The ZAMBAKARI Story

Join Us 

as

Arketa and Elario present their stories

May 1, 2019; 7pm

For details: pinebarb39@gmail.comor pinewords@mac.com

Arketa’s story is like no other. Hers was a privileged childhood, as privilege goes in a place without phones, power, plumbing, or peace. Her grandfathers were chiefs, her parents, London educated professionals, her training as a midwife was a coveted honor, and her husband, traditionally and admirably selected. But privilege gave way.          

~  ~ ~ 

It was not enough that five men swinging knives in God’s name decapitated her young husband. They raped Arketa—there, on the floor where Joseph’s headless body lay twitching. March 1984: the month of their first anniversary, her twentieth birthday, the third month of their son Elario’s life, and the first of many proofs that her privileged life had ended. 

            Six years later, November 1990, bombs destroyed Yambio town, blew her home to smithereens, and as Arketa Zambakari said, sent thousands “running like rats before the lion.” The bombs took nearly everything; bombs took her eldest child, Elario. 

            Pregnant Arketa and members of her family ran for weeks, ran, losing plastic slippers to the mud and clothing to the thorn trees. They ran rain-pelted circles in the dark jungle, ran from the bush to the path, from pillar to post in an effort to escape the human slaughter ricocheting through South Sudan. 

            Weeks later, a mile-and-a-half from safety, from the border of the Central African Republic, headed for a U.N. refugee camp in that country, north Sudanese militiamen overtook them and havocked nearly everything Yambio bombs missed. They murdered six members of Arketa’s family—her father, two brothers, a sister, her sister’s husband and their ten-year-old son. They raped and tortured the three women left alive. 

The killers noticed much too much strength in Arketa. They burned her with firewood, took a bayonet to her thigh. One assailant chose to “design a new face” for her—three smart knife slashes to each cheek. “Cry out and you are dead,” he said. There were no words. No tears. 

In January 1991, bereft and bearing wounds, Arketa reached M’boki, an inhospitable jungle site reserved for refugees. Remarkably, stubbornly, she carved out survival. 

            In 1999, a U.N. worker noticed Arketa’s children. They were bright. They needed education. He helped her with an immigration process. By lorry, by boat, by foot, by months on the move, by dodging coups and bullets, and rescuing her fifteen-year-old son, Christopher, from a Kinshasa imprisonment, in March, 2001, she and three of her five children arrived in Phoenix, Arizona. 

            (Now, against all odds, Arketa’s children have among them summa cum laude and cum laude honors, an M.A. in Theology, an LPD in Law and Policy, BS/Nurse Practitioner, a BBA in Accounting, and a singer of songs.)

*      *       *

            Two months after her arrival 2001 in Arizona, ten years after the bombing of Yambio, Arketa sat in a crowded refugee center. Her caseworker emerged from his office, and as he regularly did, shouted, “Zambakari!” 

A young man, recently arrived from Uganda, heard that shouted name. It was familiar. His inquiry about it led to the discovery that Arketa’s “dead” son, Elario, was alive, living as an orphan in Uganda. But, by the time I met her in 2009, she had yet to see Elario (thank you mighty bureaucracy and little money); nor her younger son, Timothy (his amazing and often terrifying story is in the book, here on the blog: ZAMBAKARI).

 Untenable, my thought as I learned her story. With a cadre of friends, through the generous dispersal of dollars and the completion of dreadfully detailed forms, in 2010, Timothy; then finally in 2018, Elario, each arrived permanently in the U.S.

 “Even when you give up? You don’t give up,” says Arketa. “Dah Sudanese say, A termite can do nothing to a stone save lick it.’”

             In ZAMBAKARI, I wrote:

            “By the time I met her, Arketa had taken quite a lick’n from life but her survival instincts were hard as a rock; her determination stubborn as stone; her dignity impervious to tongue-lashings. 

*      *       *

If you are not a part of Heron’s Key but would like to join us on May 1 for an evening with Arketa and Elario, please ask for details at: 

pinebarb39@gmail.comor pinewords@mac.com