Lost Boy, Lost Girl: Escaping Civil War in Sudan. John Dau Bul

was no money. Instead they might get a big container of corn or a cow.

      My mother had given Tabitha a metal spoon, a leftover from our life in Juba. Tabitha treasured that spoon and always hid it inside the luak, the cattle shed, under a log that supported the wall. One day, when it was time to eat, she went to get it, and when she reached under the log, a snake bit her! She was screaming and screaming. We watched that big long snake slither away, but luckily it wasn’t poisonous. We always had to be careful about snakes in the countryside. There were lots of them. We even saw a mad cobra in the yard. It was rearing up, taller than we were. We ran and ran, as far from it as we could get.

      One afternoon, my parents went to church in a nearby village and left Tabitha and me behind with my father’s cousin, a woman named Nyanriak. It was a nice, quiet afternoon, with cattle grazing in front of the family compound and Nyanriak in the yard grinding millet—a kind of grain we Dinka eat a lot. We were playing with other kids in the sunshine when all of a sudden we heard gunfire, and Nyanriak yelled at us, “You children, come here, come here!” We went running toward her and she pushed us toward the luak. We were screaming, “The Murle are coming. The Murle are coming.”

      The Murle are another tribe in Southern Sudan, and we knew about them because they would raid villages and steal not only cattle but Dinka children, whom they would raise as their own. It was said they couldn’t have children themselves, and that’s why they did this. Whenever a village heard gunfire, the first thought in everyone’s mind was that the Murle had come on a raid. But the Murle don’t burn villages down, and now houses were on fire, and the world had become a big storm of smoke and gunfire and screaming. People were running toward us, shouting out the names of their children or shouting at us to “Run! Run!”

      Nyanriak grabbed us and her five small children and herded us along with the crowd, prodding us to run as fast as our short legs would carry us. We raced after the other people leaving the village, running through tall grass high above our heads. The people ahead of us had made a path in the grass with their running, so we followed that, but sometimes we had to scramble through thorny bushes that scratched as we passed. We were barefoot, the way most Sudanese children are, and our feet grew big blisters on them, but we kept going as fast as we could. I was holding Tabitha’s hand the whole time. She was only three and not much of a runner. But then neither was I.