by Lopez Lomong
Kakuma was a tent city filled primarily with boys like me, boys from Sudan who’d been separated from their families by civil war. Some had been turned into soldiers. Others came here because their villages had been destroyed in the fighting. None of us belonged here. Yet here we were, far from home, in a country to which we did not belong. I am grateful that Kenya gave boys like me a place to escape war. The border guards who arrested me and my three angels could well have forced us to walk back to where we came from. Even worse, they could have handed us over to the rebels. Instead, they let us stay in their country.
However, it doesn’t take long for refugees to figure out that they are not the only ones who wish they could go home. I sensed resentment from people who lived near the camp, especially after a famine hit Kenya. Kenyan law prohibited us from moving out of the camp and permanently settling in the country. It also made it illegal for us to take a job outside the camp. Kakuma was created as a temporary place where displaced people would be safe until the war in Sudan ended. Today, twenty years later, fifty thousand people not only from Sudan but also from Somalia, Ethiopia, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Uganda, and Rwanda call Kakuma home.
It took three weeks for my feet to heal after the truck brought my friends and me to the refugee camp. About the time I could walk, my friends, my three angels, disappeared. To this day I do not know what happened to them. I got up one morning and they were gone. I thought they must have tried to walk back to our village, since that’s where we thought we were going when we escaped the prison camp. Since I had such a difficult time with the first trip, I understand why they did not take me with them. Knowing these boys as well as I did, I think they planned to tell my family where I was so that my mother and father could come and get me.
But that never happened.
The three teenage boys who saved my life were never heard from again. I’ve tried to find them on the trips I have taken back to Sudan over the past few years. No one in my village or the surrounding area has any idea who they were. It is as if they simply appeared in the prison camp, took care of me, led me to freedom, and then disappeared, just like angels in the Bible.
With my friends gone, I had to find other boys to live with. I packed up my stuff and went to another tent of boys. “Can I live with you guys? I am all by myself,” I said.
“How long have you been here?” they asked.
“Three weeks.”
“Do you have a ration card?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll have to do chores around here, just like the rest of us.”
“That’s fine with me. I am not afraid to work.”
With that, I had a new home. I lived in a tent of ten boys in camp section fifty-eight. Kakuma was portioned into sections for different tribes and nationalities. I lived in the equatorian section of the camp. That’s the region of Sudan where I and the other boys in this section all came from.
It didn’t take long for the boys in my tent to become my new family. All of us looked out for one another and shared what little we had with one another. Once a month the UN called our names for the food distribution. I lined up with all the rest of the boys, held out a ration card, and received a bag filled with grain, some oil, and a little sugar and salt. When I got back to my tent, I combined my rations with those of the rest of the boys. It was the only way we could keep what we had from being stolen.
Right after the food distribution was the most dangerous time for a young boy in the camp. Older boys, boys who were now men of eighteen or twenty years old, from other tribes in other parts of the camp would go from tent to tent, stealing food from the younger, weaker boys. My family of boys in the refugee camp did not have to worry about that. We dug a hole in the middle of our tent, hid our food down inside, then covered our stash with a mud lid someone had made. After that, we covered the whole thing with dirt. A thief busted into our tent and yelled, “Give me your food!” We all looked up at him with pathetic faces. “Someone already stole it all,” we cried. The bully turned the tent upside down, looking for our stash, but he never found it. Not one of us ever breathed a word about where our food was hidden. We were too smart for that.
I am not proud to say that I envied these big boys, the ones strong enough to take whatever they wanted. They didn’t eat the food they stole from others. They sold it to people outside the camp. That gave these boys something few of us had: real money. The more I watched the strong take whatever they wanted without suffering consequences from their actions, the more I looked forward to the day I would be big enough to do the same. This became my goal in life. In the refugee camp, there was no higher aspiration.
Even with pooling our rations, we only had enough grain for one meal a day. Six days a week we ate our meal in the middle of the night. That way, we were the hungriest when we needed our strength the least.
Yes, six days a week we ate only one meal, but one day was different. Every Tuesday around noon, workers left the fenced UN compound and pushed wheelbarrows to the far side of the camp. Every boy in the place listened for the squeak, squeak, squeak of the wheelbarrows rolling through the camp. When we heard it, we all took off running.
I had no idea what was happening the first time I heard the squeak, squeak, squeak go by. The boys in my tent rushed out and yelled back at me, “Hurry up, Lopepe! You don’t want to miss out on this!” I raced to catch up with them. We ran across the camp until we came to a pit. Inside the pit was the garbage dump.
The moment a UN worker emptied the first wheelbarrow over the edge into the dump, mayhem broke out. Boys jumped down into the pit and dug through the garbage as quickly as they could. Elbows flew; fights broke out. Boys went after the garbage like hungry hyenas fighting over a gazelle carcass. One of the boys from my tent popped up from the pit, handed me a half-eaten banana, and said, “Get it back to the tent and don’t let anything happen to it.” I did what I was told. That was part of life in my camp family. We all had chores to do, roles to play, and we all did them. I guarded that banana like it was the crown jewels of England.
It didn’t take very many Tuesdays for me to go from running salvaged food back to the tent, to jumping down into the scrum myself. Even though I was small, I could take care of myself. When an elbow flew in my direction, I ducked out of the way and delivered an elbow right back. My family worked together as a team down in that pit. We fought against the other boys for ripe mangoes and half-eaten pieces of bread, bananas, scraps of meat, you name it. If the Americans working in the UN compound ate it (and all the white people working there were Americans in our eyes, no matter what country they came from), they always threw part of it away. When they did, we found it. Yes, Tuesdays were the high point of our week, the one day we ate well—the day we ate garbage.
Eating garbage was not the only adjustment I made growing up in Kakuma. When I arrived, I only spoke Buya, the language of my tribe in Sudan. Everyone in the camp spoke Swahili. Within a matter of months, I spoke Swahili as well as any of them. With time I forgot how to speak Buya completely.
I also had to adjust to the fact that death was a regular part of life. In Kakuma, boys got sick and died every day. Whenever boys died, we always said malaria got them. They may have died of starvation, since food was hard to come by, especially after famine struck Kenya and the UN cut our food ration in half, but we didn’t talk about that. We also didn’t want to think that they may have died from the unsanitary conditions in the camp. We did not have a latrine for the ever-growing number of boys in the camp. Instead we used a dry creek bed that ran through the middle of Kakuma as our toilet. During the rainy season, the creek filled up with water and became our swimming hole. We should have known better, and maybe we did, but we swam there all the same. Swimming in the latrine caused disease to spread. Of this I am sure.
Sometimes malaria got boys in my tent, in my own little family. When that happened, it was up to the rest of us in the family to carry the dead body to the burial place. I lost
many friends in this way.
Life may have been hard, but we were happy. Yes, boys died and food was difficult to come by, but at least no one was shooting at us. We only ate one meal a day, but for me, coming into the camp at the age of six, I accepted this as normal. I never thought that life was unfair because I had to eat garbage. Instead, I looked at the scraps of food from the dump as a blessing. Not all the boys in the camp could do this. I knew some who chose to feel sorry for themselves, who complained constantly about their lot in life. What is the point of such complaining? After all the whining and complaining is over, you still live in a refugee camp. All the complaining in the world will not make your life any better. Instead, you must choose to make the best of whatever the situation in which you find yourself, even in a place like Kakuma.
I found it easier to maintain a positive attitude when I stayed busy. My friends and I stayed busy playing soccer. Someone made a ball by tying together rags from the dump. It did not bounce like a real soccer ball, but at least we never had to worry about it running out of air.
Nearly every boy in Kakuma played soccer. I loved the game. On the field I lived up to my name, which meant “fast.” I weaved through lines of defenders so quickly no one could stop me. I became one of the best scorers in the camp. Perhaps I was too good. The other boys came up to me and complained, “Lopepe, you never pass the ball to your teammates.” I did not listen. After all, the point of soccer is to score more goals than the other team, not to pass the ball. I kept playing the way I always had. Eventually the other boys had enough. One day I walked out on the soccer field and one of the older boys who ran the games told me, “From now on you are the goalkeeper.”
At first I hated being the goalkeeper. You cannot score from the back side of the field, and I love scoring goals. But what could I do? Instead of sulking, I told myself, Okay, you are now the goalkeeper. Make yourself the best goalkeeper in all of Kenya. And I did. By this time I was eleven or twelve years old, no longer one of the youngest boys in the camp. I still was not big, but I was fast in the goal. I blocked anything and everything.
Kakuma grew larger and larger. Every day we heard the distinctive sound of army trucks pulling up to the gate, delivering more refugees. Just as when I arrived, boys far outnumbered adults and families among the new arrivals. These boys crowded onto the soccer field, making it impossible to play. To solve this problem, the older boys came up with a plan. Before anyone could set foot on the soccer field, they first had to run one lap around the camp. The faster you finished your lap, the sooner you got to play soccer. Kakuma did not have a fence around it, but the perimeter was very clearly defined. One lap around the outside of all the tents from all the sections from all the tribes and nationalities equaled thirty kilometers—that is, eighteen miles. We ran without shoes and without extra water in the hot Kenyan desert.
While that may sound like torture to many people, to me, running those thirty kilometers allowed me to escape the realities of life in the camp. When I ran, I did not think about my empty stomach or how I ended up in this place. I could not control much in my life. The UN dictated when food was delivered, when the water spigots were turned on, even when they dumped their garbage for us to eat. But when I ran, I was in control of my life. I ran for me. None of us had shoes, yet running barefoot connected me to the ground under my feet. It was as though the path under my feet and I became one.
Running became my therapy, but I ran fast because I loved soccer. The faster I finished my lap, the more soccer I got to play. When I finished my one lap around the camp, I didn’t take a water break. I didn’t want to waste time going over to the water station when I could be playing ball. Camels drink once and go on for weeks, and so could I. I was a soccer camel.
When I was not running around the camp or playing soccer, I went to school. Every weekday morning from eight until noon, I attended UN-sponsored classes. We did not have a classroom. Instead, we met under a large canvas tent workers put up to protect students from the sun. The school also did not supply textbooks. We sang most of our lessons. A few lucky boys had books they’d brought with them to the camp, but they were few and far between. In place of books, I used to sit under the stars and remember the stories my mother told me as a little boy. I knew that somewhere, she was under the same sky. The thought made me feel connected to her somehow.
We also did not have paper and pencils. A few boys did—those who were sponsored by someone on the other side of the world. I was not so lucky. I used to stare at those writing with a real pen and think, Oh, to be so rich as to have a pen in my pocket. Someday, that will be me. In the meantime, I wrote my lessons in the dirt with a stick. The teacher walked between the rows of boys, checking our work. If I got the problem wrong or if I wrote my letters incorrectly, the teacher smacked me with a stick. “Why did you write that letter that way?” the teacher would say. The beatings motivated me to do my best. I did not enjoy getting smacked with a stick.
On Sunday we went to church instead of school. It was my favorite day of the week. Everything was good on Sundays. I didn’t have to think about food or anything else. Instead, I lost myself singing praises to God. I knew He was there with me. I never, ever doubted that fact for a moment.
And God was with me for a very long time in Kakuma. I did not stay six years old very long. Before I knew it, I was one of the older boys in the camp. Instead of having teenage friends look after me, I took on that role with the younger ones. I never questioned that role or anything else about life in Kakuma. That was just the way things were in the camp—the way life was, and the way it would always be. I never expected anything more.
SIX
From Lopepe to Joseph
I do not remember the day I came to the realization that my parents were dead. I did not wake up one morning crying, “Oh no! My mother and father are gone. What will I ever do?” During my imprisonment in the rebel camp, I dreamed nonstop about going home. When my angels came to me, they told me I was going to see my mother again. Knowing she was waiting for me carried me through the savannah when my feet left a trail of blood with every step. I did not feel the thorn bushes tearing at my legs because I knew I was on my way home.
But our path did not take us home. It took us to Kenya and Kakuma, a place filled with boys like me, boys without homes, without mothers or fathers. Every day I wondered if today might be the day my parents would come and take me home. Surely they must be out there somewhere, searching for me anywhere and everywhere. Their search had to bring them to Kakuma. Once they walked through the gates, I would be on my way home.
Days turned into weeks, but they never walked through the gates. “Why don’t they come?” I asked over and over to anyone who would listen during my first weeks in the camp. Tears flowed. “If they are looking for me, why can’t they find me?”
“You can’t think like that, Lopepe,” a friend finally answered. I tried to look away and ignore him, but he got right in my face.
“Stop it, Lopepe. Stop! You see that boy over there?” He pointed to a boy we all knew about. Like me, he was one of the younger ones. Unlike me, he was not going to survive much longer. He rarely left his tent. All day every day he sat in his tent rocking, rocking, rocking, his mind slowly slipping away. “You cannot sit and wish for something that is never going to happen, or you will lose your mind. No, you must focus on here and now. Do your chores. Go to school. Keep your mind busy. The past is gone. It will not come back. You must live in this day.”
“But …” I said, tears welling up in my eyes.
“No buts,” he said. “This is the life you now have. You must accept it and go forward or you will end up like that other boy.” He then smiled at me, which seemed oddly out of place. “You can do this, my friend. I know you can. You are strong.” My friend patted me on the back and left to go play soccer.
I sat and stared at the rocking boy for a very long time. There were others like him in Kakuma, boys who cried for home day and night. Eventually, malaria
always got these boys. I did not want to suffer such a fate. The rocking boy looked over at me, his eyes filled with sadness. What will it be, Lopepe? I asked myself. The answer was easy. I jumped up, ran out of the tent, and chased after my friend to the soccer field.
My homesickness did not immediately stop, but it changed. The moment I ran over to the soccer field, I knew my parents were never going to come and rescue me. I would not see my home again.
Once I made peace with the fact that I would never go home again, the next step came quite naturally. I did not have a home any longer, and for all practical purposes, I no longer had a mother or father. That made me an orphan. How could I be an orphan if my parents still lived? My mind completed the thought: My parents have to be dead. I knew they were. I knew it just as surely as I knew the sun came up in the east and went down in the west.
My parents were gone, but I remained. In many ways, I was the same boy I was in Kimotong. Back home, I pestered my mother and father for chores. In Kakuma, I did not have to ask what to do. We all had specific tasks we had to do every day. “You will stand in line for water every morning, Lopepe,” I was told as a boy handed me a five-gallon jerrican.
“Show me where to go and I will do it,” I said. The UN piped in water for the camp. The water station consisted of four spigots where we filled up our cans. However, four spigots aren’t very many for the thousands who lived in the camp. My first couple of years in Kakuma, I had to wake up in the middle of the night, grab my can, and go wait in line. At six, I was too small to carry the filled bucket back to the tent. One of the older boys came and got it. I did not like having to hand my jerrican over to someone else. “Someday,” I told myself, “I will be big enough to carry the can back myself.”
