He had been saying this every morning for weeks. Mornings were the time he worried most. Every morning, he said, he was leapt upon by the snarling hyenas of his many responsibilities.
— You think two more rooms will be enough? he asked me. I said it seemed like plenty.
— Whatever it is it won't seem like enough, he said. He could not believe they were coming.
— I can't believe they're coming here! To this rathole!
At that point I had been living in Kakuma, with Gop Chol, for almost three years. Gop was from Marial Bai, and had come to Kakuma by way of Narus and various other stopovers. Kakuma had been born with the arrival of ten thousand boys like me who had walked through the dark and dust, but the camp grew quickly, soon encompassing tens of thousands of Sudanese-families and portions of families, orphans, and after some time, also Rwandans, Ugandans, Somalis, even Egyptians.
After months of living in squat shelters like the ones we customarily built when first arriving at a camp, we eventually were given, by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, poles and tarpaulins and materials to build more presentable homes, and so we did. Eventually many boys like me moved in with families from our hometowns and regions, to share resources and duties and to keep alive the customs of our clans. As the camp grew to twenty thousand people, to forty thousand and upward, as it grew outward into the dry wind-strewn nothingness, and as the civil war continued unabated, the camp became more permanent, and many of those, like Gop, who first considered Kakuma a stopover until conditions improved in southern Sudan, now were sending for their families.
I said nothing to Gop about the prospect of bringing his wife and three daughters to such a place, but privately I questioned it. Kakuma was a terrible place for people to live, for children to grow. But he really did not have a choice. His youngest daughter had been diagnosed with a bone disease at the clinic in Nyamlell, east of Marial Bai, and the doctor there had arranged for her transfer to Lopiding Hospital-the more sophisticated clinic near Kakuma. Gop did not know precisely when the transfer would take place, and so spent an inordinate amount of time searching for information from anyone at Lokichoggio, anyone involved in medicine or refugee transfer in any way.
— Do you think they'll be happy here? Gop asked me.
— They'll be happy to be with you, I said.
— But this place…is this any kind of place to live?
I said nothing. Despite its flaws, from the beginning it was clear that this camp would be different from those at Pinyudo and Pochalla and Narus and everywhere else we had been. Kakuma was preplanned, operated from the start by the UN, and staffed almost entirely, at first, by Kenyans. This made for an orderly enough operation, but resentment festered from within and without. The Turkana, a herding people who had occupied the Kakuma District for a thousand years, were suddenly asked to share their land-to cede a thousand acres in an instant-with tens of thousands of Sudanese and, later, Somalis, with whom they shared few cultural similarities. The Turkana resented our presence, and in turn the Sudanese resented the Kenyans, who seemed to have seized every paying job available at the camp, performing and being compensated for tasks that we Sudanese were more than capable of in Pinyudo. In turn, the Kenyans, in their less charitable moments, thought of the Sudanese as leeches, who did little more than eat and defecate and complain when things didn't go as desired. Somewhere in there were a handful of aid workers from Europe, the United Kingdom, Japan, and the United States, all of whom were careful to defer to the Africans, and who cleared out when the camp erupted into temporary chaos. This did not happen too often, but with so many nationalities represented, so many tribes and so little food and so great the volume and variety of suffering, conflict was inevitable.
What was life in Kakuma? Was it life? There was debate about this. On the one hand, we were alive, which meant that we were living a life, that we were eating and could enjoy friendships and learning and could love. But we were nowhere. Kakuma was nowhere. Kakuma was, we were first told, the Kenyan word for nowhere. No matter the meaning of the word, the place was not a place. It was a kind of purgatory, more so than was Pinyudo, which at least had a constant river, and in other ways resembled the southern Sudan we had left. But Kakuma was hotter, windier, far more arid. There was little in the way of grass or trees in that land; there were no forests to scavenge for materials; there was nothing for miles, it seemed, so we became dependent on the UN for everything.
Early in my days at the camp, Moses again appeared in and departed from my life. When Kakuma was still being shaped, I would take daily walks around its perimeter, to see who had made it and who had not. I saw arguments between the Sudanese and Turkana, between European aid workers and Kenyans. I saw families being re-formed, new alliances forged, and even saw Commander Secret talking passionately to a group of boys just a few years older than me. I kept clear of him and any SPLA officers, for I knew their intentions. While walking the camp's borders in the first few weeks, I learned that Achor Achor had made it after all, and that three of the original Eleven were with him.
When I saw Moses, it was not very dramatic. Early one morning in the first months of Kakuma, as I stepped over a group of young men sleeping, sharing one long blanket, their feet and heads exposed, I simply saw him. Moses. With another boy our age, he was attempting to cook some asida in a pan, over a fire in a small can. He saw me just as I saw him.
— Moses! I yelled.
— Shh! he hissed, and came to me quickly.
He turned me away from his companion and we took a walk around the perimeter of the camp.
— Don't call me Moses here, he said. Like many others at the camp, he had changed his name; in his case, it was to avoid any SPLA commanders who might be looking for him.
He was a different boy than the last time I had seen him. He had grown many inches, was built like an ox, and his forehead seemed more stern and severe-the forehead of a man. But in essential ways, in his wide crooked smile and bright smiling eyes, he was still very much Moses. He wanted immediately to tell me about his time as a soldier, and he did so with the sort of breathless excitement one might use in describing a particularly attractive girl.
— No, no, I wasn't a fighter. I never fought. I only trained, he said, answering my first question. I was greatly relieved.
— But the training! Achak, it was so different than the life here, than in Pinyudo. It was so hard. Here we have to worry about food and insects and the wind, but there they were trying to kill me! I'm sure they were trying to kill me. They killed boys there.
— They shot them?
— No, no. I don't think so.
— Not like Pinyudo, the prisoners?
— No, not like that. No bullets, they just drove them to their deaths. So many boys. They beat them, ran them into the ground, chased them back to Heaven.
We walked past a small tent, inside of which a white photographer was taking pictures of a Sudanese mother and her emaciated child.
— Did you get to shoot a gun? I asked.
— I did. That was a good day. Have you shot a gun? I told him I had not.
— It was a good day when they gave us the guns, the Kalashnikovs. We had waited so long, and finally they had us shoot at targets. Oh man, the guns hurt! They shoot you while you're shooting the targets! They call it kickback. My shoulder is sore right now, Achak.
— Which shoulder?
He indicated his right shoulder, and I punched it.
— Don't!
I did it again. This was hard to resist.