CHAPTER FOUR

The Belgian, Bombs, and the Boy

March 1984-November 1990

 

Yambio Town

How happy Arketa had been between March 1983 and March 1984. As a boss’s wife, she lived in a brick house rather than a tukul. As was common in her culture, she spent little time with her husband. Sudanese men lived mostly in an exclusively male world. Even Arketa’s house provided a room to which Joseph retreated to escape women’s activities. As was customary, Arketa busied herself with her mother-in-law who, fortunately, loved Arketa and fawned over the December-born boy, Elario, the only child of her only child.  In the union of the Taban and Zambakari families the marriage arrangers had done well.

 

Arketa doesn’t remember just which day it was, whether before or after her twentieth birthday, when the door had pushed open, when teak tables and teacups crashed across the floor, when Joseph’s blood spewed like river water from an elephant’s trunk. Only that on that day in March 1984, men and fear seized her body and mind. 

 

Within hours of her mother rescuing her, Arketa was settled in the relative safety of Saura village. Her father built a sleeping tukul and kitchen for her in the family compound. Arketa squared her shoulders against sorrow and sealed her heart shut. She pitched in with the family chores. She ground cassava flour between stones, bearing down with the weight of her sorrow. She pounded yam. She carried water from the river on her head and Elario on her chest. She tended fires. At the earliest opportunity, she tossed her hated Nagero pajama into the flames. She made brooms, more than the whole compound of dirt floors required butsheneeded to break into the jungle, she needed to rip up thick grass stems, strangle them together and angrily wind two strands of plant fiber round and round five times as she had been taught as a child, securing the top. She jerked in a final knot and swallowed the knot in her throat. Somewhere between Nagero and Saura, somewhere between rapes and running, Arketa lost the sense of ordinary, maybe even part of her mind. 

 

After the death of her husband she wasn’t thinking clearly, she knew that. She hated the looks of concern villagers cast her direction. Arketa covered her pain with incessant chatter and unnecessarily loud laughter as if nothing unpleasant had happened to her. In the daytime Arketa appeared carefree, even detached. Her mother worried. She chided, “You are not yourself. You are not even thinking of those things that happened.” Arketa ignored concerns but at night she curled her body around her broken heart, knees to chest and hands over her mouth to muffle moans. Only at night did fear rule. Only at night, for months on end, did Nagero’s scattershot violence assail her mind. 

 

The violence surrounding Joseph’s death left Arketa in shock but one year of responsibility to a man chosen for her and so quickly taken from her was not enough to create grief. Her husband was a good man. He fathered her son. Violence was the culprit and now, as months and seasons stretched away from that horrible March day, Arketa’s awareness of need, of want, grew strong. She needed to be young, to be footloose, to be happy, to have a man with her by choice. She wanted a woman’s experience on her own terms. Work would help, she was sure. She took a midwifery job seven miles away in Yambio, capital of West Equatoria state. Her father provided his brick house there, the one with three bedrooms and a zinc roof. At the hospital, she met and served alongside both Sudanese and European doctors and nurses who became new friends. 

 

°  °  °

 

The Belgian doctor was older than Arketa, much older. His beard was already white. He walked fast, laughed easily, and god knows, his French accented voice was utterly charming. He loved the people of South Sudan and he respected the well-known Zambakari family. He was smitten by twenty-year-old Arketa—lithe but stunningly strong. Her laugher, her playfulness, captured him. His hilarious attempts at speaking Zande, the language of the largest local tribe, attracted her friendship. While he worked on a cure for sleeping sickness, she worked on his language skills, cleverly tripping him up by mixing in Balanda Viri, Balanda Bor, French and Arabic with the language he meant to learn—Zande. 

 

The doctor was what she needed. Not love, not marriage. Those things no longer interested her. This white bearded man was intelligent and charming and he brought her pleasure. Like Arketa, he loved work. Probably he was married, but he didn’t wear a ring, and the subject didn’t come up. He did research at a large hospital some miles away but his weekends were shared with Arketa in Yambio. 

 

Until she was pregnant with his child, she hadn’t mentioned him to her parents. Not that she couldn’t—once a respected girl’s virginity was rightly taken in marriage, once she was widowed or divorced a woman’s sexual behavior didn’t attract attention. The senior Zambakaris frequently entertained European and British white people so while they were surprised that Arketa’s friend was older and white, they didn’t object. Nor did they object to the doctor’s suggestion that he and Arketa marry—not in the church but by local tradition. Arketa nixed the idea—her heart wasn’t in it. The doctor was a European serving in a very unsettled Sudan. His presence was tenuous. Better,she thought, not to marry but to stay, to grow my kids. Besides, he smoked. He drank the local beer too freely with his friends. She didn’t approve. For Arketa, these were reasons enough to maintain her independence. He was good to Elario, he was what she needed to keep fear at bay, but he was an outsider. Everyone knew that when the Sudanese government wished to wreak havoc on the south (which they regularly did), their first move was to kick out foreigners. Knowing the volatile conditions in Sudan, Arketa thrived in his company but said, No marriage.

 

This man knew her story. He recognized what she knew about herself, that something was missing now in her mind, in her heart. Few people saw it in her but he saw it in her eyes. He heard her cry out as she slept, even when she was not aware. He wanted her happy. He didn’t want her nervous. He bought her a Land-Cruiser and encouraged outings. As time passed and children arrived, he frequently piled the kids in the car and ran off to Saura to spend the weekend with grandparents while Arketa was free to enjoy the company of her friends. He differed from local Sudanese men by treating her as an equal, by respecting her work. He often offered advice, chucked her under the chin, and teasingly said, listen carefully to your elder, hoping somehow to prepare her against dangers rife in Sudan. Some advice, she took—she put a lock on doors of her house. But much, she ignored. He didn’t push. He knew the situation of her mind. 

            

“She needs distraction,” he told her parents, helping then understand the brokenness of her life. “Let her do what is good for her.” 

 

Together, the doctor and Arketa hosted barbeques for local Balanda friends, for visiting foreigners, for people launching off on Safari, for doctors or educators on tour in Sudan, even for the Americans serving at the large Yambio agricultural school. Nearly every weekend involved food, friends, and local beer. 

 

“One day, I will have to go,” the doctor warned. Rumors of encroaching violence wound through town like thread on lace-making bobbins. A pattern seemed to be forming but nothing was easy to pin down. “You will need to be strong, Arketa.” He could smell the increasing danger in the air of Sudan. He wanted her out. If she would just move to Nairobi he would provide an apartment. She would be safe. No, she said.Who understands the need we Sudanese have for family? No. She could not be alone in Nairobi. She could not be alone. 

 

In late 1987, the doctor was expelled from the country. Accused of helping the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army—southerners fighting against northern aggression—the man who had grown to love Elario, who had fathered two more babies with Arketa, was for the second time forced to leave them. Sometimes he was able to collect a suitcase, sometimes not. He always carried his passport. He knew the whims of Khartoum. Historically, once the government accomplished its violent aims in the south, foreigners could return. He counted on it. When he finally did return in 1989, Arketa was pregnant with her fourth child by a 

close friend, a Balanda singer of songs. The doctor won his family back and welcomed the new baby boy as if he were one of his own. For a while.

 

°  °  °

November  1990

Arketa’s brick house shuddered under the pounding of children’s feet. They ran, smacking each other and squealing with laughter. In a few weeks Elario would celebrate his seventh birthday. Five-year-old Christopher, ever the scholarly sort, tried to temper the chaos but four-year-old Nathalia squealed with a ‘bring it on!’ abandon. Nearly two, naked baby Timothy watched, bouncing on tippy-toes, encouraging mayhem by blabbering the few words his toddler’s tongue mastered.  Rain tapered off, tapping rather than pounding the zinc roof but humidity clung to the morning like a blanket over a sweating horse’s back. Arketa sang. Even under harsh conditions, still, this was a good day.

 

The recent condition of Sudan resembled the rowdiness of Arketa’s children. In 1985, a military coup deposed President Nimeiri. A push-and-shove crowd of contenders vying for power narrowed down to a civilian coalition with a membership that rolled over like wild pigs at the river’s edge. Who governed scarcely mattered to people of the south; the country’s black majority was utterly unrepresented in government. All council members were northerners committed to an Arabized nation and to the establishment of Sharia law throughout the land. Meanwhile, Sudan’s expanding second civil war declared in 1983 slid through the country like hot lava seeking lower ground. Slowly, menacingly, it rolled to the country’s southwest corner, toward Yambio and Saura, consuming citizens and towns in the velocity of its flow. 

            

In 1989, a military junta under the leadership of General Omar Hassan al-Bashir quashed the government’s ruling council. Dark skinned as a moonless night, Bashir described himself as akhdar—brownish. Northerners, no matter how African black, considered themselves “not black.” Nor were they African. Some northerners were Arab but all preferred to be considered Arab. They called their brothers and sisters of the south, African,yes. South Sudanese were African blacks—aswad—the word for slave, yes. Bashir aimed to Arabize and Islamize the whole of the country, both the Muslim north and the Christian south. Upon gaining power, he quickly vowed “to purge from our ranks the renegades and hirelings, enemies of the people and enemies of the armed forces . . . Anyone who betrays the nation does not deserved the honour of living.”

            

Under this vow, some two million of his people, nearly all aswad,were labeled betrayers and lost their lives. Tens of thousands were internally displaced and at least as many ran to other countries. In 1989, conditions in South Sudan shifted from Nimeiri-bad to Bashir-brutal. Still in power at the time of this writing, Bashir is wanted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague on multiple counts of war crimes; crimes against humanity, and the crime of genocide. 

 

°  °  °

 

Typically, in November, adults in Yambio fussed about weather. This complaining was as traditional as morning tea. In this final, fierce month of the rainy season, Savannah grass, as tall and supple as a ten year old, now lay heavy on its side—soppy, slippery, and stunned into submission by fierce rains, hailstorms, and high winds. Frogs, some the size of feral cats, settled in deep puddles croaking the waa, waaa, waathat children loved mimicking. Tree branches bent under the weight of wind and rain. In November, skinny Arketa yielded to reality, walked barefoot to the hospital for work, tarp plastic tented over her head and mud oozing between her toes. She complained with the best of them. 

 

In November 1990, Yambio was abuzz, but not with the usual fuss about weather. Rumors of violence volleyed from tukul to tukul. Reports of killings, of village burnings, kidnappings, and mutilations paralyzed people. Adults discussed running, but to where? More and more frequently, as days passed, as rains pounded, dread spread among the people. Fear owned the place. Men and women abandoned field preparation. Women no longer strolled in pairs to river’s edge for water or washings but rushed to the river in groups, leaving children behind in the care of elders. Hunting ceased. Increasingly, the forests belonged to war. Arketa refused to travel to outlying areas to deliver babies, restricting her work to the hospital. The jungle and its road belonged to warfare. 

 

One Thursday or Friday—she can’t remember which—the announcement she feared came over the radio: “All Foreigners, LEAVE!” She knew the drill. She knew she might or might not see the doctor before he was forced to leave.

 

Medical people were ordered out so quickly this time that the government sent a special small plane to fetch the doctor from his workplace, flew him to Yambio and transferred him to a plane moving foreigners out of South Sudan. Arketa tried to remember—was this the third time since she had been with him? The fourth? What she knew for sure was what she heard on the radio. Bashir said, “I don’t want to see”—what we call Muzugu, the white person—“I don’t want to see dez people again. Dey are dah ones behind the SPLA.” Reason enough for a man meaning to radicalize his nation. “Dat was the speaking among dah people of Yambio about doz things.  

 

°  °  °

Early Sunday morning the town loudspeakers blasted the warning, “Stay Home! Don’t get out of your houses.” Anxious talk rattled people’s minds. Gunshots rang out from the forest, military lorries rumbled through town cutting ruts deep enough to bathe in. Word spread about missing men. 

 

When, the foreigners were flown out, some local people read the handwriting on the wall and headed for Zaire, some moved to villages east. Over the weekend, sounds of shelling intensified. By Saturday afternoon, Arketa questioned her choice to stay in Yambio. But, where could she go?

            

It’s like jumping into dah cold river, she reasoned. Dah first time, you think, ‘Oh, it’s bad!’ Den, you jump again and dah water don’t feel so cold. You get used to it. The guns, the noise of fighting, came near. Oh, we should go,” she thought. Then the noise stopped and she thought, It’s not so bad. Arketa chose to stay in her safe home, her brick house with locks on the doors, the house with a strong zinc roof and familiar things. 

 

If Arketa heard the bird that goes “Glick, Glick, Glick,” the bird that signaled the coming of death, she paid no attention. All Saturday night rain drummed on the zinc roof. She slept fitfully. At some ungodly and unseasonably warm hour, she carried the sleeping children into her room and arranged them with light covers on the cool concrete floor. She stumbled back to her sleeping mat hoping their nearness might relieve her mounting fears. 

 

By Sunday morning the sky cleared. A bright sun delivered greater warmth and Arketa shook off the night’s terrors. Early that particular November 1990 morning when the ‘All Clear’ siren sounded, every child under Arketa’s care marched down the road with their mother to Saint Mary’s Church for morning mass. Every Sunday, Father John gave thanks for yet another day of safety. He prayed for that week’s dead, blessed the people, and released them to God. Arketa prayed for the doctor and prayed for his baby now forming in her belly. 

 

She and the children changed from church clothes before Arketa moved to the detached kitchen where she began work on the one main meal of the day and as her tribe of children dashed about, Arketa yelled, “Stay close!” hoping to keep them nearby. The children ran riot. Had the doctor been there, he would have lifted baby Timothy from the floor, and been the boy’s transportation in the train of children’s tramping feet. But, the doctor was gone. 

 

           ° °  °

 

In a matter of weeks, tall, lean Elario, the boy kicking a ball by the time he was two, would be seven-years-old. He had choices. He could run around with his siblings in the small compound where Christopher and Nathalia were ready to try shimmying up a banana tree. Or, as most kids did, they offered to throw stones at mangos hanging by the hundreds on compound trees. But, not today for Elario. His thoughts centered on the playground a half-mile away at Saint Mary’s church, the church of his baptism and confirmation, the church of today’s blessing. His thoughts were on soccer. 

 

Elario reasoned that the field was close enough that he could go and still obey his mom. Cross the muddy dirt road at the front of the compound, cut through the stalls of the central market, wave polite greetings to neighbors along the way, jog a few familiar meters north along a row of mango trees, avoid the forest and he was there. Sunday morning, after church but before lunch, Elario fetched his soccer ball and headed off on calloused bare feet to meet friends for the one game worth playing.

            

As Elario ran, Arketa hummed popular Sudanese songs, prepared food, and kept a safe space between toddling Timothy and the charcoal cooking-stove by deftly extending her foot to push him back. As the older children squealed and skirted their mom’s instructions, violence approached Yambio. No longer just raids at the outskirts by armed horsemen, or swift abductions in the jungle. No longer the quiet knife, or occasional skirmish with guns. On this November Sunday, swiftly and unexpectedly, airplanes swept over town.Arketa “didn’t remember perfect,” the number of planes. 

 

“It is like, when dah bombs are popping and your ears cannot hear, you forget too much. Yeah.”  

 

At the first sound from the sky Arketa dropped the large wooden ladle into the cooking pot, grabbed the baby and ran out of her house. One plane was low enough for her to read the Arabic markings on it. Townspeople shot from houses, all looking up, pointing, easily reading the planes’ markings and screaming out in recognition, yelling to each other, “From Iran! The planes are from Iran!” 

 

“Dis was dah good friend of Bashir, Iran’s president, helping to destroy dah south!” 

 

Arketa brooks no question on the airplanes’ place of origin. Everyone saw it. It was well known in Sudan, this cooperation between leaders bent on violence against their own people; Bashir’s quid pro quo relationship with Iran. In 1991, during an official visit to Khartoum, Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani praised the revolutions occurring in his country and Sudan. They would, he affirmed, “benefit the entire Islamic world.”

 

Werethere three planes? Arketa wasn’t sure. More? They crisscrossed the sky, firing. “Oh, god! Dah whistling sound, down, down, before ‘BOOM!’Den, Boom! Boom!”Yambio was being destroyed.  Planes, turning, returning, again and again. The ground jerked under her feet with each sound. She was screaming for all the children, screaming for Elario, running, capturing kids, running to the field. She was pushing Christopher and Nathalia ahead of her as she ran to find Elario. As she ran she secured baby Tim-o-tee, to her back. 

 

“Everybody was running like dah lion was loose on dah town. My mind will never forget it.”

                        

“Elario!” Arketa screamed. 

 

BOOM! BOOM!Glick! Glick! Glick! But it wasn’t the sound of the bird warning of death, it was the sound of bullets striking as the planes strafed zinc roofs, and stones, and the bodies of terrified citizens. The ground leapt in its own shock, shuddered, and surrendered itself to destruction. Arketa jumped across small puddles in the road, and tried a shortcut leading to the church but “dah bombs was heavy. Dah smoke coming up, like when you burn something? Dah smoke is coming up. You cannot push dah children dahr, you cannot see in it.

            

“When dah bombing began in Yambio, what was in your hand was what you had; was all you had. You will leave everything. You are in slippers? You have slippers. Your feet have no shoes? Your shoes will stay to be bombed. If rice is cooking, dah rice will stay behind. People was screaming, searching for family. Everyone was running to dah deep forest, one by one.” 

            

Doors stood open, charcoal irons burned on the board draped with a skirt half-pressed, food cooked untended, and people ran, half or fully-clothed. The people of Yambio, the people of the Zambakari family, fled to the forest, fled fire from the sky and bullets from guns, fled soldiers claiming the roads, crazy with the need to kill. 

            

° °  °

 

Yambio to Saura

Neighbors of twenty-six-year-old Arketa pulled her from her search for Elario, ordering her to leave Yambio. If he was alive, they yelled, someone would bring him along. Timothy was the toddler hitched to her back or hiked to her hip as she ran with hundreds of others into the region of wild animals and sunless paths. Sarai was the Belgian’s baby, three or four weeks in Arketa’s womb. At three and five years old, Nathalia and Christopher scrambled for hands to hold, whether of mom, of neighbors, or strangers. The children were lifted, passed around, or dragged along on that first day of what became refugee existence.

 

The border of Congo was very close to Yambio and many people ran toward it. Arketa, however, aimed to reach her parents compound in Saura, seven miles away, seven miles closer to the jungle. For some time, every week, family members had met to evaluate the situation, to determine just what to do if war reached them. Best to meet in Saura,they agreed. Everyone heard stories about people who didn’t plan, like in Eastern Equatoria where a woman of Torit ran, leaving kids of two months and one of one year by themselves. Dis makes people in South Sudan too smart, makes dem ready to arrange what to do. Yeah.  

            

For years, even before she went off to midwifery school, Arketa heard the advice, ‘If der is trouble where you are? People of Western Equatoria run to dah border of Central African Republic. If you see dah people of CAR, call out to dem in French, ‘Soudanais! Sudanese!’Dey will tell you about dah place purchased by the U.N. for refugees. M’boki. Go dehr.’ Yeah, we know where to run. And? When I was very little, in a time of trouble my mom and daddy ran for a short time with dah kids to Central African Republic, close to M’boki. Yeah. Dey know about it. But, it isn’t easy, getting dehr.”

 

°  °  °

People once came from around the world to beautiful Yambio for Sudanese safaris, for sights seen from the safety of lorries or jeeps. No foreigners now. The jungle was full of anger from the unannounced presence of crazed Africans. Birds and monkeys scolded. Bombs exploded. Lions, leopards, baboons, elephants, poisonous snakes—all were on alert. Some, put off by the invasion, made a meal of invaders. Arketa saw it, heard about it, ran from it. 

 

“People was running from dah forest to dah road, to dah bush, to dah road, back into dah deep forest. Lots of kids was running even with no family. Running, den hiding, not moving for fear of dah militia, for fear of the lion. The bombs follow alllll the open places.”

 

Arketa knew better than to follow the roads. People in roads, people on open paths, people fearing the forest, those people were followed by the planes. Shooting. 

 

“We cannot be in dah open places. No. I don’t know how to describe it. Everything you had yesterday? Today was gone. Everyone who was with you yesterday? Today, dey can be gone.”

 

By mid-day Sunday, from Yambio north to N’zara, long-range bombs destroyed both land and hope. Arketa’s heart screamed out as she ran, demanding that she return for Elario. Her flip-flopped feet and a phalanx of friends forced her forward. The impact of bombs and shells had her ears ringing inside her head louder that the screams of hundreds of people running around her. Her children stumbled. They cried out, “I cannot hear, Momma! I cannot hear!”Still, they ran. 

            

Halfway between Yambio and N’zara, a narrow dirt road ruts its way along the edge of Saura but people running in the road were among the early dead. A general sense of direction and a powerful sense of desperation pushed Arketa deep into the forest. Was this the tree she passed thirty minutes before? This stream—can it be the one that parallels the road? The gunfire she heard, the occasional sound of a lorry, assured her that she was moving rightly. By the time she reached her parents compound, sunlight had slipped low, shattered slices of light between the weave of branches and vines. She began calling out. Her parents ran out when they heard her voice. 

            

Fetching Timothy from Arketa’s back, her mom looked over the arriving crew and asked, “Where’s Elario?”

            

“I don’t have him.”

            

“We have to wait for him,” said her father. Exhausted, weeping, Arketa moved toward the main tukul.

            

“Not in the compound,” her father said, catching her arm. They would stay just outside, a bit to the edge of the forest. Arketa entered the compound only long enough to collect water and food for her children. 

            

“We will sleep away from here tonight and wait one more day, to see if Elario is coming,” her father said. “Saura is now too dangerous. Dah compound is a target.” Later, without the usual evening fire, Arketa lay on her back and watched planes coming in to bomb villages. Darkness fell. The cries of people in the forest rose above the sound of rain.

 

“Elario?” Her query was frequent. It was soft. It was dangerous to speak it but she had to. “Elario? Is dat you?” There was no sleep.

 

°  °  °

 

“We are not going to make it here,” Arketa’s father said the next morning. “You go ahead. Start walking. I’ll wait. Maybe Elario will make it because people are still coming.” 

 

He gave directions for reaching N’zara through the jungle. Not the road, no. People using the road were easy prey for strafing from the air or soldiers on foot. It could be some days before anyone felt safe to use a road or approach a village. The family packed dried cassava bread, peanut butter, fruit and dried meats in small bags for each to carry. Leaning on his walking stick, John Bazia Zambakari bade his family to go, promising to catch up. He waited half that day and when Elario did not arrive, John walked to Yambio.

 

“Because dah holidays was coming, my two brothers and my sisters, Angelina and Teresa, was already in Saura, visiting, bringing some, but not all, of dahr family. All of us crossed from Saura, not to the road but to the left-side-hand, to paths through dah forest. N’zara was seven miles more by dah road but we are not using dah road.”

            

“We was hurrying dah way of N’zara. And? Ah! Dah people of N’zara was running away from it. You see? No one really knows where to go. Everyone is trying to miss dah bullets but dah bullets was . . . was what?” she asked. “Was everywhere. Doz people from N’zara was going to Yambio!” 

 

No laughter followed this memory. No laughter, only the ‘deep breethe’ that Arketa manages when hardship requires response.

            

“Something happens to people when bombs are falling. We are like chickens running from dah fox, all noisy and feathers flying, nowhere safe to go. Dah chicks is scattering. People was not really focusing. And? You are not getting tired! Not for a long time did we stop even to let dah children sleep.”

            

            

Arketa’s father met the family just beyond the destruction of N’zara’s cotton textile factory, close to the bombed offices of the sugar cane processing plant and the burning coffee fields. He came with heavy news. Elario was not found. 

 

He arrived as the family reached the N’zara River. “We collect him to start running. Not by using the bridge, no.” 

 

No one was risking the bridge. Rather, hundreds of people plunged into the river behind the large cotton factory; plunged like schools of fish they rushed to a place where the water was “past dah knees, coming to your leg above. We swim. We carry dah children across the river. We know dah dangers of crocodiles but what can we do?” 

 

Arketa’s Yambio house and Saint Mary’s church where Elario had played was burning, her father reported. Half of Arketa’s house, the whole church—bombed to the ground. And, she adds, “Dah next day? You are again walking in dah deep, deep forest. Dehr is food growing along dah way – avocado, po-po, orange and banana, yeah. If you find dah stream? You drink it. Dah water in November was still running, clear. Dah rain still falling but dehr is no sun. In four or five hours, because dah forest is dark? You find yourself back to dah place where dah night before, you was sleeping on dah leaves. Dis is big confusion.”

 

It is about 125 miles from N’zara to Source Yubu, a one-day trip by car for anyone foolish enough to risk a car.

 

“Dah days between N’zara and Source Yubu ? Huhhh! One week on dah foot for us.”

 

°  °  °

Nzara to Source Yubu

“The Balanda don’t cut the skin.”

Arketa and I had not talked for a few days when I returned to Phoenix and we met. She carried me back into the war, to the loss of her son, Elario, to the night of sleeping on leaves across from the N’zara River, the need to keep children quiet for fear of government militia. She planted my feet firmly in the month of November 1990. 

 

“Dis story is very difficult. Nobody knows dis story, Barbara. Dah scars on my face, on my belly, my left leg are dah result of Muslim torture.” 

 

In a face-to-face visit, Arketa had me wandering in the dark, thick jungle which she calls forest. She drew me near to Source Yubu, also called Ri Yubu, a village close to the border of Central African Republic. Once she was satisfied that the setting was clear, she stopped speaking momentarily. Then, quietly said, “But dis happened not at N’zara, no. From N’zara, for the next days, we walk only in dah forest. Zaire . . . You know Zaire?”

 

“I do. It is now Democratic Republic of Congo.”

 

“Huhn.” She voiced her approval; I was where she needed me to be. “Zaire was close on dah left of us as we were running. Dah road to Yangiri and Tambura, to dah right-side-hand. But you know, we did not use dah roads.”

 

They walked through the bush toward Ezo, which was very close to the border of the Central African Republic. When they came across clusters of settled people, they were given fruit from the trees. 

            

“Dos people living dehr point and tell us, ‘dis way now.’ It was a week or more, our walking. At every stream we crossed, we drank deeply and washed dah children. We was going now from near Ezo to dah village of Source Yubu. From dehr, it is three miles to dah border of Central African Republic, to dah place for our calling in French, ‘Sudanais! Sudanais!’ In Central African Republic, we will walk on to M’boki which is dah place for Sudanese refugees. Dat is our hope.”

             

Nearly safe, they kept walking. They began seeing other groups of Sudanese, hundreds and hundreds of people moving closer to one another, moving toward Bombouti, Central African Republic. There in the forest, feeling further from danger, they risked conversations. They whispered news and rumors of deaths and desperation; they separated, and moved on as quietly as possible, ever fearful of government militia or South Sudanese rebels. The Zambakaris walked a mile and a half beyond Source Yubu. In one mile and a half they would reach the border of Central African Republic (CAR). 

 

A bit more than a mile to go, an hour-and-a-half from hope. Arketa and her family hung tightly to that hope as they walked. They didn’t yet know the plan concocted by the presidents of CAR and Sudan for Africans of South Sudan.

 

“Dey had an agreement to keep us out of CAR. Dis was what we heard between dah people as we moved toward dah border.” Not until hundreds of Southern Sudanese were slaughtered near Source Yubu did U.N. force the blockade to be lifted—but not for long did word of a blockade matter to Arketa’s family.

 

“Close to where we could not cross dah border, dah Muslims disguised as South Sudanese caught our family.”

 

Over a hundred and how many miles from their homes and a mile-and-a-half from hope, the Zambakaris stopped in a small clearing to rest.

 

Arketa’s body and expression slipped into sorrow as she spoke. 

 

“That day, no tears come out, Barbara. No tears.” 

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COMING UP:

CHAPTER FIVE--Between What Was and What Will Be  

November 1990

 “You are on dah boat?” Arketa asked over the phone.

 

“I am. We are docked at a harbor in British Columbia,” I said.

 

“In Canada? Ummm. Up from dah water in Seattle but now dah boat is parked?”

“Right. We’re parked.” A strong northeastern wind twisted in the cloudy September sky, turned tail, and shot through the boat’s windows from the west, scattering manuscript pages. I slid a nearby window closed.