God Grew Tired of Us by John Bul Dau

Author:John Bul Dau
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: National Geographic Society
Published: 2007-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

John Dau, second from right, drinks porridge with

his best friends after school in 1999.

The UN trucks brought corn, oil, and bags of lentils to three distribution centers at Kakuma. Once, in 1994, they brought dates, the sweetest fruit of the desert. They unloaded the food in huge buildings inside a fence.

We refugees queued up to get our rations. The camp caretakers issued everyone a food card, which looked something like a driver’s license. Each boy had to be responsible for getting his own food, but sometimes boys would loan me their cards, so I could pick up their rations along with my own and save them a trip to the distribution center. Each card had the numbers 1 through 12 printed along its edge. As I received my ration, a caretaker cut off the number corresponding to that particular distribution and pressed my finger in invisible ink. At the end of 192 days—16 days times 12 distributions—I got a new card. Some boys tried to cheat the system and go through the line twice with stolen cards, but their fingers glowed blue or purple when the invisible ink was exposed to ultraviolet light. The caretakers confiscated their stolen cards, and the Kenyans put them in jail.

Those were some of the rare times I saw the Kenyan police administering true justice. Most of the time, police officers abused the law to their own advantages. Camp policemen were Turkana. They sympathized with their fellow tribesmen, who raided our camp at night, and turned a deaf ear to our complaints. They got little pay and seldom had enough to eat themselves, so they shook down any Sudanese they caught during their patrols outside the camp. The Kenyan government declared that refugees could not leave the country, no doubt to promote civil relations with the Sudanese government, and tried to keep us from wandering outside Kakuma and making trouble with the natives.

I tried seven times to leave the camp and make my way back to Lokichokio. “Loki is good,” my friends said. “You can get sponsors there, and you can get someone to take you into their home in Kenya.” I had been living in Kakuma for a couple of years by that time. I wanted to get out of camp and into a real town, either in southern Sudan or with a sponsoring family in Kenya. The djellabas never took Nairus, in southern Sudan, and I would have loved to go there. Or maybe, I thought, I could join the SPLA or go looking for my family. All of those options seemed better than staying year after year in Kakuma. Twice, I actually made it into Lokichokio. I loitered there for a couple of days, trying to get news of the war and find a way to get over the border, but I never had any luck. The police caught me and took me back to Kakuma.

Kenyan police officers never seemed to help me and the other boys; they just wanted to rob us and get away with it.

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