The thirteen remaining boys still had each other to depend on. They missed Akon’s gentle ways but they were glad for her. The officials began moving the families the next morning, separating them from the orphan boys. All the girls, they discovered, were being placed with families.
“Akon is really lucky to find her aunt,” Madau said. “Most of the orphan girls will just be put with strangers.”
“Let’s go see if we can find her and greet her aunt,” suggested Ayuel. “I want to see her one more time. She really looked happy.” Maybe Gutthier and I should have gone with our uncle when we had the chance. He offered to take Malual, too. Maybe I made a bad decision. Staying didn’t keep him and Chuei from dying.
He and Gutthier searched for their cousin Akon every day, but never found her. The officials would not allow them to mingle with the families who had already been identified.
It took five or six days to relocate the families on the other side of the camp. Some boys tried to sneak in with them, but the officials checked every name and orphaned males were turned back. Ayuel again felt abandoned by adults, even though he knew none of them. He thought of the time the women and girls had turned back to their burned villages rather than walk to Ethiopia.
The next few weeks passed slowly. Food remained sparse. The boys watched the points of tents rise up in the far corner of the field. A rope stretched across, dividing the two societies—orphaned boys from families with mothers, sisters and brothers, and sometimes fathers. Soon a high pole fence replaced the rope. We must be less important, less valuable, they concluded. The thirteen took comfort in remaining together. They too, were a family.
The Ethiopian officials vanished just as the SPLA soldiers had disappeared when the boys arrived. Men in uniform wearing light blue caps appeared. Instead of the one microphone, these men talked over two huge microphones shaped like bells that sat on top of their trucks. The person speaking hid in the truck cab so no one could see him. But his voice came out loud and clear.
“Good morning, boys,” the hidden voice said. “We are here from the United Nations. Now that we have the families and girls settled, we are going to make life better for you, too. As you know, there are several different clans and tribes here. We must all get along. Already we’ve seen fights break out—Dinkas against Nuers, Equatorians against Dinkas, boys from one town fighting against another town. The remedy for this, the U.N. has decided, is to form new “families” of about thirty to fifty boys each that we are calling villages, mixing up the clans, separating relatives and forcing all to live together in harmony. This, we believe, will prevent gangs from forming. Then several villages will be put together to form twelve larger groups.”
“This is the end of our little family,” Madau said. “I don’t like their idea one bit.”
“I don’t either,” Ayuel said as he sat surrounded by his friends and listened to the voice coming from the bells. I’ll be alone again with a bunch of strangers. “But what can we do? At least we have a little food here, and they have promised us schools.”
“You can still visit your friends,” the voice said in a softer tone. “But you are in this camp to keep from being hurt anymore by the war in your country. We don’t want small wars to break out here.” After the low grumbling of the assembly faded, the voice continued. “From now on the supplies will be distributed to the new groups, which we will be forming immediately.
“Please, get in one of the lines in front of these officials to find out which group and which village you are in. Let’s do this in an orderly fashion. Move out of the way when…” The voice droned on, but Ayuel had stopped listening. “At least we can still see each other,” he whispered to Madau.
Since Madau was his cousin and Gutthier his half-brother, Ayuel knew they would not be put together. He tried to be brave and accept the new rule, but it left him feeling lonely. That night, lying between two strangers, he dreamed of coming home with the cows. His mama welcomed him with a smile and said how proud she was of him. He played soccer with his brother Aleer and with Malual and Tor, their voices full of laughter and their bodies brimming with good health.
“So what’s your new group and village like?” Ayuel asked as he walked along the edge of camp at dusk with Gutthier and Madau. They were in Group Ten. It felt good to be with his old friends rather than the strangers he’d been assigned to live with.
“I don’t talk to the people in in my village. They’re mostly Nuers and a few Equatorians. The Dinkas are all older,” said Madau who, by nature, was prone to keep quiet.
“Wish we could’ve all stayed together,” Ayuel said. “There’re about fifty in Village One, or my ‘family’ as they call it. It’s not at all like our family of seventeen.” He slapped at mosquitoes attacking his arms.
“And we’re about the only ones left that get together,” Madau said. “I did see Donayok the other day. He’s the head leader of Group One in charge of over 1,000 boys. He supervises all his village leaders and has his own tukul and boys who work for him.”
“They couldn’t have found a better or fairer leader,” Ayuel said. “We should go see him sometime. Leaders get extra food.”
“Yeah, and he would share. I never see anyone else. Wonder how Akon is doing with her aunt and cousins.”
“Better than us.”
“Like I said, I don’t talk in my village, but I listen to what people say,” continued Madau, picking up on his earlier comment. “The Dinkas were saying—and they’re the only ones I understand—that when the United Nations people first got here, they counted about 33,000 of us. Then 12,000 died of cholera or starved to death.”
“Or from eating too much, too fast,” added Ayuel. “Or from diarrhea.” He thought of Malual Kuer.
“They took away the families and girls. Now there are about 16,000 of us boys in the twelve groups,” continued Madau.
“I still think maybe we should’ve gone to one of the other camps, Markas or Itang,” Madau said. “Maybe we could stay together there.”
“We could just keep going—right now, tonight.”
“I’ve heard Itang is north of here. I don’t want to go to the Markas training camp and be a soldier,” Ayuel said, considering the possibility.
“Well, there’s the North Star.” Gutthier pointed to the first faint star to show in the evening sky. The boys kept walking in that direction without making a decision. “What else do the Dinkas say?”
“That we are going to start building tukuls to sleep in—like back in Duk.”
“Are we really going to go to Itang?”
More stars began to brighten and hang low as darkness fell.
“We don’t have food with us, and we could run into hostile gangs or….”
The howl of a hyena in the distance cut off their conversation. The three friends turned and ran back to their separate new families.
As Ayuel got to know the others in his compound, he spent less and less time with his old friends. He soon realized the boys from the Nuer tribes were not as terrible as he’d been led to believe. The members in his new family felt as lonely as he did.
In a couple of weeks, the United Nations assigned a man to each designated group to teach the boys how to build huts in the style of the ones they’d known in Sudan. Like the other boys, Ayuel dug holes and stuck sapling poles deep in the ground, then plastered the sides with wet clay mixed with straw. The older boys framed the roof with poles that came to a high ridge in the middle. Ayuel helped