Elario and Arketa meeting in Kampala after a 20 year separation

Arketa stood her ground. For the first time in hours she was out of the lorry, her feet firmly planted on muddy ground somewhere between the villages of Zamou and Bangasu. Before her was a wide, swift river and at its edge was a raft—of sorts—a rattle of logs bound together and barely wider than the lorry itself. The attached motor hummed like helicopter blades sputtering under water. Raft workers raced around yelling to one another, hoisting and hauling ropes thick as their bare thighs and heavy as sin. Arketa studied the situation as she was told to climb back into the lorry.

AAAIIIIEE! Arketa straightened up and waddled from the field of slender cassava trees. She hung the hoe, collected bundles of cassava root and leaves the local citizen paid her for garden work, and headed home. The pain struck again. Arketa pressed one hand against her hardened belly, and with the other she steadied the precious bundle of food on her head. Cassava root is rich in starch, vitamin C and calcium, and the leaves provide protein. But who knew? Neither root nor leaf store well but no one in M’boki had the luxury of storing food. Pain or not, Arketa would not leave the cassava behind.

Arketa and Teresa yielded to pain, thirst, and diminishing light by slumping against a nearby tree that shielded them somewhat from the rain. Without children along, they “slept good.” Shorty before morning light, birdcalls woke Arketa. She winced as she rose onto swollen feet, slipping into the forest to relieve her self then, along with her sister, resuming the walk to M’boki. 

One very warm April day, shortly before Easter, Arketa sat crouched in the small tree-hollowed pirogue for the crossing of the massive Mbomou River. As refugee women did, she wore bark cloth over her genitals and “leaves to cover dah butt.” Upon reaching the Democratic Republic of Congo shore, the forward oarsman jumped out and settled the boat. A cover of clouds complicated Arketa’s swift search for concealed crocodiles but did nothing to hamper the oppressive heat. Now visibly pregnant, she ran on bare feet toward the jungle’s edge and thanked God that she survived her third river crossing. Borrowed machete and digging tool in hand, she slashed a path forward, looking up for the winding yam vines that could twist sixty feet or more along tree trunks, through thick brush and clung to anything overhead. She and the two women she worked shouted out frequently to maintain proximity to one another and, they hoped, distance from wild animals. 

Somewhere in the 153 miles between Arketa’s hometown, Yambio, and Bomboti, Arketa lost track of things which included the remaining fragments of her flip-flops. Miles, like the names of days, the passage of weeks, phases of the moon, condition of hair, smell of bodies or wounds were unmeasured, unmarked, and unimportant. Calendars, pens, telephones, work schedules, sacks of seed, church clothes, cooking pots, paychecks, laughter, lightheartedness and her eldest child—gone. Organized consciousness—gone; blown away by bombs. Arketa moved along first by the gestures of border police then by instinct, fear, and when she could see it, the setting sun.

“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?”

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.

The menace of Sudan’s war remained intermittent during Arketa’s childhood. She wasn’t dead from bullets or from a fall in the forest of Bazia, no. Bruised and subdued, yes, but she had survived. Her siblings continued to shake their heads at her playful spirit while her mother worked to corrall it. 

Arketa lay stunned and dizzy, fairly sure her eight-year-old body was dead. Her long fall through a web of branches left torturous music in her mind—bump, bump, bump,thud. The sounds resembled the bouncing beat of the Ganza, the dance of the dead, off a drum tautly topped with a stretched elephant’s-ear. 

It was nearly 8am, and dear goodness, Arketa thought, the day was already hot and steamy like the tea she was about to prepare. She padded from her bedroom to the detached kitchen wiping sweat from her face and fanning the loose skirt of her pajama, the tailor-made dress that hung loose from her shoulders to her ankles. Nothing underneath, thank goodness. Not the American pajama, no. This cotton frock was made by the local seamstress for wearing at home in the hot Sudan weather. Arketa loved tropical heat but a collection of days hovering at a stifling 90° had been more than enough.