go.” That thought and the loss of our friends and relatives at the Gilo haunted us. It was another darkness we had to live with. We felt hopeless. We began to trade the few clothes we had brought with us to the Anyuak for food. They would come to town and bring corn and millet, sorghum, and beans and take the T-shirts or other clothes the UN had given us in exchange. Maybe a T-shirt would be worth two cups of maize. Some people sold all the clothes they had and were left naked and starving. I

began coming to Kakuma. They represented social service agencies in the United States and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. They began screening Lost Boys to see whether they had living relatives in Africa, and whether they had fought in the war. In either of these cases, you were not eligible for their program. About 3,600 Sudanese passed the interviews and began being processed for relocation to America. One American interviewer who spent a year screening refugees at Kakuma

hit the women and children the hardest, so the villagers rejected that choice. Some argued in favor of flood. They knew the Dinka could survive because they could catch fish as the swamps filled with water. But floods meant our precious cows would die, so the villagers rejected that choice too. Most of the people in my village finally decided that the man had chosen wisely, but everyone kept talking about what the tortoise had said. A month or two later, a crow landed on the shoulder of an old

burned the countryside and airplanes strafed and bombed the villages, refugees moved south. Some came to Duk Payuel, and that is how I came to share a hut with strangers. My parents and other adults slept on the ground outside. I was having trouble sleeping, so I heard clearly the whine or whistle as it grew louder. Then I heard more sounds just like the first. A chorus of shrieks descended toward our village. Boom! Boom! Boom! Explosions shook the earth. I heard a huge crackling sound like

where we went. Martha I was a little girl, not even six years old, when the happy days with my family in Juba disappeared forever. It all started when my mother and my little sister and I left our home and went to stay with my grandmother and my aunt’s family. They lived in a farming and cattle-raising village in the countryside. But it wasn’t really my home, and I got scared when my mother left us there and went back to Juba. When she returned to us, she brought a lot of our belongings with