moment a shape appeared in front of me, and then filled the space next to me. It was Miss Gladys, with her smell of fruit and flowers and a woman's perspiration, and before I could assess this new situation-it was the closest she had ever been to me-she was holding my hand. She did not look at me, but only at Deborah Agok, but she was with me. She would be there whatever the news was. The timing for this most intimate contact with the object of my innumerable daydreams could not have been less appropriate.

— Because I am a midwife, Deborah continued, and I tried to listen, — I came to know a midwife in Marial Bai, a very strong woman who wore most days a dress of faded yellow, the yellow of a tired sun.

All eyes were upon me again, and I struggled to keep mine dry. I was being pulled with such force in two directions. My hand was already soaked with sweat entwined within the fingers of the divine woman by my side, and at the same time, my ears had heard that my mother might be alive, that Deborah had met a midwife who wore a yellow dress. My eyes were wet before I could prevent it. With my free hand, I pulled at the skin below my eyes to drain the water back into my body.

— This midwife and I spent a good deal of time together, comparing stories of bringing babies into the world. She had assisted in the birth of over one hundred babies, and had had great success in avoiding untimely deaths for these infants. I shared with her new advances in the science and techniques of midwifery, and she was a very quick and willing learner. We quickly became good friends, and she invited me to her home. When I arrived, she cooked for me the dish we had tonight at Kakuma, and she told me of life in Marial Bai, about the effect the famine was having on the village, about the latest attacks by the murahaleen. I told her of the world of Kakuma, and in talking about my life here, I mentioned my good friends Gop and Ayen, and the boys they had taken in. When I mentioned the name Achak to this woman, she was startled. She asked what this boy looked like. How big is he? she asked. She told me she had known a boy with that name, so long ago. She asked if I might wait a moment, and when I said I would, she left her home in a hurry.

Now Miss Gladys held my hand tighter.

— She returned with a man she identified as her husband, and he explained that she was his first wife. She asked me to repeat what I had told her, that I had known a family in Kakuma who had adopted a boy named Achak. What is the name of this man in the camp? the husband asked. I told him his name was Gop Chol Kolong. The man was very interested in this information, insisting that this man was from Marial Bai, too. But they had no way to confirm that the Achak who I knew of in Kakuma was the same Achak who was their son. It was not until I returned to Kenya and told this story to Gop that it all became clear. So now I must ask you some questions, to know the answers for sure. What is the name of Achak's father? she asked, directing her query to Gop.

I don't know why she did this. She had yet to meet my eye.

— Deng Nyibek Arou, Gop said.

— His mother? she asked.

— Amiir Jiel Nyang, I answered.

— Was Achak's father a businessman in Marial Bai? she asked.

— Yes! almost everyone in the room responded. Her theatrics were insufferable.

— Tell us! Were these people Achak's parents? Gop finally asked. She paused, annoyed to have her spell broken.

— They are the same. Achak's parents are alive.

In the next few days, before my scheduled trip to Nairobi, much effort was expended by Gop, Ayen, Noriyaki, and others in keeping me at Kakuma. Now that I knew my parents had survived, it seemed impossible to remain apart from them. Why wouldn't I simply go back to Marial Bai and join my father in his business? The purpose of all my journeys was to keep me safe and educate me, and now that I was both safe and educated and I was grown and healthy, how could I not return to them? The most recent raid of Marial Bai had been just months before, but this didn't matter to me, not at all.

I spent my hours contemplating my arrival at home, crossing the river, parting the grasses, emerging from the brush and into the village, striding into my parents' compound as they emerged from their homes to see me. They would not immediately recognize me, but as they moved closer they would know it was their son. I would be twice the size I was when I ran from Marial Bai, but they would know it was me. I could not picture them, my mother or father. My siblings were also faceless to me. I had formed an approximation of all of the members of my family, drawn from people I knew at Kakuma. My mother's face was Miss Gladys's, but somewhat older. My father's was that of Gop, plus many years of deprivation and decline.

Once we had embraced and my mother had wept, we would sit together all day and all night, talking until I knew about every day, every week since I had been gone. Did you think I was dead? I would ask. No, no, they would say, We always knew you would find a way to survive. Did you think I would come back? I would ask. We knew you would come back, they would say. It was right for you to come back.

— Are you forgetting that the country is in the middle of a famine? Gop asked. Gop knew my plans too well, and threatened to tie me to my bed, to cut off my feet to prevent me from walking out of Kakuma.

— Are you forgetting that you would have to pass through land held by Riek Machar's Nuer forces, who would not like to see a Dinka boy of army age? You're leaving comfort and education and a job here to go back to what?

I could not remember a time that Gop was so agitated. He followed me all the hours of the day; he amassed allies-other teachers, elders at the camp-in his quest to keep me from leaving. I was watched at all times, with friends and strangers both congratulating me on the news from home, and at the same time urging patience, a prudent course, to wait until the time was right to return.

— At the very least, give it time, Ayen said one night at dinner.-Think it over. Go to Nairobi and think about this. Remember, on the Nairobi trip you will be with both Tabitha and Miss Gladys.

When she said this, and I did not immediately respond, I saw her exchange a quick glance with Gop. They knew they had captured my interest.

— Why not go to Nairobi, and then decide? Ayen added.-Then if you do go home, you can tell your parents all about your trip to the city. Ayen was a very convincing woman.

When the day of the trip finally arrived, seeing Tabitha on that UN vehicle was devastating. I approached the bus as it idled and Tabitha's heart-shaped and symmetrical face was there, by the window, ignoring me. She was sitting with another Sudanese girl, and she finally glanced at me, made no sign she even knew me, and then returned to her conversation. This was according to plan, I should note. We had decided to make no outward signal of our feelings, though a few on the bus knew our intentions. I played my part, climbing aboard the bus and sitting with the humorous Dominic, knowing he would help pass the time on the ride, which had been described as very long and punishing.

— Hey, Madame Zero, will you be shopping for new dresses in Nairobi? he asked.

Everyone laughed, and Anthony smiled a barely tolerant smile.

It is hard to communicate how momentous it was, after seven years in that camp, to be on the way to Nairobi. It is impossible to explain. And most of those in the group were worse off than me. I lived with Gop Chol, and had a paying job with an NGO, but most of the other members of the drama group-twenty-one of us, all Sudanese and Somalis, all between twelve and eighteen-had nothing. Besides Tabitha, there were eight girls, most of them Sudanese, and this made the trip particularly enjoyable, and not at all punishing, for the rest of the Dominics. We rode on a standard blue UN staff bus, the windows open, the two days of driving buoyed by cool wind and constant songs.

The scenery was astonishing, the peaks and valleys, the mist and the sun. We passed through the Kapenguria area of Kenya, much of it mountainous and cool with rain. We saw birds with bright plumage, we saw hyenas and gazelles, elephants and zebras. And corn! So many crops, everything growing. Seeing this part of Kenya made it all the more depressing and inconceivable that our refugee camp had been placed where it had. We pressed our faces to the glass and wondered, Why couldn't they put Kakuma there? Or there, or there? Do not think it was lost on us that the Kenyans, and every international body that monitors or provides for the displaced, customarily places its refugees in the least desirable regions on earth. There we become utterly dependent-unable to grow our own food, to tend our own livestock, to live in any sustainable way. I do not judge the UNHCR or any nation that takes in the nationless, but I do pose the question.

As the land passed by, I saw my parents, my approximated visions of them, on every hill and around each bend. It seemed as logical as anything else that they would be there, on the road ahead of us. Why couldn't they be here, why couldn't we will ourselves together again? Surely my father could find a way to live and thrive in Kenya. Just the thought of my mother here, walking with me along these green paths, along that river, near those giraffes-it felt so very possible for a few hours of that drive.

We stayed in Ketale, in a hotel with beds and sheets and electricity and running water. Though this town was not the size of Nairobi, still it left us astounded. We were unaccustomed to the sky's black being punctured by lights. Some of the Somalis had experienced these things before, but those of us from southern Sudan had seen none of this; even in our homes, in our villages before the war, there was no plumbing, and any of these amenities, bedsheets and towels, were rare and coveted. At that hotel in Ketale, we ate at their restaurant, drank cold drinks from an icebox, swishing the ice cubes-which at least a portion of the group had never touched-around in our mouths. If we had turned around the next day, just that one night in Ketale would have made for the most spectacular of journeys. In all of the time at Ketale, Tabitha and I barely spoke, saving any interaction for a later time. The opportunity would arise, we knew, and we needed only to wait and watch.

We drove on in the morning, through the afternoon and through the night, and by the morning after, were in Nairobi. I have to attempt to communicate the awe that comes over a group of young people like us, after spending many years in a camp at the edge of the world, upon seeing something like Nairobi, one of the largest cities in Africa. We had nothing with which to compare it. On the bus there was a hush. You might imagine a bus full of teenagers loudly pointing at buildings, at cars and bridges and parks. But this bus was utterly silent. Our faces were pressed against the windows but no one said a word. Some of what we saw was impossible to understand. Houses upon houses, windows upon windows. The tallest building I had seen before that day was precisely two stories tall. And knowing that these buildings faced no threat, that they would stand untouched-the sense of permanence was something I had not known for many years.

When we arrived at Nairobi that morning, we were dropped off at a church and there we met our sponsors. Each of us was assigned a host family, most of whom were in some way affiliated with the national theater. I was assigned to a man named Mike Mwaniki, an extraordinarily handsome and sophisticated man, I thought. He was perhaps thirty years old, and was one of the founders of the Mavuno Drama Group, based in the city; they performed original plays by young Kenyan playwrights.

— This is the man, eh? he said to me.-You're our guy!

He shook my hand heartily and slapped me on the back and gave me a slice of cake. I had never had cake, and in retrospect it doesn't make much sense that he would greet me at nine-thirty in the morning with cake, but he did, and it was delicious. A white cream cake with stripes of sunflower orange.

The other members of the group went with their sponsors, and Tabitha went off with hers, an older couple dressed extravagantly and driving a Land Rover. Miss Gladys quickly disappeared with a very handsome and wealthy-looking Kenyan man-we did not see her again until the performance two days later-and I went with Mike. He shared an apartment with his girlfriend, a diminutive and luminous woman named Grace, and together they lived in a part of the city called BuruBuru Phase 3. It was a mad neighborhood, busier than any place I had ever known. Kakuma held eighty thousand people, but there was very little traffic, few cars, no horns, scant electricity, very little bustle. But in Nairobi, in BuruBuru Phase 3, the hum of the streets was inescapable. The motorcycles, the cars and buses run at all hours, and the sweet toxic smell of diesel is everywhere. Even in their apartment, where the floors and glass were so clean, the street was there, the smell of the roads and sounds of people passing under their windows. The cars were so many colors, an array I didn't know existed. In Kakuma all the vehicles were white, identical, all bearing the UN symbol.

I was given the bedroom Mike and Grace shared; the mattress was enormous and firm, and in that first moment in that room the sheets were so white that I had to turn away. I put my bag down and sat on a small wicker chair in the corner. I had a crippling headache. I thought I was alone in the room so I dropped my head to my hands and tried to massage my skull into some kind of agreement that all this was good. But my head frequently was overwhelmed, and the best times of my life were often accompanied by migraines of inexplicable origin.

— Are you set? Mike asked.

I looked up. He was standing in the doorway.

— I'm fine, I said.-I am very good. I am very happy. I forced a smile that would convince him.

— We're seeing a movie tonight, he said.-You'll come?

I said I would. He and Grace had to go to work. They worked at an automobile dealership down the road, but they would be back at six to pick me up. Mike showed me the TV and the bathroom and gave me a key to his front door and to the apartment building, and he and Grace jogged down the steps and were gone.

To be alone in that place! They had given me the key and I sat for some time, watching the people move below the window. This was the first time I had been on the second story of a building. It was quite disorienting, though not so much unlike sitting in a tree over Amath's house with Moses and William K, trying to listen in to the conversations she would have with her sisters.

After an hour of watching the street, the path below the window, I tried the television. I had seen only scattered bits of TV by that point, and so, left to my own devices, alone with twelve channels, this was a problem. I did not move for three hours, I am ashamed to admit. But the things I saw! I watched movies, the news, soccer, cooking shows, nature documentaries, a movie where the sky held two suns, and an examination of the last days of Adolf Hitler. I found a learning channel, directed to students my age, where the hosts were teaching the same book I was studying at Kakuma. This filled me with a certain pride, knowing that what was good enough for refugees was good enough for the Kenyans of Nairobi.

In the afternoon, after far too much TV, I heard the students returning from school. I used my key to lock the door and I walked out to see all the boys and girls in their uniforms, and they looked at me and whispered.

— Turkana!

— Sudan!

— Refugee!

They pointed and giggled but they were not unkind, and I loved them for not being unkind. Here the students walked freely and wore clean white shirts with plaid skirts and scarves to match. It was too much. I wanted to wear a uniform, too. I wanted to be one of them, to know what to wear every day, and to be Kenyan, to go to school along paved roads and laugh about nothing. To buy some candy on the way home and eat it and laugh! That was what I wanted. I would have walls where I slept, and I could turn a faucet and water would come and wash over my hands, as much as I wanted, cold as bone.

The film Mike, Grace, and I saw that night, I remember distinctly, was Men in Black. I knew to some extent what was going on in the movie, but wasn't sure what was real and what was not. It was the first time I had been in a theater. The film was confusing but I did my best to follow the reactions of the audience. When they laughed, I laughed. When they seemed scared, I became scared, too. But all the while the separation of the real from the not-real was very difficult for me. After the movie, Mike and Grace took me for ice cream, and they asked me what I thought of Men in Black. There was no possibility that I would admit that I had no idea what was happening much of the time, so I lavished the film with praise and otherwise agreed with all their assessments. They were fans of Tommy Lee Jones, they said, and had seen The Fugitive four times.

We walked along the streets of Nairobi that night, on the way back to their apartment, and I thought of this life. To have ice cream! We actually had to choose between two ice cream vendors! I remember being conscious of the fleeting nature of that night, how in two days I would be back at Kakuma. Though I tried to disguise it, I slowed our pace as we walked. I wanted so badly to make the evening last. It was a lovely night, the air warm, the wind civilized.

Back at the apartment, Mike and Grace bid me goodnight and encouraged me to take what I wanted from the refrigerator, to watch television if I liked. This might have been a mistake. I did not take any food from them, for I was overstuffed anyway, but I did take advantage of the second part of their offer. I am not sure when I fell asleep. I spun the channels until my wrist was sore. I know that light had begun to bleach the sky when I finally went to bed, and I was dazed for most of the next day.

In the morning, I found Grace on the couch, crying. I tiptoed quietly into the living room. She held a newspaper in her hand.

— No no no! Grace said.-No! I can't believe it!

Mike came to see what Grace was reading. I stood, timidly, for fear that something like the bombing of the embassy had happened again. As I got closer to the newspaper, I saw the image of a white woman in a car. She was very pretty, with sandy brown hair. There were pictures of the same woman handing flowers to an African child, stepping off airplanes, riding in the back of a convertibles. I guessed that this woman, whoever she was, was dead.

— This is terrible, Mike said, and sat with Grace, holding her shoulder against his. I said nothing. I still did not know what had happened. Grace turned to me. Her eyes were wet, swollen.

— Don't you know her? she asked. I shook my head.

— This is Princess Diana. From England?

Grace explained that this woman had given a great deal of money and assistance to Kenya, that she worked for the ban on land mines. She was a beautiful person, she said.

— A car crash. In Paris, Mike said. Now he was behind Grace, wrapping his arms around her. They were the most loving couple I had ever seen. I knew my father loved my mother, but open affection like this was not part of life in my village.

All day, people were crying. Ten of us, Tabitha and the Somalis and most of the Dominics, walked through the city and wherever we went, we found people weeping-in the markets, outside the churches, on the sidewalks. It seemed the whole world knew this person named Diana, and if the world knew her, the connection between the peoples of the earth was tighter than I had imagined. I wondered if the people of England would mourn if Mike and Grace died. At that time, confused as I was, I imagined that they would.

My sleep-deprived state dulled my senses, and perhaps this was helpful. After lunch we went to the theater to rehearse for the next night's show, and had I been more alert I might have fainted. The theater was enormous, a lavishly decorated space. The last time we performed the play we had done so on the dirt of Kakuma, the audience sitting on the ground before us. There were no proper stages in our camp, and now we were standing on real boards of cherry wood, looking out at the plush seats, twelve hundred of them. We rehearsed that day, though the mood was somber. The members of our group had all been informed of Diana's death, and who she was, and they feigned or adopted sadness.

When the troupe was alone that day, in whole or in part, we talked about staying. We all wanted to remain in Nairobi, to live there forever. No one wanted to go back to Kakuma, even those of us with families, and we theorized about how we might stay. There were plans to run away, to disappear into the city, to hide until they'd given up on us. But we knew at least some of us would be caught and punished severely. And if anyone did run, it would mean the end of any trips to Nairobi for anyone else at Kakuma. In the end the only solution, we knew, was a sponsorship. If a Kenyan citizen agreed to sponsor any of us, or any refugee in Kakuma, one could live with that sponsor, go to a real Kenyan school, and live as the Kenyans did.

— You should ask Mike to sponsor you, one of the Dominics urged me.-I bet he would.

— I can't ask him that.

— He's young. He can do it.

The idea was not a good one, I didn't think. It was the habit of so many I knew, in Kakuma and later, to take the generosity of a person and stretch it to breaking.

But in a few weaker moments I thought, I could ask him, couldn't I? I could ask him the night before I was to leave. Then no harm would be done; if he said no, it would not be uncomfortable.

So that became my plan. Until the last day, I would be cavalier and happy, showing how appealing I was, and then, the last night, I would mention to Mike that a young man like myself would be helpful in Nairobi, would be able to do just about anything for Mike and Grace and the Mavuno Drama Group.

After rehearsal, Mike and Grace offered to take me and one friend out for dinner at a Chinese restaurant. I chose Tabitha, but was ready to have my selection rejected as inappropriate. But as it was not unusual in Kenya for people like Tabitha and me to date, Mike and Grace accepted and welcomed her. My selection intrigued them, I believe, for they asked many questions on our walk to pick her up. Which one was she again? Did we see her yesterday? Was she wearing pink?

We ate at a restaurant with clean ceramic floors and pictures on the wall of past dignitaries of Kenya. Tabitha and I ate lamb and vegetables and soda. I gained weight, everyone did, so quickly those few days. We had never eaten so well. All during dinner Mike and Grace watched us eat, smiling sadly, and as we became sated and could talk undistracted by our food, Mike and Grace, I am sure, noticed that we were in love. They looked from Tabitha to me and back again and they grinned knowingly.

We walked from dinner to a shopping mall, four stories tall and filled with stores and people, so much glass, a movie theater. Tabitha and I pretended to be familiar with a place like this, and tried not to seem overly impressed.

— Oh lord, we're tired, Grace said, forcing an extravagant yawn. Mike laughed and squeezed her hand. He stopped outside a photo-processing shop. A potbellied man stepped out and he and Mike and Grace greeted each other warmly.

— Okay, Mike said to Tabitha and me.-I'm guessing you two would like some time alone, and we're willing to allow this. But first we'll make an arrangement. This is my friend Charles.

The potbellied man nodded to us.

— He'll be working here till ten o'clock. We will allow you two to stay here at the mall together, unchaperoned, so long as at ten o'clock, you meet Charles back here at his shop. He'll close up and take you both home.

It was a very good deal, we thought, and so we accepted immediately. Mike handed me a handful of shillings and winked at me conspiratorially. When I held that money in one hand and Tabitha's hand in the other, I felt sure that I was living the best moment of my life. Tabitha and I had almost two hours alone together, and it did not matter that we needed to stay inside the mall.

— Be back here at ten, Charles said, looking at Tabitha.

— You'll be okay? Mike asked me.

— Yes sir, I said.-You can trust us.

— We do trust you, he said, and then winked at me.

— Now go, you're free! Grace said, and shooed us with the back of her tiny hand.

Mike and Grace left the mall and Charles returned to his film-developing machines. Tabitha and I were alone and the choices were too many. I began to think where might be the most appropriate spot to hold her against me, to hold her face in my hands. Gop had instructed me to hold a woman's face in my hands when I kissed her, and I was determined to do it this way.

I knew nothing about the mall, but I had the presence of mind to know that in such a situation, the man should appear decisive, so I first led Tabitha up two flights of stairs and into the biggest and brightest of the mall's stores. I did not know what was inside. When I finally realized it was a grocery store, it was too late for me to change my mind. I had to feign great pride in my choice.

When I look back on this, it seems very unromantic, but we spent most of our two hours in this grocery store. It was enormous, brighter than day, and filled with as much food as all of Kakuma could eat in a week. It was also something of a variety store and a drug store, too-so many things in one place. There were twelve aisles, some with freezers stuffed with pizzas and popsicles, others stacked with home appliances and cosmetics. Tabitha examined the lipsticks, the hair products, false eyelashes, and women's magazines; she was very much a cosmetics girl even then. At Kakuma Town the stores were wooden shacks stuffed with ancient-seeming products, nothing packaged brightly, nothing so pristine and delectable as the contents of that Nairobi grocery-variety store. We walked up and down each aisle, showing each other one wonder after another: a wall of juices and sodas, a shelf of candy and toys, fans and air conditioners, an area in the back where bicycles were lined up and gleaming. Tabitha let out a little squeal and ran to those made for the smallest riders.

She sat on a tiny tricycle built for a toddler and honked the horn.

— Val, I need to ask you an important question, she said, her eyes alight.

— Yes? I said. I was so worried that she wanted something of me that I was not prepared to give. I had feared for a long time that secretly Tabitha was well-versed in the ways of love, and that the moment we were alone, she would want to move too quickly. That it would be clear I had no experience at all. Seeing her on that tricycle provoked strong and inexplicable feelings in me.

— Let's run, she said.

This wasn't what I had expected.

— What? Run where? I said.

— Run away. Stay here. Leave Kakuma. Let's not go back.

I told Tabitha that she had lost her mind. She said nothing for a minute and I thought she had regained her senses. But she was far from finished.

— Val, can't you see? Mike and Grace expect us to leave tonight, together. That's why they left us alone.

— Mike and Grace don't expect us to leave.

— You heard Grace! She said shoo! We can go off and be like them. Wouldn't you like to live like them? We can, Val, you and me.

I told Tabitha I could not do it. I did not agree that Mike and Grace expected us to leave that night. I believed that they would be greatly troubled by our disappearance, that it would bring them a lot of trouble from police and immigration officials. Our defecting would also, I reminded Tabitha, put an end to all sanctioned refugee excursions from Kakuma. Our trip to Nairobi would be the last any youth from Kakuma would ever make.

— C'mon, Val! We can't think of that, she said.-We have to think of what you and I can do. We have to live, don't we? What right do they have to tell us where we can live? You know that's not living, how they have it at Kakuma. We're not humans there and you know it. We're animals, we're just penned up like cattle. Don't you think you deserve better than that? Don't we? Who are you obeying? The rules of Kenyans who know nothing about us? Everyone will understand, Val. They'll cheer us from Kakuma and you know it. They don't expect us to come back.

— We can't, Tabitha. This isn't the right way.

— You're put on this Earth just once and you're going to just live as these people make you live? You're not a person to them! You're an insect! Take control. She stomped her foot onto mine.

— Who are you, Valentine? Where are you from?

— I'm from Sudan.

— Really? How? What do you remember from that place?

— I'll go back, I said.-I'll always be Sudanese.

— But you're a person first, Val. You're a soul. You know what a soul is? She truly could be condescending, exasperating.

— You're a soul whose human form happened to take that of a boy from Sudan. But you're not tied to that, Val. You're not just a Sudanese boy. You don't have to accept these limitations. You don't have to obey the laws of where someone like you must belong, that because you have Sudanese skin and Sudanese features you have to be just a product of the war, that you're just part of all this shit. They tell you to leave your home and walk to Ethiopia and you do. They tell you to leave Ethiopia, to leave Golkur, and you do. They walk to Kakuma and you just walk with them. You follow every time. And now they tell you that you have to stay in a camp until they allow you to leave. Don't you see? What right do all these people have to draw boundaries around the life you can live? What gives them the right? Because they happened to be born Kenyan and you Sudanese?

— My parents are alive, Tabitha!

— I know that! Don't you think it would be more likely to get to them from Nairobi? You could work and earn money and get to Marial Bai far more easily from here. Think about it.

I can look back and see the wisdom in what she said that night, but at the time, Tabitha was frustrating me greatly, and I had a low opinion of her views and of her. I told her that her rhetoric would not convince me to break laws or to diminish the quality of life for thousands of young people at Kakuma.

— I have no right to make life harder for anyone else, I said.

And that was the end of our talk. I wandered through the store for some time, not sure if I wanted to be with Tabitha then or ever again. She was a different person than I had previously assumed. She seemed selfish to me, irresponsible and short-sighted and immature. I decided I would simply go to Charles's shop at ten o'clock, hoping Tabitha would be there. But I did not want to be the one to prevent her from fleeing if she so chose. I hoped so dearly that she would not run away but I did not want to tell her not to. I did not have that right. I was sure that this night would be the end of our romance. She would see me as timid and overly obedient; this was something I feared from the beginning, that Tabitha favored more dangerous men than me. I was then, like I was on so many days, at war with my law-abiding personality. Over the years, my eagerness to please those in authority got me into far too much trouble.

It was, however, too soon to admit this to myself or to Tabitha, so I remained among the bicycles, reminded of the man in the desert who kept fresh food in a hole in the ground. I thought of this man and found myself unconsciously touching my shin where the barbed wire had made a meal of me. It was then that I saw that Tabitha had returned. She was storming down the aisle to me, past the electric fans and the coffee makers and towels, and she was soon in front of me, standing inches away.

— Stupid boy! she yelled.

I had no answer for that accusation, for it was certainly true.

— Now kiss me, she demanded.

She was as angry as I had ever seen her, her forehead making use of muscles I did not know a face possessed. Her lips, though, were pursed, and she closed her eyes and tilted her head up to mine. And immediately all of my opinions about her fell away. My stomach and heart collided but I leaned down to Tabitha and kissed her. I kissed her and she kissed me until a clerk in the grocery store asked us to leave. They were closing, he said, pointing to his watch. It was ten o'clock. We had been kissing for forty minutes there among the bicycles, her hands on the handlebars and mine on hers.

I remember nothing from the next day. Tabitha was obligated to spend the day with her sponsors, and because Mike and Grace were working, I spent much of the day in their apartment. Occasionally I walked around the neighborhood, attempting to think, even for a second or two, of anything beyond the kiss we shared. But it was futile. I relived that long kiss a thousand times that day. In the apartment I kissed the refrigerator, I kissed every door, many pillows and all of the couch cushions, all in the effort to approximate the sensation again.

I should have been concerned about Tabitha, about whether or not she would appear that day at the rehearsal, but I had not yet processed the night before. When Tabitha arrived that afternoon at the theater, I was so entranced by memories of the night before that I barely noticed the real Tabitha, who was purposely ignoring me. Sometime in the night she had decided to be mad at me again. She would continue to fume for weeks to come.

On the night of our performance, the theater was full. There were eighteen different groups performing, from all over Kenya. Ours was the only troupe of refugees. I thank the Lord that we performed well that night; we remembered our lines and under the lights, with all those seats, we still found a way to be present in the words and drama of the play we had written. We did well, we knew we did well. When we finished, the audience cheered and some people stood and clapped. Our group placed third overall. We could not have asked for more.

Afterward, there was a celebratory dinner, and then we all went to our sponsors' homes. Even on the walk there the struggle was evident on my face.

— What's the matter? Grace asked.-You look like you ate something sour.

I told her it was nothing, but I was a wreck. I knew that I had only this night to speak to Mike and Grace about the possibility of his sponsoring me.

But I said nothing to Grace, and nothing to either of them as they washed up before bed. Grace went to sleep and Mike did, too, before he returned to the living room.-Couldn't sleep, he said.

We sat on the couch that night watching television for hours more, and while I asked him questions about what we saw-who are the men in the curved hats? who are the women wearing feathers? — all I could think was Could I? Could I really ask him such a thing? I could not ask such a thing of Mike. It was far too much, I knew. Mike was too busy to be burdened with a refugee. But then again, I thought, I could be such a help. There were so many things I could do to earn my keep. I could cook and clean and certainly help in any way the theater needed me. I was organized, I had proven that, and I was well liked, and I could clean the theater after it closed, or clean it before it opened. I could do either or both, and afterward, could come home and turn down the bed for Mike and Grace. Certainly Mike would know all the things that I would be willing to do. He knew that I would be willing to work for my room and board, to make it advantageous to have me around.

I cursed my stupidity. Mike did not need or want someone to help with all that. He wanted to be a young man unencumbered by the plight of a gangly Sudanese teenager. This was his good deed, this week of hosting me, and that was enough. If my mother knew I was even contemplating imposing on someone in such a way, she would be so ashamed.

— Well, this is the end of the night for me, he said, and stood.

— Okay, I said.

— You staying up again? he asked.-I don't know when you sleep. I smiled and opened my mouth. A tumble of words, obsequious and needful words, were so close to leaving my mouth. But I said nothing.

— Good night, I said.-Your hospitality has meant everything to me.

He smiled and went to bed, to join Grace.

We went home the next morning, all of us refugees from Kakuma. Everyone was tired; I was not the only one who had developed a taste for television. I did not sit near Tabitha, and did not speak to her the entire ride back. It was just as well. I was drowning in so many thoughts and needed a rest from her, from any reminder of the choices I had not made. I rested my head on the glass, trying to sleep it all away. We did not stop at Ketale this time, instead driving straight through to Kakuma. I slipped in and out of consciousness, watching the lush parts of Kenya pass by, its great green hills and sheets of rain drenching far-off farms. We flew past all that and back to the howling mess of Kakuma.

CHAPTER 24

I am in the parking lot of the Century Club and there are twenty minutes before the gym opens. There is not enough time to nap, even if I were able, so I turn on the radio and find the BBC World News. This program has been a part of my life for so long, since Pinyudo, when the SPLA commanders would blast its reports from Africa across the camp. In the past few years, it seems that no BBC World News broadcast has been complete without an item on Sudan. This morning there is first a predictable story about Darfur; an expert on African affairs notes that seven thousand African Union troops patrolling a region the size of France have been ineffectual in preventing continued janjaweed terror. Funding for the troops is about to run out, and it seems that no one, including the United States, is ready to put forth more money or come up with new ideas to stop the killing and displacement. This is not surprising to those of us who lived through twenty years of oppression by the hands of Khartoum and its militias.

The second Sudan story is more fascinating; it concerns a yacht. It seems that the African Union was to meet in Khartoum, and el-Bashir, the president of Sudan, wanted to impress the heads of state with an extravagant boat, which would be docked in the Nile and would carry the dignitaries up and down the river during their stay. The vessel was ordered from Slovenia, and Bashir paid $4.5 million for it. It goes without saying that $4.5 million would be useful in feeding the poor of Sudan.

The yacht was transported from Slovenia to the Red Sea, where it sailed to Port Sudan. From Port Sudan, it needed to be transported overland to Khartoum in time for the conference. But getting it to the capitol proved far more difficult than anticipated. The 172-ton boat challenged the bridges it had to be driven over, and the overhead electrical wires along the way were problematic; 132 of them had to be cut down and reassembled after the yacht had passed. By the time the yacht was within sight of the Nile, the leaders of Africa had come and gone. They had somehow managed without the yacht and its satellite TVs, fine china, and staterooms.

But before the boat reached Khartoum, it had become a symbol for how decadent and callous Bashir is. The man has enemies from all sides-it is not only the southern Sudanese who despise him. Moderate Muslims do, too, and have formed a number of political parties and coalitions to oppose him. In Darfur it was a non-Arab Muslim group, after all, who rose up against his government, with a variety of demands for the region. If genocide does not incite the people of Sudan to replace this madman, and the whole National Islamic Front that controls Khartoum, perhaps the boat will.

As I have been listening to the radio report, I have been staring across the parking lot to a pay phone, and now I see it as an invitation. I decide that I should call my own number, to ring my stolen phone. I have nothing to lose in doing so.

I use one of the phone cards I bought from Achor Achor's cousin in Nashville. He sells $5 phone cards that in fact give the user $100 worth of international long distance. I don't know how it works, but these cards are bought by all the refugees I know. The one I have is very strange, and was probably not made by Africans: it bears an unusual montage: a Maori tribesman in full regalia, spear in hand, with an American buffalo in the background. Over the images are the words AFRICA CALIFORNIA.

It takes me a moment to remember my own number; I have not called it often. When I do remember it, I dial the first six digits quickly and pause for a long moment before finishing the cycle. I often cannot believe the things I do.

It rings. My throat pounds. Two rings, three. A click.

'Hello?' A boy's voice. Michael. TV Boy.

'Michael. It is the man you stole from last night.'

A quick small gasp, then silence.

'Michael, let me talk to you. I just want you to see that-'

The phone is dropped, and I hear the sound of Michael speaking in an echo-giving room. I hear muffled voices and then 'Gimme that.' A button is pushed and the call ends.

I gave the police officer this number and now I know that they did not try to call it even once. The phone is still in possession of the people who stole it, those who robbed and beat me, and this phone is still working. The police did not bother to investigate the crime, and the criminals knew the police would do nothing. This is the moment, above any other, when I wonder if I actually exist. If one of the parties involved, the police or the criminals, believed that I had worth or a voice, then this phone would have been disposed of. But it seems clear that there has been no acknowledgment of my existence on either side of this crime.

Five minutes later, after I have returned to my car to catch my breath, I return to the pay phone to try my number again. I am not surprised when the call goes directly to voicemail. Out of habit, I type in my access code to listen to my own messages.

There are three. The first is from Madelena, the admissions officer at a small Jesuit college I visited months ago and which all but promised me entry at that time. Since then, they seem to have arrived at a dozen or more reasons why my application is incomplete. First, they said, my transcript was not official enough; I had sent a copy, when they needed a certified original. Then I had failed to take a certain test that earlier they told me was unnecessary. And all the while, every time I have tried to reach Madelena on the phone, she has been gone. Periodically, though, she calls me back, always at an hour when she knows I will not pick up. I am not sure how she does it. She is a master at this. This message is more informative than any other:

'Valentine, I've talked to my colleagues here at the college and we think you should get some more credits under your belt from the community college'-and here she fumbles with her papers, finding the name-'Georgia Perimeter College. The last thing anyone wants to happen is for you to come all the way out here only to be unsuccessful. So let's get back in touch after a few more semesters, and see where you're at…' This continues for a while, and when she hangs up I can hear the relief in her voice. She will not have to deal with me, she assumes, for another year.

In much the same way as happened at Kakuma, people have been astonished by my difficulty achieving some objectives that they imagine would be easy for me to reach. I have been in the United States five years and I am not much closer to college than I was when I arrived. Through assistance from Phil Mays and the Lost Boys Foundation, I was able to quit my fabric-sample job and study full-time at Georgia Perimeter College, taking the classes I had been told that I would need to apply to a four-year college. But it has not gone as planned. My grades have been inconsistent, and my teachers not always encouraging. Is college really for me? they asked. I did not answer this question. My Foundation money ran out and I had to take this job, at the health club, but I am still determined to attend college. A respected college where I can be a legitimate student. I will not rest until I do.

This fall it seemed I had finally reached a place where I was ready. I had four solid semesters of community college under my belt and my grades were on the whole fine. They dipped after the death of Bobby Newmyer but I did not think these few mis-steps would hamper my applications. And yet they did. I applied to Jesuit colleges all over the country and their response was confusing and conflicted.

First I toured. I visited seven colleges and always did my best to take notes, to make sure I knew exactly what it was that they were looking for in a prospective student. Gerald Newton had told me to ask them point-blank, 'What will it take to make sure I am a student here in the fall?' I said exactly those words at every school I visited. And they were very encouraging. They were friendly, they seemed to want me. But my applications were rejected by all of these schools, and in some cases the admissions officers did not respond at all.

When I finally spoke to an admissions officer at one school, a man who agreed to be candid with me, he said some interesting things.

'You just might be too old.'

I asked him to explain. He represented another liberal arts college with a small undergraduate population. I had visited this school, its manicured topiary, its buildings looking much like the catalog we had passed around while waiting for the plane to take us away from Kakuma.

'Look at it this way,' he said. 'There are dorms here. There are young girls, some of them only seventeen years old. You know what I mean?'

I did not know what he meant.

'Your application says you're twenty-seven years old,' he said.

'Yes?'

'Well, picture some white suburban family. They're spending forty thousand dollars to send their young blond daughter to college, she's never been away from home, and the first day on campus they see a guy like you roaming the dorms?'

In his opinion, he had explained everything he needed to. He was trying to give me frank and final advice; he imagined I would quit. But I refuse to believe that this is the end of my pursuit of a college degree, though it seems to me now that I might have to be creative. At Kakuma we could invent a new name for ourselves, a new story for whatever purpose, whenever the pressures and obligations necessitated it.-You have to innovate, Gop said many times, and he meant that there were few unbendable rules at Kakuma. Especially when the alternative was deprivation.

There is a message on my phone from Daniel Bol, who I have known since Kakuma. He was in the Napata Drama Group, and though he does not say it outright, I know that he needs money again. 'You know why I'm calling you,' he says, and exhales dramatically. Normally I would not consider calling him back, but something occurs to me, a way I might solve my problem with Daniel once and for all. I call him back.

'Hello?' It is him. He is awake. It is 3:13 a.m. where he is. We chat for a few minutes about general things, about his new marriage and his new child, born three months ago. Her name is Hillary.

Daniel is not a particularly graceful man, and I take some pleasure in hearing how clumsily he arrives at the purpose of his call.

'So…' he says. Then he is silent. I am supposed to glean from that that he needs my assistance, and now I am expected to be asking him which Western Union is the closest to his home. I decide to have him explain his situation a bit more clearly.

'What's the matter?' I ask.

'Oh Achak, as you know, I have a new child at home.'

I remind him that we were just speaking about her moments ago.

'Yes, and she was sick last week, and then I did a dumb thing. I am very ashamed of what I did but it is done. So.

And again I'm supposed to infer the rest and then wire the money. But I will not make it so easy for him. I put on a bit of theatrics for old time's sake.

'What is done? What happened? Is your baby still sick?'

I know that his baby isn't sick at all, and was not sick, but I am surprised when he drops this part of his gambit.

'No, this isn't about the baby. She's fine now. This is about something stupid I did over one weekend. Two weeks ago. You know what I'm talking about.'

It is always curious how he prefers not to say the word gambling, as if he doesn't want to pollute our conversation with the word. But I push him one step further and finally he explains what I knew to be the case when I first heard his voice on my answering machine. Daniel leaves his wife and child for days at a time and travels forty-five minutes to the Indian reservation, where there is a casino he favors. There he has lost a total of $11,400 over the last six months. All of us who know him have attempted various methods of helping him, but nothing has worked. For some time, many of us made the mistake of simply giving him money. I gave him $200, all I could manage, and only because he told me that he had no insurance coverage for his child and had to pay the birthing expenses out of pocket. Americans from his church, and Sudanese all over the country sent him money at that time, and only later did we learn that he had been insured all along, and that every cent of the $5300 or so provided to him, from twenty-eight of us, went back to the casino. Since that time, he has been gingerly feeling out those among us who might still be tapped for donations. His approach this morning is to claim a new direction, and salvation.

'This is the end of it for me, Dominic. I'm finally free of this habit.' He still will not say the words gambling or blackjack. I listen to him for ten minutes and he refuses to say the words.

'If I can't pay this off,' he says, then drifts off for a moment. 'I just might have to…end it. Just give it up, dammit. Everything.'

For a moment I don't understand what he's saying. An end to the gambling? But then I understand. But I know this threat to be hollow. Daniel is perhaps the last person I know who would ever take his life. He is too vain and too small. We sit with his threat for a few moments, and then I decide that it is time to play the card I have been holding all along.

'Daniel, I wish I could help in your time of need, but I was attacked last night.' And so I tell him the entire story, the ordeal from the beginning. Though I know him to be a self-centered man, I am nevertheless surprised by how little he seems to care. Along the way, he makes curt sounds that he hears what I'm saying, but he does not ask how I am doing, or where I am now, why I am awake at 5:26 a.m. But it is clear that he knows he cannot continue to ask me for money. He only wants to get off the phone, for he is wasting time with me when he must think of who to call next.

By many we have been written off as a failed experiment. We were the model Africans. For so long, this was our designation. We were applauded for our industriousness and good manners and, best of all, our devotion to our faith. The churches adored us, and the leaders they bankrolled and controlled coveted us. But now the enthusiasm has dampened. We have exhausted many of our hosts. We are young men, and young men are prone to vice. Among the four thousand are those who have entertained prostitutes, who have lost weeks and months to drugs, many more who have lost their fire to drink, dozens who have become inexpert gamblers, fighters.

The story that broke everyone's will was widely told and unfortunately true: One night not long ago, three Sudanese men in Atlanta, all of whom I knew here and in Kakuma, were out carousing. They drank in no-name bars and later in the street, and eventually were awake and intoxicated while the rest of the city had found reasons to sleep. Two of the men began to argue about money; there was $10 at issue, which had been loaned and not repaid. Soon there was a fight between two of them, clumsy and seemingly harmless. The third man tried to break it up but all three of them were sloppy and blurred and one of the men attempted a kick to the chest of his debtor, and lost his balance, landing on his head. That effectively ended the dispute for that night. The three dispersed, and the third man helped the kicker home, where his head swelled. Half a day later, the friend called an ambulance but by then it was too late. The kicking man fell into a coma, and died two days later.

Does this sort of thing happen to Americans? A man tries to kick another and then dies? Could anything be more pitiful? Did it need to be over $10? I find myself cursing the third man, the friend, for not bringing the kicker to the hospital sooner, and for telling everyone that the dispute was over so little. The Sudanese, anyone can now say, will kill each other over $10.

I send money to many. Because everyone at Kakuma knew I had a job there, they assume I am wildly successful in America. So I receive calls from acquaintances in the camp, and in Nairobi, Cairo, Khartoum, Kampala. I send what I can spare, though most of my money goes to my younger brothers and stepbrothers, three of them in school in Nairobi. They were so small when I left Marial Bai that I can remember little about them from that time. Now they are grown and have plans. Samuel, the oldest and shortest, just graduated from high school, and is applying to business schools in Kenya. Peter will graduate from a British-run preparatory school in Nairobi; Phil helped to pay for his tuition. Peter is perhaps the most like myself; at school he is very involved-he is a prefect, he plays basketball and is a black belt in karate. He is quiet but is respected by his peers and his teachers. Because he is the most reliable of my brothers, I send funds through him for distribution to Samuel and to Philip, who is sixteen and wants to be a doctor. I am happy and proud to send them money, sometimes as much as $300 a month. But it is never enough. There are so many others for whom I cannot do what I would like to. My father's sister lives in Khartoum with three children, and has very little means of taking care of herself. Her husband was killed in the war, and his brothers are dead, too. I send her money, perhaps $50 a month, and I wish I could send more.

The last message is from Moses. Moses of Marial Bai, Moses who was brought north as a slave, Moses who was branded and escaped and later trained to be a rebel. Moses who went to private school in Kenya and college in British Columbia and now lives in Seattle. I have not seen him since Kakuma and I am so grateful when I hear his voice. His is a voice so unwavering, always bright, lunging forward with hope.

'Gone Far my man!' he says in English. He always liked this nickname for me. He switches to Dinka. 'Lino called me and he told me what happened. First of all, don't be mad at Lino. He said I was the one and only person he would call. And I won't tell anyone else. I promise. He also said that you're doing okay, and that the injuries weren't so bad. So I send you my best wishes for a quick recovery.'

Every time I wonder about where we're going and who we are, if I speak to Moses, I feel assured. If only you were with me now, Moses! You would be strong enough to carry us both through this horrible morning.

'Now, I know this sounds like a bad time to bring this up…' he says, and I catch my breath. 'But I'm organizing a walk…' I exhale. He says he is organizing a walk to bring attention to the plight of the Darfurians. He plans to travel from his home in Seattle to Tucson, Arizona, by foot.

'Achak, I want to do this and I know it will make a difference. Think of it! What if we all walked again? What if we could all get together and walk again, this time on roads and in view of the whole world? Wouldn't people take notice? We'd really be able to get people thinking about Darfur, about what it means to be displaced, chased, and walking toward an uncertain future, right? Call me back when you can. I want you to be part of this.'

There is a pause, when it seems that Moses has put down the phone. Then he picks it up again in a clattering rush.

'And I'm so sorry about Tabitha. Achak, I am so very sorry. You'll find another girl, I know. You're a very desirable man.' He pauses to correct himself. 'That is, to women, not to me. I do not find you desirable that way, Gone Far.'

He is laughing quietly when he hangs up.

CHAPTER 25

'There he is!'

I push through the front door to the Century Club and am met by Ben, the club's maintenance engineer. He is a thin man, with small hands and huge empathetic eyes and a great dome of a forehead.

'Hello, Ben,' I say.

'Whoa, you look wasted, son.' He rests his clipboard on the counter and comes to me, holds my face in his hands. 'Where have you been? You look like you haven't slept in weeks. And this!' He touches the cut on my forehead. 'And your lip!'

He holds my face and examines every pore.

'You get in a fight?'

I sigh, and he assumes this means yes. He drops his hands from my face and adopts a dissatisfied expression.

'Why are you Sudanese always fighting?'

I touch his shoulder and walk past. I don't feel like explaining everything that happened. I need to wash myself.

'Talk to me after you get cleaned up, yeah?' he calls out.

In the locker room I am alone. I take a clean white towel from the pile by the door and open my locker. Taking off my shoes is a miracle. My feet breathe, I breathe. Immediately I feel better. I throw them into the locker and undress slowly. I am sore everywhere; my body seems to have aged decades overnight.

The water is a shock at any temperature. As it becomes warmer, my limbs and bones grow more limber. I ease my head under the rain and watch the blood slip down my body and across the tile. There is not much, a tidy rose-colored thread that dashes for the drain and is gone.

In the mirror I do not look much different. My bottom lip is cut, and there is a sickle-shaped abrasion from my cheek to my temple. A small red spot now occupies the corner of my left eye, just one small drop in the center of the white.

I put on a T-shirt that is nearly clean, and the sweatpants and sneakers I keep at the club. Once the club's shop opens, I will buy another tennis shirt and wear it today. Though I have not slept, simply changing my clothes has created a dividing point between that day, those events, and today. I take a deep breath from the room and am overtaken. I collapse on the cushioned chair they keep in the corner. My neck has given out, and my chin hits my chest. For a moment, I am defeated. My eyes are closed, and I see nothing-no colors, nothing. I can't envision getting up again. My spine seems to have left me. I am an invertebrate, and there is comfort in this. I sit with this idea, following a course that would allow me to remain collapsed on this chair forever. It is attractive for a moment, and then seems less compelling than simply going to work.

I close my locker and soon regain myself. I have to be at the front desk in one minute; my shift begins at five-thirty.

When I get to the desk, I am relieved that Ben is gone. He feels he is more helpful, with his advice and opinions, than he actually is. If he knew what happened to me yesterday, he would have hours of suggestions about what to do, whom to call, where to file complaints and lawsuits. I sit down, alone in the foyer, and turn on the computer. My job is to check in members as they arrive and hand out brochures to prospective members. My shift is only four hours long on Mondays, and the club is not busy at this hour. There are regulars, though, and I know their faces if not always their names.

First is Matt Donnelley, who often walks in the same time I do. He runs on the treadmill from 5:30 to 6:05, does two hundred sit-ups, showers, and leaves. Here he is, a few minutes late, sturdily built, with a thin purple slash of a mouth. When I started at the club, he spent some time one morning talking to me, asking about the history of the Lost Boys and my life in Atlanta. He was well-read and sincerely interested in Sudan; he knew the names Bashir, Turabi, Garang. He was a lawyer, he said, and told me to call him if ever I needed any help or legal advice. But I couldn't think of a reason to call him, and since then we have exchanged only compulsory greetings.

'Hey Valentine,' he says. 'What's the good word?'

The first few times he said this, I thought he was actually looking for a certain word, something appropriate for that particular day. 'Blessed,' I said the first time he asked. He explained the expression to me, but I still don't know how to answer.

Today I say hello to him, and he hands me his membership card. I swipe it and his picture appears, twelve inches tall and in garish color, on the computer monitor in front of me.

'Gotta get me a new picture,' he says. 'I look like they dug me up, right?'

I smile and then he is gone, into the lockers. But his picture remains. It is a quirk of the computer system that the members' pictures linger on the screen until the next member passes through. There is probably a way to remove them from the monitor but I don't know it.

So I look for a moment at Matt Donnelley.

Matt Donnelley, at first it was a rumor. In the winds of Kakuma, people were talking about America. On a certain day in April of 1999, in the morning people talked about so many different things-soccer, sex, a certain aid worker who had been removed for touching a young Somali boy-and by sunset no one spoke of anything but America. Who would go? How would they decide? How many would go?

It started with one of the Dominics. He had been in the office of the UNHCR when he heard someone talking on the phone. The person had said something akin to 'That's very good news. We're very happy, and the boys will be very happy, I'm sure. Right, the Lost Boys. When you know how many you will take, please let me know.'

In days, those words had been repeated hundreds of times, maybe thousands, among the unaccompanied minors of Kakuma. No one could concentrate on anything, no one could play basketball, school was a disaster. Everywhere groups of boys, twenty or fifty in a cluster, were huddled around whoever had new information. One day the news was that all of the Lost Boys would be taken to America. The next day it was America and Canada that would take us, and then Australia. No one knew much about Australia, but we imagined that the three countries were close together, or perhaps three regions of the same nation.

Early on, Achor Achor appointed himself an authority on the matters of resettlement, though he had no unique expertise.

— They will take only the first in each class, Achor Achor said.-I think I'll go, but most of you will be left behind.

This view was contradicted by most of the boys, and soon enough by the facts. The United States planned to resettle hundreds, perhaps thousands of the young men of Kakuma. It became the sole occupying thought in my mind. Resettlement was known to happen to refugees from camps like ours, but the conditions were always extreme and rare, reserved for well-known political dissidents, victims of rape, others whose safety was continually threatened. But it seemed that this undertaking would be something very different, a plan whereby most or all of us unaccompanied minors would be taken and brought across the ocean to America. It was the most bizarre idea I had ever heard.

It took days of discussion to conjure an explanation for why the United States would possibly want us all. It is a fact that this country did not have an obligation to resettle four thousand young men living in a camp in Kenya. It would be an act of generosity without any material benefit for them. We were not scientists or engineers, we did not have valuable expertise or education. Nor were we from a country, like Cuba or even China, that would be embarrassed by our defection. We were penniless young men who would do our best to go to college and become better men. Nothing more. These considerations increased the strangeness of it all.

We did not know much about America, but we knew it was peaceful and that there we would be safe. We would each have a home and a telephone. We could finish our educations without worrying about food or any other threat. We conjured an America that was an amalgam of what we had seen in movies: tall buildings, bright colors, so much glass, fantastic car crashes, and guns used only by criminals and police officers. Beaches, oceans, motorboats.

Once the possibility became real in our minds, I expected to be taken at any time. We had been given no timetable, so it seemed possible that one morning I would be in class and the next moment I would be sitting on a plane. Achor Achor and I talked about how at any moment we had to be ready, because there would likely be a bus one day, and it would be going directly to the airport and then to America. We had ironclad agreements that ensured we would not forget each other.

— If you're in school when the bus comes, I'll run to tell you, I said.

— And you'll do the same for me? Achor Achor said.

— Of course. And if I'm at work, you'll find me?

— I will, I will. I won't leave without you.

— Good, good. I won't leave without you, either, I said.

In class, I tried to concentrate but found it impossible. I was constantly watching the roads, looking for the bus. I trusted Achor Achor but feared that we both might miss our ride. It occurred to us both that there might be only one bus, and whoever made it on that bus would reach America-no one else. This made our day-to-day existence difficult, with the two of us on the lookout every hour of every day. For weeks, our only relaxation came at night, when we were sure the bus could not or would not come. The planes could not fly at night, we reasoned, so the bus would not pick us up at night. We also came to the conclusion that the bus would not come on a weekend, so we relaxed on those days, too. This was all very odd, of course, because no one had told us about any bus, let alone its schedule. We had conjured our theories and plans based on no facts whatsoever. But in those days everyone had their own theory, each as plausible as the next, for nothing seemed impossible anymore.

It was very surprising for me, for Achor Achor and the rest of us when, after two weeks, the bus had not come. We wondered if there were obstacles, and what exactly they were. Outside of the unknown and uncontrollable factors, there were those we knew quite well. The Sudanese elders of Kakuma, a good portion of them, did not want to allow us boys to go to the United States.

— You will forget your culture, they said.

— You will get diseases, you will get AIDS, they warned.

— Who will lead Sudan when this war is over? they asked.

Because many of the unaccompanied minors assumed that it was these elders who were holding up the process, a meeting was called between our leadership and theirs. Hundreds attended, even though only a fraction could fit inside the church where the meeting was held. A crowd twelve deep surrounded the little corrugated-steel building, and when Achor Achor and I arrived-we were to be among the youth representatives-there was no chance of finding a space inside. So we listened from the outer ring of those gathered outside. From the church came yelling and arguing, and the standard fears were expressed: of our losing sight of our customs and history; doubts that the emigrations would ever really occur; and what the loss of four thousand young men would mean.

— How can our country recover when we lose the youth? they said.

— You are the hope of the country, you boys. What will become of our country if there is peace? We risked our lives to have you educated in Ethiopia, we brought you here to Kakuma. You speak many languages now, you can read and write and are being trained in other trades, too. You are among the best educated of our people. How can you leave when we're so close to victory, to peace?

— But there is no peace and there will be no peace! a young man said.

— You have no right to hold us back, said another.

And so on. The meeting went late into the night, and Achor Achor and I left after standing for eight hours, listening to the rhetoric circling and spinning off in a dozen directions. Nothing was settled that night, but it became clear to the elders that they could not control these four thousand young men. There were too many of us and we were too hungry to move. We were a small army of our own now, we were tall and healthy and hell-bent on leaving the camp with or without their blessing.

The first step in leaving Kakuma was the writing of our autobiographies. The UNHCR and the United States wanted to know where we had come from, what we had endured. We were to write our stories in English, or if we could not write adequately in English, we could have someone write it for us. We were asked to write about the civil war, about losing our families, about our lives in the camps. Why do you want to leave Kakuma? they asked. Are you afraid to return to Sudan, even if there is peace? We knew that those who felt persecuted in Kakuma or Sudan would be given special consideration. Maybe your family in the Sudan had done something to another family and you feared retribution? Perhaps you had deserted the SPLA and feared punishment? It could be many things. Whichever strategy we applied, we knew that our stories had to be well told, that we needed to remember all that we had seen and done; no deprivation was insignificant.

I wrote my story in an examination booklet, its small pages lined in blue. It was the first time I told my story, and it was very difficult to know what was relevant and what was not. My first draft was only one page long, and when I showed it to Achor Achor, he laughed out loud. His was already five pages long and he hadn't reached Ethiopia yet. What about Gilo? he asked. What about Golkur? What about the time we ran to the planes, thinking they would drop food, and instead they dropped bombs, killing eight boys? What about that?

I had forgotten that, and so many things. How could I put everything down on paper? It seemed impossible. No matter what, the majority of life would be left out of this story, this sliver of a version of the life I'd known. But I tried anyway. I tore up my first version and began again. I worked on it for weeks more, thinking of every last thing I had seen, every path and tree and pair of yellowed eyes, every body I buried.

When I finished, it was nine pages long. When I turned it in, the UN took a passport picture of me to attach to my file. It was the first such picture of me I had ever seen. I had been in group pictures before, my head a blur in a crowd, but this new picture, of only me, staring straight ahead, was a revelation. I stared at this photo for hours and held the folder close for days, debating with myself whether or not this picture, these words, were truly me.

I now see it as a mistake, but I brought the picture to Maria one day. I wanted her to see it. I wanted everyone to see it. I wanted to talk and talk about who I was now, the young man who had had his picture taken and was on his way to the United States. I found her outside her home, hanging laundry.

— I've never seen you smile like that, she said. She held the picture for a long time; such photographs were rare in those days.-Can I keep it? she asked.

I told her no, that it was necessary for the file, that it was crucial to my application. She gave it back to me.

— Do you think we'll be taken, too? The girls?

I was not prepared for this question. I had not heard any mention of girls being taken for this round of resettlements. It did not seem a possibility to me.

— I don't know, I said. Maria smiled her hard smile.

— But I'm sure it's possible, I said, almost believing my words.

— I was only kidding, she said.-I would never want to go, anyway.

She was an awful liar, always transparent.

I was determined to find out if girls were applying, and a few days later I learned that it was indeed possible, that many girls, dozens of them, had begun their applications. I ran to tell Maria, but she was not at home. Her neighbors said she was at the water tap and when I found her there, I told her what I knew: that girls were invited to apply, too, that they simply had to prove that they had no family and were unmarried. When I told her this, a light came to her eyes, for a moment, before flickering out.

— Maybe I'll see what I can do, she said.

— I can take you there tomorrow, I said.-We'll get an application. She agreed to meet me at the UN compound in the morning. But the next day, when I arrived, she was not there.

— She's at the water tap, her sister said.

I found her in line again, sitting again with her two jerry cans.

— I'll see what happens with all of you first, she said.-I'll go next time.

— I think you should apply now. It might take a while.

— Maybe next week, then.

She seemed unmotivated to begin the process. Perhaps it was the nature of the day, too warm and windy, a day that kept many inside. Maria did not look at me that day, did not entertain notions of escape. I had a low opinion of her attitude that day, and I left her there, sitting in the dust. The line moved. Maria picked up her empty containers and moved them a few feet forward, and sat down again.

— What's happening with your application? Noriyaki asked me.-Any news?

Many months had passed since the initial wave of excitement about the resettlements. We had all turned in our stories, and since then, many young men had been asked to come to the UN compound for interviews. But I had not been called upon. I told Noriyaki there was no news, that I had not heard anything since I turned in my papers. He nodded and smiled.

— Good, good, he said.-That's good. That means things are on track.

Noriyaki was a sorcerer at convincing me of the most implausible things, and on that day he persuaded me that despite hearing nothing from the UN, I would be scheduled for the first airlift to America. I should begin to plan accordingly, he said-I should begin deciding which NBA team I preferred, for there would be no doubt that I would be asked to play professionally. I laughed, but then wondered if I could indeed play basketball for a living. Maybe I could play for whatever college I eventually attended? Every decent player at Kakuma imagined the day that he would be discovered and lifted up, as Manute Bol had been, and brought to glory. That day, I, too, allowed myself a moment of self-delusion.

— I should tell you now, Noriyaki said that day, — I'm leaving Kakuma, too. In two months. I wanted you to know first.

It had been long enough, he said. He needed to be home with his fiancee. And with me gone, he had decided, it would be the right time to hand the Wakachiai Project over to the next team. It seemed the right thing to do, I thought. We were both happy for each other, that we would finish this stage of our lives and move on together, albeit on other sides of the earth. We talked all that day about how we could keep in touch, how easy it would be with our new, more opulent lifestyles. We could call or email each other each day, send jokes and memories and pictures. We opened two Fantas, clinked them together, and drank them down.

— You'll come to my wedding! he said suddenly, as if the plausibility of the idea suddenly occurred to him.

— Yes! I said. Then I asked, — How?

— Easy. You'll have the proper immigrant status. You'll be able to travel wherever you want. It's one year from today, Valentine. We've set a date. You'll come to Japan and you'll be there when I marry Wakana.

— I will! I said, believing it completely.-I'll definitely be there.

Drinking our Fantas, we savored that thought for an afternoon, the luxury and goodness of it all: airplanes, cities, cars, tuxedos, cake, diamonds, champagne. The day when we would meet again as prosperous men, comfortable and accomplished men of means, seemed very close.

In those days there was euphoria in the camp for so many reasons, among them the Vatican's first-ever canonization of a Sudanese martyr. Josephine Bakhita, who had been enslaved herself, died as a Canossian Sister in Italy in the late 1940s, and now she was a saint. This was a source of fascination and pride for us all, many of us having no idea that it was even possible for a Sudanese to be sanctified. Her name was invoked at church every day, and was on the tongues of every proud Dinka Catholic at Kakuma. It was an unusual time for us all, a time when for the first time in years the Dinka felt strong, felt wanted by God and faraway nations. A woman of southern Sudan could be a saint, and the Lost Boys could be flown across the ocean to represent Sudan in America. If one event was possible, so was the other. Nothing was out of the question.

When the first resettlement flights departed, there were celebrations all over Kakuma, and I went with Achor Achor to the airfield to watch the planes disappear. I was overjoyed for these young men, fully believing that I would soon join them in America. As the flights continued, though, as the near-constant news of the good fortune of this boy and that boy, I became numb to their happiness, and could only question my own inadequacies. Perhaps five hundred young men left, and as the months passed and I received no word from the UN, I became less happy for those who had been chosen. Parties broke out with every posting. Families celebrated, groups of young men dancing together when their names appeared. Each week there was incalculable joy for them and devastation for the rest of us.

I was not close to leaving. I hadn't even been given an interview. The interview was the first step, long before one's name could be posted. Something seemed very wrong.

— I'm very sorry, Achor Achor said one day.

I had already heard. Achor Achor's name had appeared that morning.

— When do you leave? I asked.

— One week.

The news was always quick like this. One's name was posted, and then that person was gone, it seemed, within days. We all had to be ready.

I managed to congratulate him, but my pleasure in his good fortune was tempered by the bewilderment I felt. I had done everything right, I thought. Through my job, I even knew some of the same UN staff members who were helping with the resettlement process. Nothing seemed to give me an advantage. I had not been a soldier, I had an exemplary record at Kakuma, and I was not the only one baffled by the fact that so many were sent to America before me. No one understood it, but theories abounded. The most plausible among them held that there was a prominent SPLA soldier named Achak Deng, and that the two of us were being confused. This fact was never confirmed, but Achor Achor had his own theory.

— Maybe they don't want to lose you here. This did not cheer me.

— You're too valuable to the camp, he joked.

I did not want to be so valuable to the camp. I wondered whether I should be less responsible for a while. Could I shirk my duties, seem less competent?

— I'll say something to the UN people when I see them next, he said. All of the boys who lived in the household of Gop had been lifted up and transported-to Detroit, San Diego, Kansas City. Soon I was among only a few men of my age left at the camp. The others whose applications had been ignored or rejected were known SPLA commanders or criminals. I was the only one I knew who had an unblemished background but who had not yet even been interviewed. I had been scheduled for interviews, yes, but each time the day approached, something would happen and the date would be pushed back or canceled. One day there were clashes in the camp between the Sudanese and the Turkana, one killed from each side, and Kakuma was closed to visitors. Another time the American lawyer who was present at all the interviews had to go home to New York at the last minute. He would return three months later, they told us.

There is no feeling like rejection coupled with abandonment. I had read about the Rapture, wherein sixty-four thousand souls would be taken to heaven before the End Days, when the Earth would be engulfed in flames. And over the next six months of 2000, it felt very much like I was being left at Kakuma while all those I knew were pulled from our purgatory and lifted up to the Kingdom of God. I had been examined by the powers that be, and was deemed deserving of eternal hellfire.

Achor Achor left one morning and we did not allow drama into our goodbye. He was wearing a winter coat, because someone had told him Atlanta would be very cold. We shook hands and I patted his puffy shoulder, both of us pretending we would see each other again, and soon. He left with another of the Eleven, Akok Anei, and as I watched them walk down the road to the airfield, Achor Achor looked back at me with eyes that betrayed his sadness. He did not think I would ever leave the camp.

After Achor Achor, hundreds more left. Dozens of planes took to the sky, full of Lost Boys like me, so many whose names I never knew.

Everyone found my continued presence at Kakuma very amusing.

— They'll reschedule you till you're the last guy! the humorous Dominic said. He was the last of the Dominics to remain with me, but he had been interviewed already and so was buoyed by confidence.-Gone Far, you're not going anywhere! he laughed. He didn't mean to be cruel, but he had lost the power to make me laugh.

Noriyaki tried to remain positive.

— They wouldn't keep rescheduling you if they didn't want you to go.

He had extended his stay at Kakuma, citing various organizational technicalities and directives issued by his superiors in Japan. But I had a terrible feeling that he was waiting for me to leave before he left himself. I eventually learned this was indeed his plan.

— Maybe they're waiting for you to leave first, I told him. I badly wanted him to go home to his fiancee. She had waited too long for him.

— I'm afraid that's out of my hands, he said, grinning.-I have my orders.

Finally, a tornado of a day. I had prayed for such a day, and then it came. In one morning I received word both that I would be interviewed and that Tabitha and her brothers had been accepted for resettlement. It was a wild sort of a day that began, with Tabitha arriving at my door just after dawn.

— We're going! she squealed.

I had not yet opened my door. It was unheard of for her to appear at my door alone before the daylight was whole. I told her this in an urgent whisper. We would risk the disapproval of the community; we had already stretched their tolerance, I was sure.

— I don't care! she said, now louder.-I don't care I don't care!

She danced and squeaked and jumped.

When I stood and awakened enough to hear and, later, to process her news, she was already off to wake up whoever she planned to tell next. I was not surprised that she delivered this news to me in such a cavalier way. It is a fact that no love fostered in Kakuma could compete with the prospect of leaving that place. Later I learned that her departure date was scheduled for two weeks from that day, and I knew then that I would not see her again in the camp-not in any meaningful way. I knew from watching the departures of so many hundreds of others that the days between notice of departure and the day itself, there was little time for anything, let alone romance. I would see her in groups, walking quickly to and fro with her brothers or friends, taking care of so many details. I suppose we did find a few moments alone, but she was not with me anymore. All romances ended in those days, when so many were leaving Kenya. Even while sitting together in her empty house or mine, Tabitha would talk only about the United States, about Seattle, about what she would find there-Nairobi multiplied many times over! Oh, she would laugh, the kaleidoscopic possibilities!

The morning she gave me her news, I received news of my own. Tabitha's scent was still in the air when another voice came from the other side of my shelter.

— Achak!

There were only a few people who still called me Achak.

— Who is it?

It was Cornelius, a young neighbor of mine, a boy of eight, born on a rainy day at Kakuma, who always seemed to know everything before any other soul. Months earlier, he had known which refugee had impregnated a Turkana girl, and on this day, he told me that he had heard that I had been scheduled for an IOM interview. It was well-known that Cornelius's information was invariably correct.

And so it was. It was July of 2001, eighteen months after the resettlements began, and finally I sat in a white cinderblock room, before two people: one white American and a Sudanese interpreter. The American, round in the face and with cold blue eyes, introduced himself as a lawyer, and then apologized.

— We're so sorry, Dominic. We know you've been puzzled by the delay in your application. You probably wondered what the heck was going on.

I did not contradict him. I had almost forgotten that I had used the name Dominic on my application.

Their questions swung from very simple questions about my name and hometown to more involved investigations of the dangers I had faced. I had been briefed by many other Lost Boys about what questions to expect, but the ones they asked me varied slightly. There was a majority of the Sudanese who insisted that one embellish as often as possible, to be sure to claim the deaths of all of one's family and known relatives. I had decided, against the advice of many, to answer all the questions as truthfully as possible.

— Are your parents alive? the lawyer asked.

— Yes, I said.

He smiled. It seemed to him a new kind of answer.

— Your brothers and sisters?

— I don't know, I said.

From there the questions went deeply into my experiences as a refugee: Who were the groups that wanted to kill you and what made them want to kill you? What kind of weapons did they carry or use? Before you left your village, did you see people killed by these attackers? What motivated you to leave Sudan? Which year did you leave Sudan? When did you arrive in Ethiopia and by what means? Did you ever fight in the wars of Sudan? Do you know of the SPLA/SPLM? Where you ever recruited by the rebel army? What security issues do you face in Kakuma? And finally: Have you ever heard of the country called the United States of America? Do you know anyone there? Do you prefer to be resettled in a country other than the U.S.?

I answered all of the queries without distortion, and it was over in twenty minutes. I shook their hands and left the room, puzzled and depressed. Certainly that was not the sort of interview that would decide whether or not a man traveled across the world and became the citizen of a different nation. As I stood, dazed, the interpreter opened the door and caught my arm.

— You did very well, Dominic. Don't worry. You look worried. I'm sure this'll be straightened out now. Smile, friend. And get used to the idea of leaving this place.

I didn't know what to believe. Everything had been delayed so long that I felt uneasy about expecting anything. I knew that nothing was real until one's name was posted on the board, that in the meantime I had to keep working and going to school.

Noriyaki, though, was more certain.

— Oh, you're going.

— Really? I said.

— Oh yeah, it'll be weeks now. Days. No time.

I thanked him for his encouragement, but I made no plans. He, however, did. Finally he made arrangements to leave the camp. He was almost a year late, but now he would finally be going home. The relief I felt was enormous. He had been at Kakuma long enough on my account, and every moment he remained there was taking a toll on me. I wanted him to resume his life, I wanted him to finally make a happy woman out of his long-suffering fiancee. We toasted his imminent departure with orange Fanta and marked the remaining highlights on our calendar. There was little of consequence left to do-only the standard games and classes and deliveries of equipment, and one trip into central Kenya with the youth basketball team. We would be chaperones and coaches, and this, we decided, would be the final hurrah of the Wakachiai Project, at least under our administration.

This was late July and the day was clear. Noriyaki and I were in the cab of a converted truck, the two of us in front and in back the youth basketball team, twelve Sudanese and Ugandan boys, who were to travel four hours to Lodwar to play a team representing a Kenyan high school.

The day was so bright. I remember distinctly feeling God's presence that morning. It was a day that many women, waking and beginning their chores, were calling glorious, a morning for which we gave thanks.

We left the camp very early, about five a.m. All of the boys, and Noriyaki and I, were euphoric to be on the road; Kakuma's refugees were always happy to leave the camp for any amount of time, for any reason. In fact, there were delays in leaving this particular day, because as was customary, there was a good deal of pleading from a variety of Kakuma's characters who attempted to argue their way onto the basketball team. Soon enough, though, we were an hour away from Kakuma, fourteen of us, and the sun was rising. I was in the cab of the truck with Noriyaki, with the twelve players, all of them under sixteen years old, riding in the back, sitting on benches, bouncing in the truckbed with every bump of the crumbling road. Lodwar was about 190 kilometers away, and the drive would take more than four hours, given the rough roads and checkpoints. Everyone was in a good mood, though, singing traditional songs and songs of their own creation.

The second of the early-morning regulars enters.

'Valentine, mon amour! How are you?'

This is Nancy Strazzeri, an elegant woman in her mid-fifties with short white hair and a blood-red velvet sweatsuit. She once brought me coffee cake she had made herself.

'Fine, thank you,' I say.

'Broken any hearts lately?' she asks while handing me her card.

'I don't think so,' I say.

I swipe her card, replacing Matt Donnelley's face with hers.

'See you in an hour, mon frere,' she sings, and is gone. Her face, a tired face with eyes that speak of past mischief, remains.

Nancy, the road to Lodwar was dotted with potholes and cut everywhere with cracks that had become small winding canyons. Noriyaki did his best with the truck, which he had driven only once before, and never this far. It was a stick shift, and the trucks he had driven around Kakuma had automatic transmissions. I had never been in the front seat of any vehicle, and tried to remain calm, though Noriyaki's control of the vehicle seemed tenuous.

The passage of time was slow as we turned a corner and saw the obstacle. There was a large mound of dirt in the right lane. It should not have been there. There was no reason that that dirt should be there.

Noriyaki yelled in Japanese, swerving left to avoid it.

The truck tilted heavily, and bodies flew past my window. The players in the truckbed were thrown onto the road. Noriyaki swerved again, now to the right, but he had lost control. The truck tilted onto two wheels.

Noriyaki again screamed a word I didn't know. Screams from the truckbed. Three more players were tossed. The truck groaned and slid slowly off the road, down the berm, and rolled onto its roof. The breaking of glass, the squeal of machinery. It was not fast, our decline, but it was irreversible, and when it was clear that the truck would crash, Noriyaki threw his arm across my chest. But then he was gone.

The truck came to a stop on its side. I was still inside the cab, and through the broken windshield I could see two boys lying on the dirt. I. looked over to Noriyaki. He had fallen out of the truck, and when the truck rolled, it had landed on his chest. Blood left his head like water. There were fragments of glass in his cheek and forehead, shards everywhere around him, pink with his blood.

— Oh! he said, and then closed his eyes.

— Noriyaki! I said, my voice far weaker than I could have wished. I reached through the window and touched his face. He did not respond.

Now there was someone on my side of the truck, pulling at me. It was then I was reminded of the rest of the world. That I was alive.

I was helped out of the truck, and stood for a moment. There were now people all around the road, new people. Kenyans from another truck, a food truck. They had seen the accident. The basketball boys were strewn everywhere, all over the road and embankment. How many were dead? Who was alive? Everyone was bleeding.

— Dominic! a boy's voice said.-What happened?

This boy seemed to be fine. Who was he? My limbs felt loose, disconnected. My neck was sore, my head felt detached. I stood under the sun, my eyes stinging with sweat, everything so heavy, and I watched.

— One, two, three! The Kenyans were moving the truck off of Noriyaki. They rocked the truck one way and then the other, and when the truck was tilted away from Noriyaki, one of the men was able to slip in and push Noriyaki out. The truck was dropped again where Noriyaki had lain. The men carried Noriyaki up to the road, his body limp, blood no longer leaving his head.

That was what I saw before I fell.

I was loaded onto the food truck and taken to Kakuma. I awoke on the road.

— He lives!

— You see this, Simon?

— Ah, good! Good! We were not sure about you, Sudan.

— You would have died if we had not been driving by.

— Stay awake, boy. We have an hour to go.

— Pray, Sudan. We are praying for you.

— He doesn't need to pray. God spared him today.

— I think he should pray. He should say thanks and keep praying.

— Okay, Sudan, pray. Pray, pray, pray.

Two more people, a couple, enter the club. I do not remember their names. They smile at me and say nothing, his hand on the small of her back. They are in business attire, and they hand me their membership cards. Jessica LaForte. Malcolm LaForte. They smile again and they are gone.

I look at the face of Malcolm LaForte, wishing I had swiped them in reverse order. His wife is dark-eyed and dark-haired and her face is soft and forgiving, but he is a severe-looking man. An impatient man. Impatient men have made my life much more difficult than it might otherwise have been. He gives me a terse smile he thinks passes for sincere, and enters the club.

Malcolm LaForte, in the camp, I was dead. For many days, among many hundreds of people, I was considered deceased. The casualties reported from the truck accident varied hour to hour, day to day. At first, all aboard the truck were presumed killed. Then the basketball players themselves began arriving at Kakuma, and it became clear that none of these young boys had died. Everyone agreed it was miraculous.

But I was dead, most were certain. Valentine Achak Deng was dead.

Gop and his family heard this and they wept and screamed. Anyone who knew me cursed Noriyaki, they cursed Kakuma and basketball and the broken Kenyan roads. My coworkers at the UNHCR were despondent. The Napata Drama Group held a ceremony in my memory, led by Miss Gladys with speeches from Dominic and Madame Zero and all the members. Tabitha wailed and did not leave her bed for three days, rising only when she heard that I was not, in fact, dead.

I woke up at Lopiding Hospital. There was a nurse with her hand on my forehead. She said something to me while looking at her watch.

— Do you know what happened? she asked.

— Yes, I said, though I wasn't sure.

— None of your friends are dead, she said.

At this I was relieved. I had a memory of Noriyaki looking grey and covered with glass, but this woman seemed to be saying that he had survived.

— But the Japanese driver is dead, she said, standing.

She left and I was alone.

Noriyaki's family! I thought. Oh, Lord. This was too much. I had seen senseless death, but it had been so long since I had seen something like this.

I was responsible for Noriyaki's death. It was boys like me who had forced the creation of Kakuma. If there was no Kakuma, Noriyaki would not have come to Kenya. He would be at home, with his family and fiancee, living a normal life. Japan was a peaceful country, and people from peaceful countries should not be involved in the business of countries at war. It was absurd and wrong that this man should come so far to die. To die while bringing some refugees to play basketball? To die because he wanted to see me leave the camp? It was a wretched thing my God had done this time. I had a low opinion of my Lord and a lower opinion of my people. The Sudanese were a burden upon the Earth.

Having seen the death of Diana mourned around the world, I reserved some expectation that Noriyaki's death would provoke tributes and despair throughout the camp, throughout Kenya and the world. But I heard of nothing of the kind. I asked the nurse if there had been television reports about the accident; she said she had not seen any. The aid workers at Kakuma were distraught, to be sure, but there was no worldwide outpouring, no frontpage obituaries. Within two days of his last breath, Noriyaki's body was taken to Nairobi, where he was cremated. I do not know why.

— What are you doing here?

A man was standing over me, his face silhouetted by the sun through the low window. He stepped closer and it was Abraham, the maker of new legs and arms. Immediately tears fell down my face. I had been in the hospital for days, in and out of sleep.

— Don't worry, he said.-Your limbs are intact. I'm here only as a friend. I tried to talk but my throat was too dry.

— Don't talk, he said.-I know about your head, the drugs they have you on. I'll just sit here with you for a while.

And he did. He began to sing, quietly, the song he had hummed that day, long before. I fell back asleep and did not see him again.

I was at the hospital nine days. They tested my head, they examined my hearing and vision and bones. They put stitches in my head and bandaged my limbs. I slept much of each day, and Tabitha left while I stumbled through the fog of my painkillers.

I suppose in the back of my mind I knew the day was fast approaching, but I was not certain until a note was delivered to me one day after breakfast. I do not know how Tabitha was able to find a pink envelope in that camp, but somehow she did. It even smelled like her. The note was written in English; she had employed the help of a Kenyan writing instructor, I suppose, to make the note as formal and eloquent as possible.

Valentine my dear,

I was so worried when I heard about the accident. And when I believed that you perished on the roadside, I was devastated. Imagine my joy when it was not true, when I knew that you had survived and would be fine. I tried to visit you, but they were not admitting people who could not claim to be your caretakers. So I waited for news of your health, and was encouraged when I knew you would make a full recovery. I am so very sorry that Noriyaki has passed away. He was well loved and will surely go to Heaven.

As you know, my flight could not wait. I am dictating this letter just hours before my plane leaves for Nairobi. My heart is heavy, but we know that I had to leave. This camp cannot tell us where we should live. I could not miss the opportunity to fly away. I know you understand me on this point.

I will see you again, my dear Valentino. I don't know what our lives will be like in America but I know that we will both be successful. The next time I see you we will both drive cars and meet at a clean and expensive restaurant.

Your loving friend,

Tabitha

A stream of new people bursts into the club at ten to six. First, two women in their seventies, both wearing baseball caps. Now a very large woman with corkscrew hair shooting in every direction, followed by a pair of younger women, sisters, very fit and with their hair in ponytails. There is a pause in the flow, and I look to the parking lot, where I see the gold sun rising in the reflection of the cars. A white-haired man enters the club, walking with his body angled forward. He is the last of the bunch: Stewart Goodall, with close-set eyes and a crooked smile.

Stewart Goodall, can you imagine a letter like that? Everyone I knew had left for a place expected to be paradise many times over, and I remained behind, and now even Tabitha was gone, having slipped away while I slept.

After a week recuperating, I went back to the Wakachiai Project. Because it was a two-person staff, if I did not return quickly, the project would wither. Most of Noriyaki's possessions were still there-his letters, his sweatsuit, his computer, his picture of Wakana in her white tennis dress. I was not prepared for the reality of being there without him. I put all of his things in a box but still the room spoke his name all day. I knew I would have to leave very soon.

I was charged with finding a replacement for Noriyaki. The Japanese wanted to continue funding the project, and to keep it running, I had to pick a new officer. I interviewed many candidates, most of them Kenyan. It was the first time a Sudanese refugee had interviewed a Kenyan for a job at Kakuma.

I found a Kenyan man named George and he became my assistant. We continued to plan activities for the youth of Kakuma, and soon after my return we received a large shipment of soccer balls, volleyball uniforms, and running shoes from Tokyo. Noriyaki had been trying to find the funding for this shipment for months, and now seeing all of it spread around the office, so many new things-it was so difficult.

The doctor checked on my progress once a week. I was sore in my bones and joints, but the symptoms the doctor had worried about-dizziness, blurred vision, nausea-did not occur. It was only the headaches, of varying severity throughout the day, that affected me, and they were worst at night. I lowered my head to my pillow and as I did, the pain grew. My friends and family checked on me and watched me warily. I had lost ten pounds at Lopiding, so they gave me extra rations and anything they could find to distract me-a handmade chess set, a comic book. When I did fall asleep, I fell deep, and my breathing was hard to detect. More than once I woke up to Gop poking me in the shoulder, making sure I was alive.

After a month, my body had recovered and mentally I had reached a certain numbness that was hard for me to define or for others to detect. Outwardly I performed my duties at work and at home, and my appetite had returned to normal. I alone knew that I had decided on a change. A few days earlier, I decided definitively, though against the advice of virtually everyone, to return to Sudan to rejoin my family. There was no reason to stay at Kakuma, and remaining there was a daily punishment. It was God and the earthly powers that be saying this was the best I deserved, that this life was good enough for the insect known as Valentine Achak Deng. But Tabitha's letter had ruptured something inside me, and now I did not give a damn about Kakuma, about my duties, about what was expected of me. I decided I would go first to Loki, then buy my way to Marial Bai. I had enough money, I surmised, to bribe my way onto an aid flight. I had heard of this being done before, and with less money than I had already saved.

Gop inadvertently reinforced my way of thinking about leaving the camp. He had been making many remarks at that time about imminent peace in the south of Sudan. He pointed to many positive developments, including the 2000 Libyan/Egyptian Joint Initiative on the Sudan. Though it was later invalidated, it provided for the establishment of an interim government, power-sharing, constitutional reform, and new elections. And just a few days earlier, President Bush had designated John Danforth, a former senator, as Presidential Envoy for Peace in the Sudan. He would, they said, certainly see that peace was necessary, and with American might, make sure it was achieved.

— You look better today, my new assistant George said one day. We were on our way to replace the nets on the basketball courts, and George was wearing a whistle tied around his neck. He loved to wear his whistle.

When I told George my plan to leave, he almost punched me. He raised his hand to me and then stopped, his whistle in his mouth.

— Are you crazy? he said.

— I have to.

Now he blew the whistle in my face.

— Sudan's still a war zone, man! You said yourself that the murahaleen were still active in your region. How are you going to fight them? Are you going to read to them? Write a play for them? No one in the world, not one person in southern Sudan, would leave this place to go there. And I'll personally see to it that you don't. I'll tie you up with these nets. I'll cut off one of your feet.

I smiled, but George had not changed my mind. People still went back to Sudan. Strong young men like me could do so, and I was older and smarter than I was when I attempted my recycling. Staying at Kakuma was an untenable idea. Everyone would see me as having been rejected-four thousand are taken to America and I was deemed not worthy. It would be too difficult to live with that stigma. George blew his whistle again, this time to get my attention.

— Listen. I bet Wakachiai will hire you full-time if you want it. You'll make ten thousand shillings a month, be able to eat at the UN restaurants, drive one of their Land Rovers. Pick a nice bride and live pretty well here.

— Right, I said, and smiled.

— Don't be crazy.

— Okay, I said.

— Don't be stupid.

— I won't, I said.

— This is your home, he said.

— Fine.

— Accept it and thrive here.

I nodded and we installed the new nets.

Six-thirty is when the real crush begins at the Century Club. The rooms become crowded, the exercise machines are all occupied, people become tense. The members are determined to work out and it is frustrating to them when they cannot do it on the timetable they have planned. I check in a dozen people within a five-minute span. They are all working people, professional-looking people. They smile at me and some exchange a few words. One middle-aged man, who has told me he teaches high-school history, asks me how my classes are coming. I lie and tell him they're all fine.

'Headed to college?' he asks.

'Yes sir,' I say.

The last woman of the rush is Dorsetta Lewis, one of the few African-American women who works out at this club. She is about forty, very appealing, at once confident but with a shy way of carrying her head, a perpetual rightward tilt.

'Hey there, Valentine,' she says, and hands me her card.

'Hello, Dorsetta,' I say, and swipe it. In her photograph, she seems to be in the middle of a belly laugh. Her mouth is open wide, all of her teeth visible. I have never heard her laugh and have occasionally thought of trying a joke on her.

'Still hanging in there?' she asks.

'I am, thank you,' I say.

'All right then,' she says, 'that's what I like to hear.'

She disappears into the locker room.

The truth is that I do not like hanging in there. I was born, I believe, to do more. Or perhaps it's that I survived to do more. Dorsetta is married, a mother of three, and manages a restaurant; she does more than hang in there. I have a low opinion of this expression, Hang in there.

The club goes quiet again for a spell, and instinctively, I find myself checking my email. There is a note from my brother Samuel.

'Will you call her yet?' he asks. 'Here is a picture.'

Samuel has recently taken a trip from Nairobi to Khartoum, and joined my father there. They planned the trip so my father could buy goods to reconstitute his business in Marial Bai. Phil Mays had sent my father $5,000, and with this money he planned to buy enough goods to open his shop again. While in Khartoum, Samuel heard about a certain young single woman-she was from a prosperous family and was currently studying English and business in Khartoum. Samuel went to see her and thought immediately that she was meant for me. I have no doubt that he first pursued her himself, but nevertheless, he has been pestering me since, insisting that I call her, so she and I can realize we're meant to be married. I look at the picture he has attached, and she certainly is attractive. Very long hair, an oval face, a V-shaped smile, remarkable teeth. This woman, Samuel assures me, would jump at the chance to move to the United States to be my wife.

Now that I'm online, I decide that I should send an email to those whose addresses I can remember. I would call, but my stolen phone contains all of my phone numbers; I have memorized only a few. I conjure the email addresses of Gerald and Anne, of Mary Williams and Phil, and Deb Newmyer, and Achor Achor; he will forward the message to everyone else. At this point I do not care who knows.

Hello friends,

I am writing to inform you that I have recently been assaulted by two dangerous persons in my apartment. The attackers asked me to let them use my phone and when I opened the door, they held me at a gunpoint, kicked me in the cheek, forehead, and back, until I lost consciousness. They took my cell phone, digital camera, checkbooks, and over five hundred dollars in cash. Thank God they didn't shoot me. For some time, I was guarded by a boy who I believe to be their son, Michael.

As I write to you, I do not have a cell phone and do not have your contact information. Please send me your numbers and I will call you tomorrow. I need to get all my information back.

Have a blessed day.

Sincerely,

Valentine Achak

P.S. Please remind me of your birthday.

Dorsetta, I pretend that I know who I am now but I simply don't. I'm not an American and it seems difficult now to call myself Sudanese. I have spent only six or seven years there, and I was so small when I left. I can return to Sudan, though. Perhaps I should. The country has been very vocal about needing the Lost Boys to return to southern Sudan. 'Who will rebuild this country if not you?' they ask. It is the most incredible turn of events that we boys, who were shuffled from camp to camp and who lost half our ranks along the way, are now considered the hope of the nation. Though we are working jobs such as this, hovering near $8.50 an hour, we are far wealthier than most of the residents of our country. We live in apartments and houses that would be reserved only for rebel commanders and their families. And as fraught with peril as our journeys were, in the end, we have become the best-educated group of southern Sudanese in history.

My friends who have returned to Sudan, to visit their families and find a bride, uniformly gape at the primitive nature of life there. A life without cars, roads, television, air conditioning, grocery stores. There is very little electricity in my hometown; most of the power, when they have it, is provided by generators or solar devices. Certain amenities like satellite phones are becoming more common in the larger towns, but on the whole the country is many hundreds of years behind the standard of living to which we are now accustomed. One man I know drank the water from the river, as all of the people do, and he was in bed for a week, vomiting a year's worth of meals. We have been weakened by our time in America, perhaps.

Dorsetta, what was I doing getting on another vehicle, again heading to Kitale, so soon after my accident? My bones still ached everywhere and I had no desire to get on that road again, but there had been a trip planned for many months, and I could not disappoint the boys. Thirty of them, two squads of nine-year-olds, were traveling to Kitale to play against the local boys' teams. Usually such games were exhibitions only; our kids were roundly defeated by any of the Kenyan squads. But the score never mattered, only leaving the camp mattered, so there I was, just weeks after the accident, on September 5, getting on the bus again.

I stood by the vehicle, a closed-top UN bus this time, with George, and we watched the boys run from all sides of the camp. They were good boys, smiling boys-about a third of them had actually been born here, in this camp. To be born here! I never would have thought it possible. The others had come from many regions of Sudan, many brought here as infants, starving and barely alive. I occasionally wondered if one of them could be the Quiet Baby, now grown. Perhaps the Quiet Baby was a boy. It was possible, of course it was. In any case, I loved all of the boys equally.

As they boarded, each of them giddy and touching every inch of the bus, I checked their names against the team roster.

Two were missing.

— Luke Bol Dut? I called out.

The boys laughed. On a day like this, they laughed at anything.

— Luke Bol Dut?

I looked out the window. The day was bright, light as linen. Two boys were running toward the bus. It was Luke and Gorial Aduk, the other missing boy. They were in their uniforms and were racing toward us as if reaching the bus would save them from certain death.

— Dominic!

It was Luke. He leaped onto the bus, almost hysterical. He couldn't get his next words out.-Dominic! he said again.

Another fifteen seconds as he caught his breath.

— What is it, Luke?

— Your name is on the board!

I laughed and shook my head. It was not possible.

— Yes it is! And not just on the board! Your name's on the list for cultural orientation. You got it! You're going!

Cultural orientation was the final step. But before that step were so many others: first a letter, then another interview, then the name on the board. Then another notice for cultural orientation. All of this usually took months. But this wild boy was telling me that the board was telling me all this at once.

— No, I said.

— Yes! Yes! yelled Gorial. He was trying to pat my back.

— Wait, I whispered.

I asked the bus driver to wait, and I told the boys to stay with the bus. I turned to George. I stammered for a second, asking him to wait a moment while I…

He blew his whistle.-Go!

I ran toward the board. Could this be true? Noriyaki had been right! They really wanted me! Of course they did! Why wouldn't they want me? They would not have waited so long if they didn't want me.

I ran.

Halfway there, I caught myself. What was I doing? I stopped. I looked like a fool, running to the board because some nine-year-olds told me my name was listed. False reporting had become a joke; it happened all the time, and was never funny. I slowed down and considered turning around.

The moment I slowed my pace, I heard screaming. I looked up to see Luke and Gorial, trailed by a mass of other boys, running toward me.

— Go! they screamed.-Go to the board!

They looked like they would knock me down if they reached me. I turned again and ran, the boys close at my heels. We all ran, the boys skipping and jumping and laughing along side me. Gop Chol, coming back from the tap, saw us running down the road.

— Where are you going? he yelled.

His face again restored me to my senses. Should I tell him what the boys said, tell him where I was running?

I smiled and continued running. I ran with an abandon I hadn't known since I was very small.

— It's on the board! Gorial screamed to him.-Dominic is on the board!

— No! Gop gasped.-No!

He dropped his jerry can and ran with us. Now there were fifteen of us running.

— You really think it's on the board? he huffed alongside me.

— It is, it is! yelled Luke.-I know how to read!

We ran, tears streaming down our faces because we were laughing and maybe crying and maybe just delirious. Finally we were at the board, the Lutheran World Federation's information kiosk, where they displayed refugees' arts and crafts.

I ran my eyes over the names. Gop was doubled over, holding his side. There were so many names, and the light was too bright, the ink so faint.

— There it is! Gorial yelled. His finger was stuck on the board so I couldn't see. I swept his little finger away and read my name.

DOMINIC AROU. SEPTEMBER 9. ATLANTA. Now Gop was reading with me.

— September 9? he said.-That's Sunday. Four days away.

— Oh my God, I said.

— Four days! he said.

The boys made a song of it.-Four days! Four days! Dominic's gone in four days! I hugged Gop and he said he would tell the family. He ran off and I ran off, back to the bus.-I'm going! I told George.

— No! he said. I told the boys.

— Where? With us?

— No, no. To America. My name is on the board!

— No! they all yelled.-No it isn't, never!

— You're really leaving? George asked.

— I think I am, I said, not quite believing it.

— No! You're here for life! the boys joked.

But finally the news sunk in. I would not be going on their trip that day, and probably wouldn't see them again. Some of the boys seemed hurt, but they found a way to be happy for me. George shook my hand and they leapt over the seats and crowded around me and patted me on the back and the head and hugged my waist and legs with their small arms and tiny bony hands. I was not sure if I would see them again before I left. I hugged all the boys I could reach and we cried and laughed together about the insanity of it all.

It was Wednesday night and I was leaving Sunday. I had hundreds of things to do before my flight to Nairobi. My head ran through all the tasks necessary. There was no time. I knew everything that had to be done, having seen all of my friends leave before me. I had to be at cultural orientation two of the next three days, leaving no time for anything. I would say goodbye to my Kakuma family and friends on Saturday, but before then, it would be madness.

That night I went back to the board, to see my name again. It was indeed my name. There could be no error now. They could not remove my name from that list. Actually, I knew they could-they could do anything, and often did-but I felt at least I had grounds to fight if they tried to rescind their promise. While I was looking at the board that night, I saw also my name on the list for INS letters. They had not sent the letter; I only had to pick it up, and that was the last part of my release. It was all happening at once. I didn't know what to make of the logic of the UN, but it didn't matter. I was leaving in three days and soon everyone knew.

I was telling any person I could see, and they each told ten or twenty more. There was rejoicing in all quarters but there was also concern. Gop's family, and many of my friends, though expressing happiness to my face, worried for me: what did this mean, that I should go on this trip so soon after the accident? This could not be good, they thought. It seemed to be tempting fate to take such a trip so soon after a near-death experience. No one said anything to me. I was too happy and unworried and they didn't want to dampen my optimism. Instead, they prayed. I prayed. Everyone prayed. And amid it all I thought, this is not right. I've just found out my family is alive. How can I travel across the world? How can I not at least wait in Kakuma until Sudan is safe again? I had waited fifteen years to see my family, and now I was voluntarily taking myself even farther from them. Nevertheless, this was God's plan. I could not believe otherwise. God had placed this chance in front of me, I was certain, and I became convinced of his presence in the sequence of my life when I learned of the possibilities offered by Mr. CB.

There was at that time a brand-new development at Kakuma: through the ingenuity of a Somali entrepreneur, it became possible for those with means to reach, or try to reach, relatives in war-torn areas of East Africa. The Somali, who became known among the English-speaking refugees as Mr. CB, knew how to contact NGOs working throughout the region, and could occasionally arrange to have those living nearby brought to the radio to speak to family members at Kakuma. To reach someone in southern Sudan, we could visit Mr. CB, and for four minutes of radio time, pay him 250 shillings-quite a lot for most of the camp's residents. He would then try to ascertain how best to reach the relative in question. If there was an SPLA radio outlet in the area, he could start there. If there was an NGO in the area, he could go about negotiating with them. This was more difficult, given the NGOs typically had restrictions against using their radios for personal communications. In any case, if all hurdles were cleared, Mr. CB or one of his operatives-for he had employees representing all the nations of Kakuma-would say, We are looking for such and such a person, can you bring them to the radio? And on the other end of the line, someone would be dispatched in whatever village or camp or region to find this person. Sometimes that person would be a hundred yards away, sometimes a hundred miles.

I had the money to pay for a connection to Marial Bai, where I learned there was a cooperative NGO worker at the International Rescue Committee. I knew that it was necessary, now more than ever, for me to reach my father, to tell him about the developments in my life, that I had been chosen for resettlement to the United States. So very soon after Mr. CB opened his operation, I arrived, with 250 shillings in hand.

Mr. CB's place of business, a rectangular room of mud walls and thatched roof, was always crowded. Wives were attempting to reach husbands, children looked for their parents. The Somali's primary clientele was Dinka, but when I arrived that day there was a Rwandan teenager looking for her aunt, her only surviving relative, and a Bantu woman seeking her husband and children. I sat between two other Lost Boys, younger than I, who had come only to watch the process, to test its reliability before they went about raising the money for their own phone call.

We all sat on log benches on either side of the long room, and at the front, Mr CB sat on a chair, the radio on a rough-hewn table before him, two assistants flanking him, one Dinka, one Ethiopian, ready to translate when needed.

After two hours of listening only to static and disappointment, it was my turn, and by this time my hopes were realistic. As I waited, no one had been connected that day, so my expectations were low. I sat down before the table and listened as Mr. CB and his helpers contacted the IRC operator in Marial Bai. Much to everyone's surprise, the connection was made within minutes. The Lost Boys behind me gasped to hear a Dinka voice on the other end. But it was far too soon. I wasn't ready.

Mr. CB, using basic Arabic, explained that he was looking for my father, Deng Nyibek Arou. The Dinka assistant translated, and I heard the NGO worker say that he had seen my father just that day, at the airfield. There had been an Operation Lifeline supply plane that morning, and virtually the entire village had turned out to see what comprised the shipment. Mr. CB asked that my father, Deng Nyibek Arou, be summoned to the radio, and that he would call back in one hour. The man in Marial Bai agreed. I sat back on the log bench, the Lost Boys congratulating me, both of them electric with anticipation. I was absolutely numb. I was sure I had lost the power of speech. It seemed utterly impossible that I would be speaking to my father in one hour. I had not even planned what I would say. Would he remember me? He had so many children by now, I knew, and he was growing older…It was a horrible hour, that hour of waiting in that narrow room and that Somali barking into his radio.

A Burundian couple went ahead of me, attempting to reach an uncle they thought might send them money, but they had no luck. And soon it was my turn again. Mr. CB, with a certain swagger in knowing that at least this one connection, my connection, worked, took my money and contacted the Marial Bai operator again.

— Hello? he said.-Is he there? Okay.

The microphone was handed to me. I stared at it. It was as dead as a stone.

— Talk, boy! the Dinka assistant urged. I brought the microphone to my mouth.

— Father?

— Achak! a voice said. The voice was not at all recognizable to me.

— Father?

— Achak! Where on Earth are you?

The voice broke into a loud belly-laugh. It was my father. To hear my father say my name! I had to believe it was him. I knew it was him. And just as I became sure, the connection ended. The Somali, his pride at stake, called again. In a few minutes, my father's voice again burst through the box.

— Achak! he barked.-Speak if you can! Be quick like a bunny!

— Father, they want to send me to the United States.

— Yes, he said.-I heard they were sending boys there. How is it? And the connection died. When Mr. CB found Marial Bai again, I continued where I had left off.

— I'm not in America. I'm at Kakuma. I want to ask you what I should do. I want to see you. I'm not sure I want to travel so far away from you, now that I know you and my mother are alive. I want to come home.

The radio cut out once more. This time the Somali took twenty minutes to regain the IRC operator, and the connection was now far more faint.

When my father and I could hear each other again, he was still talking, as if he had never been interrupted. He was lecturing now, far from amused, his voice raised.

— You have to go, boy. Are you crazy? This town is still ashen from the last attack. Don't come here. I forbid it. Go to the United States. Go there tomorrow.

— But what if I never see you again? I said.

— What? You'll see us. The only way you'll see us is if you get to the United States. Come back a successful man.

— But father, what-

— Yes, the What. Right. Get it. This is it. Go. I am your father and I forbid you to come to this place-

The connection snapped closed for good. The Somali could not regain it. So that was that.

In those last few days before leaving, I ran everywhere. The next day was my first day of orientation, and my last day of work at the Wakachiai Project. I ran to class and sat with fifty others, mostly younger boys who I did not know; everyone my age was gone. There were two teachers, an American and an Ethiopian, the American withering in the heat. This classroom, the best in Kakuma, was indoors, in the International Organization for Migration center. It had a real roof and floor and we sat in chairs. We listened, but were too excited to pay attention properly, to process the information in a useful way.

They talked about life in the United States. About how to get a job, how to save money, how to arrive on time for work. They talked about apartments, about buying food and paying rent. They helped us with the math-most of us, they said, would be making $5 or $6 an hour. This seemed like a great deal of money. Then they told us about buying food, and paying rent on an apartment. They had us do the calculations, and we realized we could not afford to live on $5 or $6 an hour. No particular solution was offered, I don't think, but we were too high to dwell on the details. We tried to listen to all the words, but we were so excited. Trying to learn numbers and facts that first day was like catching bats leaving a hollow. They managed to seize our attention when the American brought out a cooler and passed around a large cube of ice. I had seen ice before, though in smaller form; none of the other boys had seen ice at all, and they laughed, and squealed, and passed it hand to hand as if it might change them forever if they held it too long.

At work that day, I attempted to impart everything I knew to George, who would have to take over the project entirely. He was very attentive, but we both knew that leaving so quickly would be problematic. The operation had lost its two primary staff members in the space of a month.

— Maybe they'll send another Japanese person, George said.

— I hope they don't, I said.

I wanted no more people coming to Kakuma unless they had no other choice. I wanted us to take care of ourselves, and to solve all this on our own, and to bring no innocents into the hole we had dug. It seemed a sensible plan, that day at least, and after we locked up the office that afternoon, I felt the satisfaction of having settled another of my affairs at the camp.

As I walked home, the afternoon still bathed in harsh light, I saw my stepsister Adeng walking quickly toward me. Her arms were wrapped around her torso, a strange expression on her face.

— Come quickly, she said.

She took my hand in hers. She had never held my hand before.

— Why? What is it? I asked.

— There is a car, she said.-Outside our house. For you.

A car had only once before stopped at our shelter, when Abuk had arrived.

We walked quickly toward home.

— See? she said.

When we arrived, I saw four cars, UN cars, black and clean, dust everywhere around them. I stood with Adeng. The car doors opened and a dozen people stepped out at once. There were two white people, two Kenyans. The rest were Japanese, and all were wearing formal clothing-jackets and ties, clean white shirts. A young Japanese man, tall and wearing a tan suit, stepped forward and introduced himself as the translator. And then I knew.

— These are the parents of Noriyaki Takamura, the man said, sweeping his arm toward a middle-aged couple.-This is Noriyaki's sister. They have come from Japan to meet you.

My legs almost gave way. This was such a difficult world.

His parents greeted me, holding my hand between theirs. They looked very much like Noriyaki. His sister took my hand. She looked like Noriyaki's twin.

— They say they are sorry, the translator said, — but Wakana, Noriyaki's fiancee, is not well. She wanted to meet you, but she is finding all this very difficult. She is in bed, in the UN compound. She sends her good wishes for you.

Noriyaki's father spoke to me and the man in the tan suit translated.

— They say that they are sorry for the pain in your life. They have heard much about you and they know you have suffered.

— Please tell them that this is not their fault, I said.

The translator related this to the Japanese. They spoke to me again.

— They say they are sorry to add to the tragedy of your life. Noriyaki's mother was crying now, and soon I was, too.

— I am so sorry that you have lost Noriyaki, I said.-He was my good friend. He was loved by everyone in this camp. I beg you not to cry for me.

Now everyone was crying. Noriyaki's father was sitting on the ground, his head in his hands. The man in the tan suit had stopped translating. Noriyaki's mother and father cried and I cried there, in front of my shelter, in the heat and light of Kakuma camp.

I had two more days before I left for Nairobi, then Amsterdam, then Atlanta. I slept without peace that night and woke early, hours before the second day of orientation class. In the inky blue light before dawn I walked around the camp and felt sure I would never see any of it again. I had never seen Sudan again, had never seen Ethiopia again after we fled. In my life up to that point, everything moved in a single direction. Always I fled.

There were too many things to do in those last forty-eight hours. I knew I would do few of them well. The orientation class ended at two o'clock and with the remaining daylight I had to cancel my ration card, pack and then see hundreds of people who I would never see again.

I knew I would give away most of my things, for when someone is leaving the camp, that person is descended upon; he becomes very popular. Custom requires that he leave all of his possessions to those remaining in the camp. First, though, there is the practice of booking, wherein anyone close to a departing refugee will claim whatever they would like to have upon the person's departure.

Within a day of knowing I would be leaving, everything I owned was booked. My mattress was booked by Deng Luol. My bed was booked by Mabior Abuk. My bike was booked by Cornelius, the boy from the neighborhood. My watch was booked by Achiek Ngeth, an elderly friend who had commented many times on how much he liked it. I used some of the money I had saved to buy new clothes, some pants with side pockets, lightweight and stylish.

I rushed from place to place on my bicycle, that night and the next morning, and when people saw me, they could not believe that I was leaving.

— Are you really leaving? they asked.

— I hope so! I said. I really had no idea if any of this was real.

It was Saturday and I would be gone the next afternoon. I was still not so sure I would be leaving, because the false starts had been many and all of them cruel. And besides, when I spent time thinking on it, I had no business going to the United States; none of it made sense. It was logical, much more so, that the whole affair would be called off. As I raced through the camp, shaking hands with people I knew, it began to seem more possible that I would leave-likely even. With every person who knew about my leaving and wished me well, I began to believe. So many people could not be deceived.

When I arrived home, to sleep one last night at Kakuma, I ate a very sad and joyful dinner with Gop and the family I had adopted. Ayen and her daughters cried because I was leaving. These adopted sisters of mine, every one of them as worthy as I was, cried also because they themselves had no chance of leaving, unless they were married off to prosperous men in Sudan. They were not considered by the UN for resettlement because they were a family, and thus were in no danger. None of the resettlement countries wanted families, it seemed, so Gop and his wife and daughters are still at Kakuma today.

After dinner, I packed the few belongings I would be taking: the new pants I had bought, and the many documents I had kept-my grade reports, proof of completion of a course in refereeing, my CPR certification, my drama-group membership card-twelve papers in all. I found two perfectly sized pieces of cardboard, and I taped them inside, to make sure the documents would not be damaged during any portion of my trip. Then the strangest thing happened: Maria came into my room. I had planned to say goodbye to her tomorrow but she was here now.

I don't know how she was able to leave her home in the evening. I don't know what she said to Gop and his wife that they allowed her into my shelter. But now she stood tentatively in the doorway, her arms roped together over her chest.

— I don't think you should go.

I told her that I was sorry to leave her, that I would miss her, too.

— It's not that I'll miss you. I mean, I will, Sleeper. But I think there's something God is doing. He took Noriyaki and I think he has a plan for you. I have a premonition.

I held her hand and thanked her for worrying about me.

— I sound crazy, I know, she said. She shook her head then, as if tossing aside her concerns, the way she dismissed any hopes and ideas of her own. But then her face hardened again and she looked into my eyes with a new fierceness.

— Don't go tomorrow, she said.

— I'll see you in the morning, I said.-I'll come visit and if you think I shouldn't leave, we'll consider a new plan then.

She agreed, though she only half-believed me. She slipped away from my shelter that night and I did not see her again. I didn't tell her that I shared the same worries, that my own fears were far more immediate and vivid than hers. I told no one, but I was fairly certain that something would go wrong with this trip. But I could not live in that camp anymore. I had been at Kakuma for almost ten years and would not live out my life there. Any risk, I felt, was acceptable.

The lobby of the Century Club is stone quiet after eight a.m. The members are working out beyond the glass, stepping and running and lifting, and I watch them and think of adjustments I might make to my own regimen. Two months ago I began to work out sometimes after my shifts. The manager, a petite and muscular woman named Tracy, told me that I could get a 50 percent discount on a partial membership, and I have been using that opportunity. I've gained four pounds in those two months, and have, I think, increased the size of my chest and biceps. I don't ever again want to look in the mirror and see the insect that I was.

A new woman enters the club, someone I have never seen. She is white, very large, exceedingly graceful. She looks startled to see me.

'Hello,' she says. 'Haven't seen you before. What a wonderful smile you have.'

I try to frown, to seem hardhearted.

'I'm Sidra,' she says, and extends her hand. 'I'm new. I've only been here twice before. I'm, you know, making some changes.' She looks down at her girth shyly, and I immediately feel that I should say something. I want to make her feel better. I want her to feel blessed. I want her to know that she has been blessed. To be here now, to be alive as she is, to have lived always in this country, Sidra, you are blessed.

She gives me her card and I swipe it. Her picture appears, her smile sad and tilted, and she enters the gym.

Sidra, on that last morning I woke at four a.m. to make sure I could avoid any line at the water tap. When I arrived, there was no line, and I saw this as a good omen. I brought water home and took a shower. As I was stepping out of the shower enclosure, Deng Luol, who had booked my bed, was standing at the doorway.

— It's not even dawn, I said.

— I've never had a mattress, he said.-I have a wife, and she would dearly appreciate one. With this, I will be her hero.

He wished me a safe trip and left with the mattress on his head.

I dressed in my crisp new clothes and packed my things in a plastic bag. I had only my toiletries, one change of clothes, and my documents. There was nothing else.

Everyone in my house began waking up, and all were crying.

— Make the Sudanese proud, Gop said.

— I will, I said. At that moment, I believed I could.

I said goodbye to each of my Kakuma sisters, and to Ayen, who had been my mother for many years at the camp. It was a swift parting; it was too confusing to stay any longer. I left so quickly that I forgot one of my new shirts, and left my new shoes. I realized this later, but did not want to go back.

When I walked outside, I found Cornelius, the neighbor boy who had booked my bike. It was a good bike, a Chinese-made ten-speed, and Cornelius was already sitting on its clean vinyl seat, with the kickstand down, practicing riding it, pushing the pedals forward and back.

— Ready? Cornelius said.

— Okay, let's go.

There would be unblemished blue skies all day. I was willing to walk to the compound-I would catch the bus to the airfield there-but Cornelius, with his new bicycle, insisted on chauffeuring me. So I sat on the small seat over the back tire, my bag on my lap.

It took him some time before he steered the bike competently with me aboard.

— Pedal, boy, pedal! I said.

Soon he was steady and we got onto the main road to the compound. When we joined the road, we saw the other people. Hundreds. Thousands. It seemed half of Kakuma was walking on that road, to see off the forty-six boys leaving that day. For each person leaving, there were hundreds of friends walking with them. You could not tell who was going and who were the friends. It was a great procession, the women all so sad, the colors of their dresses blooming all over the cracked orange road to the airfield.

Cornelius was now taking us with great speed through the crowd. He rang the bell on my handlebars, parting the throng before us.

— Look out! he yelled.-Move aside, move aside!

Those leaving were sorry for those staying and those staying were sorry to be staying. But I could not stop smiling. My headache cleared momentarily during that bike ride and when we passed through the camp, riding on the back of my own bike, people stepped out of the way of the bike and yelled to me.

— Who is that leaving? they said.

— It's me, I said.-Valentine! It's me!

Cornelius rode faster and faster. The thousands of those I knew at Kakuma were now a blur painted in every color. They stepped out of their homes and ran after me, wishing me well in all my names.

— Who is that leaving? It can't be! they said.-Is it you? Is it Achak?

— Yes! I yelled, laughing.-I'm leaving! Achak is leaving! And they waved and laughed.

— Good luck to you! We'll miss you Achak!

— Goodbye to you, Dominic!

— Don't come back to this dirty place, Valentine!

And I looked at their faces as I passed, sitting over the rear tire of my bouncing ten-speed, and hoped that those people would leave the camp, though I knew that few would. The sun was strong when we reached the compound. Cornelius slowed and I leapt off. He had already turned the bike around and was heading home when he remembered to say goodbye. He shook my hand and was off. A boy so young with a bike like that? It was unprecedented at that camp.

I passed through the gate. Inside the compound, the other leaving boys leaving had gathered and were sitting in the yawning shade of the biggest tree in Kakuma. The flight was to depart at two p.m., but we who were leaving on that plane were already gone, already thinking, planning; mentally, we had already left Kakuma, left Kenya, left Africa. We were thinking of the kind of work we would do in the United States. We thought of school there, many of us imagining that we would, within weeks, be studying at American universities. One of the boys had a catalog for a college, and we passed it around, admiring the beautiful campus, the students of many ethnicities walking under the canopies of trees, past the buildings of raw-cut stone.

— I thought Jeremiah Dut was coming, one of the boys said.

— He wasn't approved. They found out he'd been a soldier.

The boys talked about that for some time, quietly, and we compared the lies we had told. Many of the boys had said their parents were dead, when only some of the boys were sure either way. After an hour of sitting in the shade, a plane came over the hills, looking very small and very fragile.

— That's the plane? someone said.

— No, I said.

At that moment, as it circled closer and finally landed, I was very sure that this was the plane that would take me to my death.

We stepped onto the plane, piloted by a Frenchman no larger than a teenage girl. There were forty-six of us on the flight, all of us having walked more or less the route I had walked. I knew none of them well; all of my friends were long gone. As soon as the plane's engines started, one boy vomited on my shoes. The boy ahead of me, smelling the vomit, expelled his breakfast on the seat in front of me. When the plane lurched forward, three more boys vomited, two of them finding the air-sickness bags in time. Beyond the retching, no one made a sound. Those of who could see out the windows were flabbergasted.

— Look at that building! A bridge?

— No, that's a house!

And inside the plane it was so bright. We had to lower the shades to rest our eyes.

The plane landed late on Sunday. No one had been to Kinyatta International Airport before, and all were astounded. The size of it all. It was much larger than the airfield at Kakuma, larger than any settlement we had ever seen; it seemed to have no end.

As evening came, we waited at the airport for a bus to take us into Nairobi, to Goal, a refugee processing center run by the International Organization of Migration. We would wait there until the next day, for our flight to Amsterdam and beyond.

In the dark around the airport it was impossible for young men like us to know what we were seeing. What were the lights? Were they disembodied lights or attached to structures? At night, most of Kakuma is dark, for there is little electricity. But here at Kinyatta everyone was still awake. No one slept at all.

— And the cars!

In all of Kakuma there were only a few at one time.

— Man, this is big! one of the men said.

Everyone laughed because it was what we were all thinking. As we drove from the airport into Nairobi, the awe grew. None but I had been in a city.

— These buildings! one of the boys said.-I don't want to walk under them.

None of the others had seen buildings over three stories, and they had little faith that those throwing shadows over the roads would stand.

At Goal we checked in, were given our itineraries and a buffet dinner of beans, maize, and marague, a mix of corn and beans and cabbage. We were shown to our rooms, six boys in each, sleeping on three sets of bunks.

— Ooh, look at these!

Most of the boys with me had never slept on clean white sheets. A boy named Charles threw himself onto the bed and pretended to swim. Then others joined in, and I did it myself. We all swam on the white sheets and laughed until we were sore.

I slept fitfully that night, listening to my roommates talk without end.

— Where are you going again?

— Chicago.

— Oh yes, Chicago. The Bulls! And we would all laugh again.

— Is it cold in San Jose?

— No, no. I think it's warm.

— Too bad for you, Chicago!

Again we laughed.

In the morning, on a clear and humid Monday, there was breakfast and afterward nothing at all to do. No one was allowed to leave the hotel. It was fenced in and guarded by Kenyan soldiers. We were not sure why.

Again that night, no one slept. The room was dark but jokes were told, and the same questions asked.

— Who's going to Chicago again?

— Me. I am the bull.

It's hard to explain why this was so funny, but it was at the time. The other favorite joke of the night concerned San Jose. Three of the boys in the room were going there, but no one could pronounce that place.

— We're going to Saint Joe's! they said.

— Yes, San Joe's will be the place to be.

The next day we were finally going to the airport to board the real plane, the one that would make it to Amsterdam and then New York. From New York we would be sent to twelve different cities-Seattle, Atlanta, Omaha, Fargo, Jacksonville, so many places.

Once on the bus, exhaustion finally overcame us. It was Tuesday, we had been at Goal thirty-six hours, and no one had slept more than a few minutes. Finally we were going to the airport, each of us wearing matching IOM T-shirts, and every window of the bus bore the weight of someone's resting head. A pothole just before the entrance to Kinyatta woke everyone up and again there was merriment. I tried to stay still and quiet, for my head was so heavy, the pain so acute that I wondered if something was truly wrong with me. I briefly contemplated saying something to the Kenyan who had guided us onto the bus, to ask him for medicine of some kind, but then decided against it. It was unwise to make oneself noticed in such situations. Make a noise and the opportunity might be taken away. Complain about anything and get nothing.

There were thousands at the airport this day, a bewildering mix of Kenyans and lighter-skinned blacks, and a hundred or more white people, most of them sunburned a raw pink. We saw a group of whites, perhaps fifty-more white people than we ever had seen in one place-all gathered together with their extensive luggage, all of them looking for their passports. I wanted to speak to them, to practice my English, to tell them that soon I would be part of their world. I had no idea where they were from but I was caught up in the idea that I was leaving one world and entering another, that the American world was a white one and all whites, even these people in Nairobi, were part of it.

We waited near the gate, trying not to attract attention. There was concern among everyone that if we were noticed by the police or airport authorities, we might be taken directly back to the camp. Thus no one wandered from their seats. No one went to the bathroom. We waited an hour, our hands in our laps, and then it was time. We boarded a plane five times the size of the one we had taken to Nairobi, and more luxurious in every way. We buckled our seatbelts. We waited. The pain in my head grew every minute.

We sat until everyone had boarded, and then sat for thirty minutes more. We were all seated in a swath in the middle of the plane, and we stayed very quiet. An hour passed. We said nothing, because we had no idea how long it took for planes to leave for Amsterdam and then New York. But the other people onboard, whites and Kenyans, had begun to ask questions, and there were a series of assurances over the intercom.-We are awaiting clearance from the tower.-We're ready to go, and are waiting for instructions.-Please bear with us. Thank you for your patience. Please stay seated with your seatbelt on.

Another thirty minutes passed. The intercom came alive again.

— There has been an incident in New York. This plane cannot go there. Silence for a few minutes more.

— Please deplane in an orderly fashion. There will be no aircraft leaving Nairobi at this time. Go back to your gate and await further instruction.

Our bus was the second to reach the hotel, and in the lobby, a hundred people, the Sudanese and the Kenyan hotel staff, even the cooks and maintenance workers, were all gathered around the TV, watching the towers burn like chimneys and then fall. Then images of the Pentagon. None of us Sudanese had ever seen the buildings that were under attack, but we understood that the United States was at war and that we would not be going there.

— Who is the enemy? I asked a Kenyan porter.

He shrugged. No one knew who had done this.

We ate and slept as best we could; we were stranded at Goal while the world decided what to do. As I had foreseen, as Maria had foreseen, I was being sent a message from God. I did not belong on this or any plane.

We expected to be sent back to Kakuma immediately, but that first day we were not sent back to Kakuma. The next day, we were not sent back to Kakuma. We knew nothing about our situation, what plans they had for us, but as the days passed, we became more encouraged about our fates. Maybe we would be resettled in Nairobi. One boy had the idea that we would work at the hotel at Goal, or at least those among us who had applicable skills might. He claimed to be a very good cook.

Some among us did not want to go to America now. To them, Sudan seemed safer than New York. Things would only get worse, they surmised, as retaliation was undertaken and led to a larger conflict. It was generally agreed that any war the United States would be engaged in would be the biggest war the world has ever known. I took what I had seen of explosions in films and extrapolated. The coming war would look like that, fire filling the sky, covering the world. Or perhaps the buildings, all of the buildings in America, would simply continue to fall in on themselves as they had in New York. A smoldering, then collapse.

There was no news from the IOM or anyone on Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday, and on Saturday something unfortunate happened: more refugees arrived from Kakuma. Another plane had flown from the camp to Nairobi, and now the hotel had another forty-six Sudanese boys. Another group followed that evening. And on Sunday, two more planes brought a hundred more passengers. These were regular flights, like the one we had taken, and they had not been rescheduled. Soon there were three hundred refugees at Goal, a facility designed for of third of that number. We slept two per bed. Mattresses were brought into the hotel from surplus stores and hospitals, and soon there were only narrow paths carved where people could walk. The rest of the floors were covered with blankets and sheets, and we slept upon them at all hours, whenever we could.

It was from one of the new arrivals that I heard about Maria. Shortly after I saw her that night, when she had urged me not to leave, she had attempted to take her own life. She had swallowed a mixture of cleaning solution and aspirin, and would have died had it not been for her caretaker, who found her in her bed, a tendril of white liquid descending from her mouth. She was taken to Lopiding and was now in stable condition. I was wrecked by this news on this day, but Sidra, thank God, her story ends well. In the hospital she met a Ugandan doctor, a woman who listened to her story and took it upon herself to guarantee that Maria would not return to the man who wanted to gain from her the best bride price. This particular doctor cared for her and eventually arranged for her to go to school in Kampala, to a school with pens and pencils, uniforms and walls. Maria is now in college in London. We are in touch via email and text-message and now I can call her Sleeper, too, for she attempted to sleep forever but now seems content to be awake.

On the second day at Goal, hot rain soaked Nairobi, and the hotel passed quickly into fetid. The bathrooms were unclean. There was not enough food. We wanted to use the money we had-and many among us had brought savings-to buy food in Nairobi, but security was now tighter than before. No one could come or go. Competition for the food served at Goal fostered ugly behavior. On the rare occasion there was meat, it brought arguments and bitterness; only a small percentage of us tasted it.

There was nothing to do. We prayed in the morning and at night, but I was helpless and dizzy. I had felt powerless for most of my life, but there was nothing like this. Some of the boys blamed the driver of our bus, saying that he had driven too slowly-had he been quicker, they claimed, we would have reached the plane sooner, and would have left the airport before the flights were grounded. This was the thinking of desperate minds. But few of us believed it was likely that we would still go to the United States. Australia perhaps, or Canada-but not this nation under attack. We were sensitive to the tenuousness of our acceptance into the United States, we did not take it for granted and were aware of how quickly and justifiably their minds could be changed. Why would a country under attack need people like us? We were added trouble for a troubled country.

The rain stopped the afternoon of the eighth day and Nairobi warmed under cloudless skies. I sat on the bed I shared with yet another Daniel and stared at the walls and ceiling.

— I wish I'd never known about America, a boy in the bunk under me said.

I wondered if these were my thoughts, too. I do not remember doing anything that day. I don't think I moved.

The three hundred of us waited. We learned that the flights carrying Lost Boys just before us had been diverted to Canada and to Norway. Travelers were stranded all over the earth.-The world has stopped, said one of the Kenyans. Everyone nodded.

Soon the flights from Kakuma stopped, but refugees continued to arrive at Goal. A group of seventy Somalis from the other Kenyan camp, Dadaab, were now at Goal, and the center's administrators were forced to allow everyone to spend more time outside. We took turns breathing the air of the courtyard.

With all the other young men at Goal, I watched the news, hoping to hear the American president say something about war, about who the enemy was. We were heartened somewhat that as the days passed, no more attacks occurred. It seemed impossible, though, that there was simply one day of attacks and no more. It was not the kind of war we were accustomed to. We stayed close to the television, expecting only bad news.

— You Sudanese want to go to America!

A Somali man, as old as any Somali I had ever seen, was speaking to us from across the room. He was standing, watching us watch the news. No one knew anything about him, but someone said they had seen him at Kakuma.

— Where will you go? They're at war! the Somali said.

I had heard of this man. The others at Goal called him the Lost Man. The Lost Man made me very angry very quickly.

— You thought it would be better there? he yelled, as the television presented a new angle of the planes breaking through the black glass of the buildings. No one answered him.

— It'll be no better! he continued.-You thought you'd have no problems? Just different problems, stupid boys!

I didn't listen to the man. I knew he was broken, mistaken. I knew that in the United States, even with attacks such as these, we would live lives of opportunity and ease. I had no doubt. We were prepared to surmount any obstacles put before us. We were ready. I was ready. I had succeeded at Kakuma and I would find a way to succeed in America, whatever state of war or peace that country found itself in. I would arrive and immediately enroll in college. I would work at night and study during the day. I would not sleep until I had entered a four-year college, and I was sure I would have my degree in short order, and would then move on to an advanced degree in international studies, a job in Washington. I would meet a Sudanese girl there and she would be a student in America, too, and we would court and marry and form a family, a simple family of three children and unconditional love. America, in its way, would provide a home for us: glass, waterfalls, bowls of bright oranges set upon clean tables.

The Lost Man was still ranting, and one of the men who had been on my flight from Kakuma could take the old man's taunting no longer.-But you're going there, too, fool! he yelled. This is what was strange about the Lost Man: he was going to America, too.

We were familiar with the attacks on the embassies in Tanzania and Nairobi, and as the days wore on, the world became more certain this was the work of the same man. As the days produced no more attacks, though, we realized that America was not at war, that it was relatively safe to go there. We decided we wanted to go more than ever.

After nine days, I organized a contingent of young men, four of us, Sudanese and Somali, to plead for our deliverance. I requested a meeting with the IOM representative I had seen moving in and out of Goal every few days. Incredibly, the meeting was granted.

He was a South African man of mixed race. When he arrived, before he could speak, I launched into my plea. We will fight! I said. We will do whatever is asked of us if you only send us to America, I said. We have waited so long! We have waited twenty years only to know that something good will happen! Can you imagine? Do not deprive us of this. You must not. We will do anything, everything, I said. My companions looked at me warily, and I suspected I was doing more harm than good. I was overtired and perhaps sounded desperate.

The man walked out of the room, having said nothing. He left a piece of paper, and on it was printed an IOM directive: the flights were to continue as soon as the airports were reopened in the United States. In the mythology of Goal, my speech became the deciding factor in the resumption of flights. I was celebrated for days, no matter how many times I denied responsibility.

The postings began on September 19. Every day, a list of twenty refugees was taped to a window by the television set, and those people would be picked up the same afternoon and taken to the airport. On the first day, the men whose names were on the list packed, unbelieving, and got on the bus at two-thirty. The bus left and that was that. The rest of us could not fathom how simple and quick the process had become. When the first three groups did not return, we became relatively certain that if we got on an afternoon bus, we would indeed leave Goal for good.

I have never been so happy to see Sudanese people disappear. Each day there were fewer people at Goal-first 300, then 260, then 220. On the fourth day I was placed in a new room, a small room with one window, high above and striped with steel bars. I had a bed to myself but shared the room with fourteen others. Every night that I knew I would not be leaving the next day I slept well, hearing the planes leaving from Nairobi.

On the fifth day my name appeared on the sheet taped to the window. I would be on the bus the next afternoon. That night I lay in bed staring at the other young men in the room, all of them shadows, only a few asleep. Half were leaving the next day with me, and those who were leaving could not rest. The mood was very different than it had been eight days earlier. The Sudanese, as far as we knew, were now spread all over the world, stranded, redirected; some who were meant for one country were now staying, indefinitely, in another. But we would be flying into all of this the next day. None of us were sure we would ever see the earth again. To fly from Africa, over the ocean, in an airplane, bound for the city where planes were flown into buildings? It wasn't just about a country at war. We were leaving everything we knew, or thought we knew; each of us had only one small bag of possessions, and no money at all, no family where we were going. This journey was an act of reckless faith.

It was dark in our small room, the fan above us unmoving. The youngest among us, a young man named Benjamin, had turned to the wall, awake and shaking.

— Don't be frightened, I said to him.

I was the oldest of the group and I felt it was my responsibility to calm him.

— Is that Valentine? he said.

— It is. Don't fear tonight, Benjamin. Or tomorrow.

The men in the room murmured their assent. I slipped out of my bed and down to Benjamin's bunk. Now that I saw him close-up, he looked no more than twelve.

— Already we've seen more than most of our ancestors. Even if we disappear while flying to our destination, Benjamin, we should be thankful. Do you remember the flight to Nairobi? We had to close every window it was so bright. We've seen the earth from the sky, we've seen the lights of Nairobi and all the people of the world walking through its streets. This is more than our ancestors could have dreamed.

Benjamin's breathing slowed, and the men in the room agreed that this was true. Emboldened, I continued to speak to Benjamin, and to the shadows of these men. I told them that the mistakes of the Dinka before us were errors of timidity, of choosing what was before us over what might be. Our people, I said, had been punished for centuries for our errors, but now we were being given a chance to rectify all that.

We had been tested as none before had been tested. We had been sent into the unknown once, and then again and again. We had been thrown this way and that, like rain in the wind of a hysterical storm.

— But we're no longer rain, I said, — we're no longer seeds. We're men. Now we can stand and decide. This is our first chance to choose our own unknown. I'm so proud of everything we've done, my brothers, and if we're fortunate enough to fly and land again in a new place, we must continue. As impossible as it sounds, we must keep walking. And yes, there has been suffering, but now there will be grace. There has been pain but now there will be serenity. No one has been tried as we have been tried, and now this is our reward, whether it be heaven or something less than that.

When I was done talking, Benjamin seemed pleased, and words of agreement were sent up into the dark from all of the room's men. I climbed back into my bed but felt as if I was floating above it. Every part of my body felt electric. My chest ached and my head throbbed with the great terrible limitless possibility of the morning, and when it came, the sky was washed white, everything was new, and I hadn't slept at all.

CHAPTER 26

When the morning ends and my work is done at the Century Club, I leave, knowing I am leaving this job and I am leaving Atlanta. I walk outside; it's an unremarkable day. I know that I will not miss the sky that guards over this city. The heavens here have been a hammer to me, and I will be moving, as soon as I am able, to a quieter place. A place where I can spend some time thinking. I need to make some new plans without the eyes of these clouds over me.

My plans are a jumble for now, but I do know certain things that I will and will not do. I will not file fabric samples again. I will not haul television sets or sweep tinsel from the floors of a Christmas-themed shop. I will not butcher animals in Nebraska or Kansas. I have no prejudice against these jobs, for I have done most of them. But I won't go back to that kind of work. I will reach upward. I will attempt to do better. I will not be a burden upon those who have helped me too much already. I will always be grateful for what pleasures I have enjoyed, what joys I have yet to experience. I will take opportunities as they come, but at the same time, I will not trust so easily. I will look at who is at the door before opening it. I will try to be fierce. I will argue when necessary. I will be willing to fight. I will not smile reflexively at every person I see. I will live as a good child of God, and will forgive him each time he claims another of the people I love. I will forgive and attempt to understand his plans for me, and I will not pity myself.

At the beginning of this unremarkable day, I will first drive home. Achor Achor and I will cover the floor that bears my blood with a plant, a lamp, perhaps a table, and we will replace the things that were stolen. I will tell Achor Achor that I am leaving the apartment, and he will understand. It will take him very little time to find a new roommate. There are plenty of my brethren in Atlanta who will appreciate that apartment, and the next man will not care about what happened there.

Today I have options. There is a friend of mine who has a new baby. He's one of the Dominics, actually; he and his wife live in Macon. Maybe I'll drive there, bring greetings and a gift. I could go to Macon, hold the newborn for a time, and then, if I felt strong, I could drive on to see Phil and Stacey and their twins in Florida. The ocean would be cold at this time of year but still I would try to swim. Or should I drive the other way? I could drive all day and night and find Moses in Seattle, stay with him and eventually join his walk. I dearly want to walk with Moses again, and will do so, I promise I will do so, unless he plans to walk barefoot. Would he do such a thing, walk barefoot to Arizona to make some sort of point? In that case I would not join Moses; that would be madness.

I look across the roofs of cars and into the field that spreads out beyond. I close my eyes against the white sky and see the yellow of a falling sun. I can see her clearly now, moving swiftly down the path toward me, walking her tall gangly walk. I should be home. It seems wrong that I am not home with her. I could leave this struggle here behind and be with her, with my father and in the cradle of the vast family I have in Marial Bai. To stay here, struggling and with my head aching so with the pressure, is, perhaps, not my destiny. For years I have vowed to return home, but not until I had finished my college education. I saw myself stepping off a plane, wearing a suit, carrying a suitcase, my diploma entombed in leather inside, and into the embrace of the town and my family. I told my father this plan, too, and he liked it very much, though he insisted that I wait until he, too, had regained the ground beneath him. He did not want me to see him again until his business was rebuilt, and not before our compound was again as it was when I came into the world.

I believe this day will come. It is, though, taking longer than expected.

Whatever I do, however I find a way to live, I will tell these stories. I have spoken to every person I have encountered these last difficult days, and every person who has entered this club during these awful morning hours, because to do anything else would be something less than human. I speak to these people, and I speak to you because I cannot help it. It gives me strength, almost unbelievable strength, to know that you are there. I covet your eyes, your ears, the collapsible space between us. How blessed are we to have each other? I am alive and you are alive so we must fill the air with our words. I will fill today, tomorrow, every day until I am taken back to God. I will tell stories to people who will listen and to people who don't want to listen, to people who seek me out and to those who run. All the while I will know that you are there. How can I pretend that you do not exist? It would be almost as impossible as you pretending that I do not exist.

THE END