One morning, as the buildings neared completion, a U.N. official called the assembly together to hear an announcement over the loud speakers. Thousands of boys crowded together in small clumps, sitting in the open area of trampled dry grass. The official introduced the new schoolmaster Maker Thiang and praised him as “an educated man from Sudan who speaks English as well as Dinka, Arabic and Swahili.” Maker Thiang stood in the back of a truck, holding a regular microphone.
“Good morning, young men of Sudan,” he said. “Today is a very important day in your lives. Today you all will become students in the schools we are forming. You will learn numbers, geography, science and the history of Africa.” He paused. “Not all today, of course.”
The crowd roared with laughter over the joke, then applauded the new schools. They could like this schoolmaster.
“And you will learn to speak, read and write English.” More applause.
“We now have, however, only a few teachers so your classes will be very large. Some of you, I’ve learned, have had one year or more of schooling, so I am asking you to help one day a week with the beginners. If you are at least eleven years old and have been to school, please see me before going to your classes. Everyone will start in First Class because you will be learning English, a new language for all of you.”
Ayuel turned to Madau and whispered, “Welcome, welcome.”
“American congressman,” his cousin added with a giggle.
“Until we have more teachers, you may choose which school to join. They will all be the same. Just try to go to the smallest class you can find.” The schoolmaster then pointed out the locations of the teachers.
With joy in his heart Ayuel, along with Gutthier, Madau and new friends from both of their villages, chose an area in the shade of a baobab tree. As Ayuel was leaving the assembly, he noticed Donayok among the older boys reporting to Maker Thiang. He waved and his former leader waved back. Donayok was a good leader. I always thought he was intelligent, but I never knew he went to school.
The boys reported, along with about 800 other students, to a young man whom they found perched on a lower limb of the baobab, waiting. At first, the boys pushed and jostled for a spot in the shade, but when the teacher spoke, they sat down quietly and reverently, packed close together. The teacher had no microphone, but he spoke in Dinka with a very loud voice: “I am Joseph from the region of Juba. I studied in Bor, but when I was twelve years old, a missionary took me to London, England, for a year where I learned to speak English.”
“Where’s London, English?” whispered Ayuel.
“No idea.” Gutthier shook his head and grinned.
“It’s where BBC comes from on the radio,” said an older boy behind his hand.
“Our first lesson is about English letters,” said the teacher. “Repeat after me: A, B, C.”
In the beginning, all the lessons consisted of repeating after the teacher. Ayuel found it hard to learn in such a large class. Sometimes he would miss important parts of Joseph’s explanations. When he came back to his compound, the boys all talked about the lesson, but there were always disagreements over what the teacher had said. The Nuers and Dinkas argued. Some began to lose interest in learning.
According to the new U.N. rules, jobs rotated within the village families. Back in their homes, these boys hadn’t been expected to do women’s work, so they were learning these skills for the first time. Some pounded grain into flour, using a hollowed-out log and a club to crush the grain. Others kept the compound clean and ready for inspection by the caretakers.
The four boys assigned each day to do the cooking couldn’t attend class, because their extra duties took the entire day. They had to walk a mile to the river, carry back two buckets of water each, gather firewood and boil the grain or beans. After building the fire, they would take turns stirring the contents of the big black three-legged pots almost continuously so the food wouldn’t burn.
Sometimes, if wheat had been issued and pounded into flour, they made a sort of flat bread that could be cooked on a metal slab over the fire. The caretakers, who were both men and women from the family camp, came around to check to see if the food was correctly prepared. When the others returned from school, the cooks rang a bell and dipped the food into wide shallow bowls. The forty-seven boys in Village One were divided into sub-villages that ate in shifts beginning at five o’clock in the evening. Those who were sick or malnourished could eat earlier. Everyone in a shift had to be present and accounted for before someone said a Christian prayer and they all could begin eating. Each boy carried his own wooden spoon in his pocket, but everyone shared a common bowl.
Ayuel didn’t mind being on cooking duty, but when those who’d been in class tried to explain the new lessons, he became more confused than ever. He never seemed to know what the right way was to do something or who had the correct information. As he sat alone one evening, Gabriel, one of his cousins and age-mates from Duk, came out and sat down next to him in the shade of their sleeping quarters. Neither had listed the other as a known relative in the camp, for indeed they hadn’t known at the time they’d been asked. Discovering each other in the same village brought happiness to both.
“Can you say all the ABCs?” Gabriel asked.
“Sure,” Ayuel said with pride. This was one thing that came easily for him and didn’t require much understanding. He reeled off all the letters, only pausing once at “Q”. “Now, you say them.”
“I always get stuck on K,” Gabriel said sheepishly. “I know it ends with W, X, Y, Z, but I don’t know what’s between.”
“I can teach you,” Ayuel said. “We’ll have helpers tomorrow, and if we can say it all, they will teach us how to write the letters in the dust.”
Every day, the boys listened to their teacher, Joseph, as he read from a book. Sometimes he held up large cards with words for the students to say aloud in unison. Then they copied the words in the dust, writing with a stick or a finger. At first, Ayuel thought of going to school and writing in the dirt as a game. It took his mind off the sorrow he carried always in his heart.
But when Joseph started beating children about the head and shoulders with a long stick if they couldn’t make the letters right, he became discouraged. When Deng came home from Bor, I loved hearing about what he’d learned in the boarding school. Except on days when the helpers came, this school made little sense. Why should I learn this hard language that nobody talks?
Twice he and his friends chose to go to a different school, but that made learning even more confusing as the teachers all taught different words. So they returned to Joseph. The teachers never checked to see who went where. They all carried disciplining sticks. None had been trained as teachers. They were mostly Sudanese refugees themselves who had a few years of schooling.
For weeks, he said “Good morning, Teacher” along with the others with no idea of its meaning, only that the words were English. He asked around but no one else seemed to know either. One day as the class broke up, the boys sang out the usual, “Goodbye, Teacher. We are going home.” A boy beside Ayuel turned and waved at the teacher and sang out the same words in Dinka.
“Is that what it means?” Ayuel asked.
“Yeah. And in the morning this is what we say.” He yelled the words in Dinka toward the teacher. “That will make him mad.” They both ran, fearing Joseph would come after them with the long stick.
“How do you know all this?” Ayuel asked when they slowed down.