A Long Walk To Water weaves together the story of two Sudanese children twenty three years apart: Salva during the Sudan civil war in 1985 and Nya during the Dafur conflict in 2008. They are told in alternating narratives.
It is 1985 and eleven-year-old Salva Mawier Dut Ariik belongs to the Dinka tribe and lives in the village of Loun-Ariik. His family includes his mother and his father who owns many cattle and is the village's judge. He has a younger brother Kuol and two older brothers Ariik and ring who have started school before him. They began to attend when they were ten years old. His sisters, Akit and Agnath do not attend school but are learning how to keep the house from their mother. Salva and his brothers as well as his father's sons from hhis other wives, were responsible for walking their cattle to the water holes.
Salva could only attend school during the rainy season when his family remained in the village. In the dry season, the family moved away. On this day in school Salva is thinking about this while the teacher is talking about the Arabic language - the official language of the Sudanese government in the north. Suddenly Salva's memories are cut off by the sound of gunfire. The war that has been raging in the south for the past two years has come to his village. The northern part of Sudan is mostly Muslim and they wanted all of the country to be Muslim. But the people in the south are of varying religions and did not want to convert to Islam. They began to fight for independence from northern Sudan.
Salva's teacher tells his students not to run home but to run into the bush which is what Salva does. There are many people in the bush but only around a dozen from his village of Loun-Ariik and no one from his family. The next day Salva and the other refugees walk into a rebel camp where they are sorted into groups. Salva is placed into a group of women and children as he is too young to fight. After walkint to a farm and spending the night in the barn, Salva awakens to find himself alone. He stays on the farm for four days helping the elderly woman but when she decides to leave, she tells him he cannot come with her.
When another group of Dinka arrive at the farm, they reluctantly agree to take Salva with them. For a week Salva walks with this group, who are joined by another Dinka group. They sleep on the ground and are hungry, but find a beehive and eat its honey and honeycomb. A few weeks later, as their group grows, Salva makes a friend in a boy named Marial who speaks Dinka with an accent. He tells Salva that they are walking east to Ethiopia. Salva has now been walking for a month and his group is now in the land of the Atuot people who are known to Salva's people as "people of the lion". This is because the area is noted for the fierce lions who hunt antelope. gnu and wildebeest.
Unexpectedly, Salva finds his father's younger brother, his Uncle Jewiir. He was in the army and has a rifle. Several days later, Marial is taken by a lion during the night. When Salva's group reach the Nile, he helps with the building of papyrus reed boats so they can cross the wide river. Salva and his uncle make it across the river and prepare to walk across the Akobo desert. It takes them three days to cross the desert, with his Uncle Jewiir encouraging Salva each day. His uncle tells him that it is unlikely many people from his village survived the attack and informs Salva that he with not stay at the refugee camp in Ethopia but will return to Sudan to fight. Sadly, Salva's uncle is murdered by a gang of men who set upon the group, robbing them at the edge of the desert.
The deaths of Marial and his uncle make Salva determined to survive. In the Itang refugee camp, Salva is separated from the people he journeyed with and placed with other children. This was not to be the end of Slava's journey however. He remained at the refugee camp for six years until 1991 when the Ethiopian government was near collapse. He and the other refugees were forced at gunpoint by soldiers into the treacherous, crocodile-infested waters of the Gilo River. From there, seventeen-year-old Salva led over a thousand boys south on a walk that took them a year and a half, to another refugee camp in Kenya. After several stays in refugee camps over the next few years, Salva was finally adopted by an American family and taken to live in Rochester, New York. He learned that he was considered one of the "Lost Boys", boys who had wandered through Sudan for months and years after having lost their families, with no one to care for them.
In Rochester, N.Y. Salva learned English, and eventually after six years was in college studying business. He knew that some day he would like to return to Sudan and help his people but he was not sure how. Then one day Salva received an email from a distant cousin whom he did barely know. The email revealed that his father was alive and in a remote clinic in southern Sudan recovering from stomach surgery. This discovery sets in motion a series of events that will impact the people of Sudan years later.
Salva's narrative alternates with fictional narrative of eleven-year-old Nya who lives in southern Sudan in 2008. Nya is carring an empty container to fill with water from the pond. It is surrounded by women and girls doing the same as well as herds of cattle brought to drink there. Nya drinks a few gourds of the muddy, brown water, fills her container and begins the journey home with it balanced on her head. After eating boiled sorghum with milk, Nya takes her five-year-old sister, Akeer with her on a second trip to the pond for more water. She will make these twice daily trips for seven month. When the pond dries up they move to a camp near a large lake during the five months of the dry season. They do not stay at the lake for the rest of the year because her tribe, the Nuer and the rival Dinka tribe fight over the land near the lake. Nya's mother worried whenever her father and older brother Dep went out to hunt, that they might be hurt or killed in a confrontation with the Dinka. The lake also dried up but Nya was always able to dig into the wet clay around the lake to get water, However, this often took up most of the day.
Nya's sister Akeer becomes very ill and her parents decide to take her to a clinic where she receives medicine. This makes Akeer well but the doctors tell Nya's parents that her illness is from the water. They are told they must boil the water before they drink it but Nya knows this is not possible. They get so little water from the lake that it isn't possible to boil it before drinking.
When they return to their village, several men arrive and ask the village chief where they get their water. Afterwards the men go out and examine two nearby trees and tell the chief that halfway between the two trees is where they will find water. After they leave, the villagers work to clear the area between the two trees of shrubs and brush. Nya and many of the villagers cannot understand why the two men believe they will find water at this location.
In 2009, the men return, this time with what Nya calle an "iron giraffe". It is a machine for drilling wells. For three days they use this machine to drill a well for the village. For Nya it will not only mean no more long walks to water but a very different way of life with new possibilities.
Discussion
A Long Walk To Water offers young readers two stories of Sudan, that span twenty-four years, from 1985 to 2009. The main narrative is based on the real life of Salva Dut who was born in the village of Luon-Ariik, in Tonj County, in Southern Sudan. It alternates with a second, shorter narrative of a young girl named Nya who represents the people of Sudan at this time. It is a story of war, loss, separation, perseverance and hope.
Sudan, the largest country in Africa, was beset by civil war beginning in 1983. This war was actually a continuation of the First Sudanese Civil War that occurred from 1955 to 1972. Sudan had been a British colony that was divided into two regions: the north which was considered similar to Arabic speaking Egypt and the south which had more in common with countries like Kenya and Uganda. Sudan was yet another case where British rule exacerbated ethnic, tribal and linguistic division within the Sudanese. In 1946 the British decided to combine the two regions, making the north responsible for the administration of the colony in both the north and the south. Arabic became the lanugage of the Sudan administration in the south. This caused resentment among the southern Sudanese who spoke English and were largely kept out of the administration of the colony. When independence from Britain was granted in 1953, the southern Sudanese had not been allowed to participate in the process and the administration of both north and south was moved to Khartoum. This set the stage for the first civil war.
The Second Sudanese Civil War occcurred from 1983 to 2005 and saw the displacement of millions of south Sudanese and these deaths of over two million people. Southern Sudan which is made up of mostly Christians, was granted autonomy in 2005.
Salva Mawien Dut Ariik is the voice of Sudan's recent past, enduring a breathless, fearful flight from school near his village of Loan-Ariik, in the wake of fighting in 1985. Separated from his family, Salva flees into the bush and endures a journey through miles of wilderness in southern Sudan to a refugee camp in Egypt. He spends the rest of his youth and early adulthood in various refugee camps in Kenya. His journey is shown on a map that is included in the front of the novel. Eventually Salva is selected to emigrate to Rochester, New York where he is taken in by Chris and Louise Moore and their family. He is one of the Lost Boys - boys who had lost their homes and families because of the war and had wandered about for many months or years. With the loving support of the Moore family, Salva gets an education and eventually is able to return to Sudan to help his country.
Salva Dut is a study in perseverance and determination. The death of both his friend Marial and his Uncle Jewiir make him determined to survive. He must persevere. Finding himself utterly alone with the loss of his entire family and witnessing the murder of his uncle, Salva struggles to go on but knows he must. "I am alone now. I am all that is left of my family...How can I go on without them? But how can I not go on? They would want me to survive...to grow up and make something of my life...to honor their memories." Remembering how his uncle helped him to look at one thing at a time in the desert, Salva believes this is what he must do now. "I need only to get through the rest of this day, he told himself. This day and no other."
This determination to survive helps Salva years later when he and the other refugees are forced into the Gilo River. In Sudan, as Salva leads a group of over a thousand boys to safety in Kenya he thinks, "I will get us safely to Kenya...No matter how hard it is." Salva was to remain in the refugee camp Ifo for years but during that time he pushed himself to learn English. As refugees were being adopted by families in the United States, Salva tried to balance his hope that he too might be allowed to go there.
After years in America, Salva is reunited with his father, nineteen years after he last saw him. His father, desperately sick from guinea worms he had from years of drinking contaminated water, had needed surgery to repair his damaged digestive system. His father's illness gave Salva the idea of how he could help his mother country of Sudan - and that was to dig water wells. But Salva did not just dig these wells for his Dinka people. He also had wells drilled for the Nuer tribe - considered an enemy of the Dinka people - as well.
Set against Salva's narrative is that of a young Nya who has to walk every day for miles to get dirty water for her family. Her narrative tells just how difficult life is for the people of southern Sudan who must spend most of their day looking for water - any water just to survive. " Home for just long enough to eat, Nya would not make her second trip to the pong. To the pond and back --to the pond and back --nearly a full day of walking altogether. This was Nya's daily routine seven months of the year. Daily. Every single day."
Nya's story also portrays the consequences of life without clean water when her little sister Akeer sickens. "Nya knew many people who suffered from the same illness. First cramps and stomachache, then diarrhea. Sometimes fever, too. Most of the adults and older children who fell ill recovered at least enough to work again, although they might continue to suff on and off for years.
For the elderly and for small children, the illness could be dangerous. Unable to hold anything in their systems, many of them starved to death, even with food right in front of them."
The drilling of a water well by Salva's organization offered new opportunities for Nya's village in ways that she never imagined. Her long walk to water was over. Clean water meant that Nya's days were free for learning at the new school that was being built. With an education, Nya can work to further improve life for her people and her quality of life will improve beyond just subsistence. "Next year there would be a marketplace where the villagers could sell and buy vegetables and chickens and other goods. There was even talk of a clinic someday --- a medical clinic, so they wouldn't have to walk so far to get help, as they had to when Akeer was ill."
The other thing the well brought was the potential for peace between the Dinka and Nuer tribes who had been at war for centuries. The well meant that disputes over limited resources like water would no longer be an issue. No one was to be denied access to the water. It belonged to everyone.
A Long Walk To Water is a short novel that allows young readers to explore the many issues countries in Africa face: conflicts between various tribes, war, the lingering effects of colonialism, conflicts over resources, and how one person can change the lives of millions.
Linda Sue Park is the duaghter of Korean immigrants and was born in Urbana, Illinois. A Stanford graduate in English, she began writing as a young child and published her first children's book in 1999.
Book Details:
A Long Walk To Water by Linda Sue Park
New York: Clarion Books 2010
121pp.
