by Majok Tulba
One thing Philip has always stressed is not to try to be a star. If you have the ball, he says, you should look for any teammate in a better position to pass to, not keep the ball and shoot for a goal yourself.
But I’m glancing around and no one is catching me, there’s no one coming to intercept the ball. And no teammate ahead of me is in a better position. It feels like the ball and my feet are communicating with each other in a conversation my brain is not part of. The truth is, I only realise later, that if I let my brain get involved, that would mess the whole thing up. I just keep my mind clear. I focus on where I’m going, not on my feet, not on the ball. My feet know where the ball is, the ball knows where my feet are.
Dust swirls around me. Time seems to move slower. I have made it past every opposing player and then I come to Bol. Behind him is Chieng and the goal. Chieng has blocked a few attempts by my team already. If I can kick a goal it will be the first of the game.
I read his body movements. I have to know which direction he will go and I have to deceive him with my own body language, make him think I’ll do one thing and then do the opposite. But first I must get past Bol. He looms ahead of me looking like he wants to pound me into the dirt. Any friendliness on his part is gone.
I’ve slowed to a fast walking speed when he says, ‘You can’t get that ball past me, Juba.’
Bol is trying to stare me down rather than watching the ball. He’s standing with his legs wide, ready to go in whichever direction he thinks I will. I rush forward and kick the ball straight through his legs. It’s a short kick and I’m able to sprint by him before he can turn around and I pick up the ball on the other side.
He’s behind me now, running to catch up. But I’m not thinking about him because now all that’s in front of me is Chieng and the goal. His eyes go from me to the ball and back to my face. He isn’t sure where to look. He isn’t sure which leg I will kick the ball with. He spreads his arms wide, trying to take up as much space as possible. He’s right in the middle of the goal but he’s leaning more to the left. I don’t know if he realises this, so I make to kick to the left and it’s natural for him to continue in that direction. As he does I kick out hard and straight, sending the ball whizzing past his outstretched arms and into the top right corner of the net.
‘Goal!’ yells Philip.
At first I feel nothing. The moment isn’t real. I turn to look at my team, who are in celebration. Majok is running towards me with his arms spread out like he wants to fly. When he reaches me he lifts me up as though I’ve scored the match-winning goal.
But because it’s the first goal it’s special and everyone in the crowd is cheering wildly. Chieng is gathering himself up, a bewildered expression on his face. Thiko is laughing madly and waving her arms above her head. Nyanbuot is clapping and Mama removes her hand from her mouth and lets a scream of joy escape. Koko is punching the air and Bagic is doing some crazy dance.
Then suddenly the feelings come and I’ve never felt prouder or more exhilarated in my whole life. Majok and a teammate hoist me up on their shoulders, the crowd is still roaring and clapping, and even Chieng comes over and grudgingly says, ‘Nice shot.’ Philip claps me on the back. I don’t see Bol.
And it hits me just how strange it is to be in a refugee camp, to be chronically hungry, to not know if you’ll ever go home again, and yet to be feeling as if you own half the cows and goats in the world.
I score no more goals that game but my team wins. It doesn’t matter, though, who has won and who has lost. For the short while that the match lasted it felt like life was almost normal.
The next morning, Bol seeks me out. I didn’t see him at all after the game.
‘I’ve been awake all night,’ he says. ‘I’ve been going over it again and again in my mind: how did you manage to slip that ball between my legs? I can’t for the life of me figure out how you managed to do that.’
It’s hard to read the expression on his face. Is he angry? Is he going to retaliate in some way?
‘It was just a lucky chance,’ I tell him.
But he grins. ‘You’re a star for sure,’ he says. ‘I thought that was going to be my chance to humiliate you,’ he confesses. ‘I’m bigger than you. I challenged you to a game way back in our village, and yesterday you beat me fair and square. Juba, you have the heart of a lion and the strength of an elephant.’
He holds out a hand to me and I take it. And the exhilaration I feel at there finally being a real truce between us is almost as great as when I scored my goal.
The nights grow colder. The paths through the camp have flooded in the rain and the mud has turned sticky as glue. Trucks get stuck in it. More people keep arriving and the UN workers still can’t keep up with the demand for tents, so any that the workers think can accommodate more people are given more. That means most of us. It’s hard to complain, because no one has anywhere else to go. We’re all in this together, and my family was once just like these people, newly arrived with nowhere to sleep. At least the weather hadn’t been bad then.
One new boy becomes upset when he tells me about his family, who were shot when their village was attacked. Other people don’t want to talk about what happened before they came here, they just stare with empty eyes if you ask. There are two women like this in our tent and one has a young child.
Mama says it’s easy for the women in the camp to feel forgotten among all the chaos. She says they’ve lost their place in the world, along with their homes and possessions and family members and friends. They miss the sense of being part of a community, the easy talking and gossiping they used to enjoy. Here they struggle to create some kind of normality, and sharing a tent is at least a way of feeling safe, part of a pack.
So now I share a sleeping mat with five other boys, with one blanket between us. If you’re in the middle it’s fine, but whoever gets stuck on the ends winds up freezing. If the other boys fall asleep before me, I steal the blanket and curl myself up under it, but inevitably the coldest boy will wake up and steal the blanket right back. And so it goes all night long.
I long to go and sleep somewhere else, but where? It’s even colder outside, and the camp isn’t safe at night. I’ve overheard men talking about the Lord’s Resistance Army, saying that the Ugandan rebels have been here in the camp. The LRA have been waging a war since 1987, I learn, and the government of Sudan supports them.
The men say the LRA chose a dark, rainy night to enter the camp. They just walked through the gates with their heads covered and the peacekeeping soldiers took them for one of their units. When the rebels reached the deeper parts of the camp, they went into tents with their guns pointed and warned people not to make any noise. Then they looted their food, clothes and cooking items. They also took two girls and marched away through the back fence into the jungle.
The sleeping situation in Thiko’s tent is little better. She too must share a mat with several others.
‘One girl cries all night long,’ she tells me one morning. We’re both tired from our nights of little sleep and from hunger. ‘And if you end up next to her, you can feel her shoulders shaking. She doesn’t stop. I don’t know when she sleeps, because it’s certainly not at night.’
‘Maybe she’s crying in her sleep,’ I say. ‘Maybe she’s the one getting a good night’s rest while keeping everyone else awake.’ I think about the boy in my tent last night whose farts were almost as loud as his snores.
‘The other night I had a dream,’ Thiko says. ‘We never found this camp. We were still out wandering, you, me and Chieng. Majok too, but not Koko and Bagic. And we weren’t scared. We had each other and we knew we’d see our families again, though we didn’t know when. Life wasn’t that bad. We roamed around, found our own food, we even managed to have fun.’ She sighs. ‘The football game was great, but apart from that I don’t really remember what it’s like to have fun anymore.’
Thiko’s dream was better than the one I had. I dreamt of running away from huge snakes with long
teeth. I’d been out looking for food and was just plucking a ripe mango when one charged me. I screamed until someone woke me up. I didn’t tell anybody about that dream and I’m not telling Thiko either, because Momo told me long ago that dreaming of a snake is a sign of bad things to come. I’ve seen enough bad things already, I don’t want to see more. I think instead of the old days back in the village. Like the day Thiko finally conquered her fear and climbed a tree.
I’d told her not to look down until she reached the top, and when she did she perched between the branches, resting her back against the trunk, and closed her eyes and calmed her breathing. Then she gazed out at the scene in front of her. I knew that from up there your eyes could follow the course of the Nile to the southeast, to where the jungle stands on both sides of it, as if giving way to the river.
Thiko looked down at me with a proud grin on her face. ‘See?’ she said. ‘Didn’t I say I could climb up here? Am I still a baby now? I’ve got up to the highest branch.’
‘No, you haven’t. And I never said you couldn’t climb up there. You were afraid to.’
But now that she’d conquered her fear, Thiko was jubilant, and in a mood to taunt. ‘Deep down all boys are trembling in fear just like girls,’ she said.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Have you forgotten that rat the other night?’
How did she know about that? ‘I wasn’t scared,’ I said. ‘Or trembling.’
‘That’s not what your mama told me.’
My mother shouldn’t be telling my friends about my fears, I thought. Especially not Thiko. ‘Maybe I was a little nervous,’ I admitted.
‘See, that’s what I meant.’ She lowered herself from the branch, gripping it in both hands until her feet touched the branch below, and so on until she reached the spot where she had to jump the rest of the way down. Closing her eyes she let go, and fell. ‘Ow,’ she yelled as she landed hard on her behind.
Meanly, I couldn’t help laughing. ‘Girls can’t jump off trees!’
‘I just did!’
She got to her feet and dusted herself off.
‘Are you okay?’ I asked.
She picked up a stone and threw it at me. ‘Don’t I look okay?’
I dodged and ran off laughing before she could throw more.
‘Yeah, you better run home to your mama,’ she called after me.
I stopped then and waited for her, and we held hands as we ran back to the village.
I take her hand again now. I will try to think of something that puts a smile back on her face.
That night, though, is no fun at all. I wake shivering again, curled up in a ball. The other boys on my mat are asleep, the tattered blanket pulled up to their chins. They shouldn’t be here, I think. None of us should. This whole place shouldn’t exist. We should all still be living in our homes in our villages, going to school, tending our goats and gardens.
I try and fail to get comfortable. The tent is full of snoring and the stale smell of farts. I pull an edge of the blanket over myself and close my eyes but I know I won’t be able to fall back asleep. Now there’s a baby that won’t stop crying. People are stirring and muttering as the mother tries to shush it.
Then she starts singing a lullaby. She sings very softly but she’s not far from me and I know the song. Her voice is soothing as I lie awake and listen.
This world is my home
It’s the air that moves in my breath
It’s the warm breeze that caresses my skin
I hear the cry of the child born in the time of war
I hear the cry of the children as the elephants fight
Don’t cry my child
Even if the elephants fight
Her voice is like a warm breeze itself.
Feel the breeze
See the butterflies
We will all go home, my child
When the elephants stop their fighting.
The woman sings like a caged bird that’s only free when it sings. Other people are grumbling now. She has woken them up. But I think I love this woman and her beautiful voice. When the baby quietens she stops singing but I wish her baby would cry again so she would sing more.
In the morning I wake feeling better than I have in days.
Philip has left the camp for a couple of weeks but we continue to practise in his absence. There’ll be another match when he returns, he’s promised, and he’ll even try to bring back uniforms. The thought of this makes us train all the harder.
People say I’m the boy who always makes his shot. And it’s true I have a knack for knowing which way an opposing player will move before he moves, so I can then go in the other direction. Chieng is getting better at goalkeeping but it’s still easy for me to kick the ball past him, though he blocks the shots of my teammates.
‘You’re really good, Juba,’ Thiko says one day when she comes down to watch us. ‘And Chieng isn’t doing bad.’
‘I think Philip is going to be surprised when he comes back at how much better we’ve got. Did I tell you he might be bringing us uniforms? Maybe even with our names on them.’
I can’t remember if Philip really said that about our names before he left, or if it’s just someone’s wishful thinking. We’ll find out in a few days when Philip is back.
‘Then you’ll be a real team,’ Thiko smiles.
The night before our match I sleep well for once. When I lie down on my crowded mat a scene from the past rolls lazily through my mind. I’m squatting on the riverbank near our home in Pacong. School is finished for the day, the goats have all been fed and returned to the pen, the garden is weeded. Mama is in our hut preparing dinner and Nyanbuot and Thon are up to their ankles in the cool water of the Nile, shading their eyes from the powerful blast of the sinking sun.
‘Then what happened, Juba?’ Thon asks me eagerly, digging his little toes into the river mud.
‘I’ll tell you if you can just stop interrupting, Thon.’
He makes a silly face. My brother has been impatient ever since he was a baby wailing for goat milk.
Beside him Nyanbuot waits quietly. She’s closed her eyes against the light but I know she’s listening carefully.
‘Well, the lion had the mouse trapped tight under his huge paw. Even one toe was enough to squash the mouse flat. But before the lion could swallow him down, the mouse said, “Mighty lion, don’t eat me. If you spare my life, I will do you a great favour one day.” The lion was so taken aback by this that he didn’t eat the mouse right off but threw his head back and laughed.’
‘Lions don’t laugh.’ Thon squints up at me from the water. ‘Hyenas laugh.’
‘It’s a story, Thon,’ Nyanbuot says. ‘Mice don’t talk either. But they do in stories. Go on, Juba.’
‘So the lion laughed and said, “A mouse? How can a mouse offer a lion any favour? What could you ever do for me?” ’
‘Juba, Nyanbuot, Thon, dinner!’ Grandpa has wandered down from the hut to fetch us.
I leap up from the bank. ‘Grandpa’s here!’
Nyanbuot runs to him and takes his hand as we head home. Thon pants along beside me on his chubby little legs, wanting to know if the mouse ever did a favour for the lion. I’m just starting to answer him when I hear loud voices. They wake me up.
I am pulled from sleep slowly, my grandfather’s voice joining with those from outside. My eyes stay closed but I can no longer see my family or the river. I don’t want to be awake. I want to stay on in Pacong.
But I have no choice, the voices quickly turn into angry shouts. There’s a thud. Followed by others. It sounds like someone being beaten. The yelling grows louder and I sense that everyone in the tent is awake now, listening. Some people sit up. There is whispering. Then gunfire. Screams. Everyone leaps up at once.
Mama’s hand is over Nyanbuot’s mouth, who whimpers but does not cry out. Another gunshot pierces the air, closer this time.
I creep to the entrance of the tent and Mama hisses, ‘Stay in
here, Juba!’
‘I just want to have a look,’ I say, and I peek out through the flap.
There are LRA rebels everywhere. Too many to count, but there are a lot more of them than there are UN soldiers. As I watch, one of the peacekeepers is shot and falls in a heap to the ground.
I turn around and say, ‘LRA!’ and gasps run through the tent. People join me at the flap and we watch in horror as the rebels go from tent to tent, yelling orders and dragging women out by the hair, throwing crying children to the ground. The air is full of screaming and sobbing.
‘Everyone outside now!’ a rebel yells. A few of them appear at the flap of our tent and point their guns at us. ‘You too!’
We file out. Mama holds Nyanbuot’s hand. A soldier pushes the barrel of his gun into my shoulder to hurry me along. We are all herded over to the football field. I keep looking for more UN soldiers but there are none, although I see Patricia on the field. She has her eyes to the ground, as though she doesn’t want to see more suffering. Philip is there too. I haven’t seen him since he returned.
Thiko has her arms wrapped around her mother. The singer of lullabies is crying with her baby.
The rebels keep their guns pointed at us as we stand there waiting. I don’t know what we’re waiting for. Maybe for them to shoot us all? Anger overwhelms me. We’re standing here on the football field where we’re supposed to be playing our game today.
‘Shh,’ Thiko whispers, even though I haven’t said anything. I know she’s saying that because she senses my rage. She doesn’t want me to do something stupid and get myself shot. I don’t want to get shot either but nor do I want to live like this. What did we do to these men? What right do they have to be here? They are Ugandan rebels and we are South Sudanese refugees. We have nothing in common. I pray that it’s only food they want. And then I think how there won’t be enough of that to satisfy them in any case.
