From Sudan we were just walking. We just started walking but didn’t know where we were going. We found ourselves in a forest and just kept going until we were out of the for- est. Sometimes we would find people who would walk with us for a while and help us. We thought we might see our parents again during the walk but we never did.
One place we walked through was very dry and we could not find water. I don’t know how long we walked but I’m sure it was more than a month.
My brothers, Koat Daniel, about age seven, and Matthew, about age five, were walking with Paul Ruot, me, and a lot of other people.1 We didn’t know which way we were going to end up heading. Each day it seemed like we were in the same place. When we got hungry we ate fruits from the trees around us or we went fishing. Sometimes we were hungry, like when we could not catch any fish. When it came to night we were just sleeping anywhere. We didn’t really care what it looked like. The next day when we got woken up we started walking. Our feet were all bloody because we didn’t have any shoes on. Sometimes we were so tired that most of us were crying. I guess we thought that crying was going to help us while we were walking. We could hear the voices of the lions. We were scared. We thought they were going to come to us, but they didn’t. Lucky for us, God kept them away from us.
It is not easy to cross the border into another people’s coun- try. Let me tell you, you don’t just cross the border for fun, because I’ve been through it! On that day, we reached the Ugandan camp without any papers or documents to see if we could live there. They always checked people on the way to see whether or not they had papers. They put us in im- migration jail for one day because they wanted to find out why we were coming to Uganda. They didn’t even give us food or water to drink, and they didn’t allow us to leave to get water that we knew was nearby. They often beat people to death in the jails. They just kept us inside the jail like we were their dogs. We smelled like garbage since we had walked so far without washing, but I guess they couldn’t smell us because it was windy. If they could smell us they wouldn’t have even come close to us. We hadn’t taken a shower for more than a month. It wasn’t because we were lazy, it’s that there was very little water. We didn’t even have enough water to drink. We were very hungry by that time. We smelled a woman cooking something that smelled very wonderful. I was wondering if she could give us some of it. But she did not. Finally they allowed us to live in the camp. We were very happy when they told us that.
We started looking for food to eat, even though we didn’t know anyone to ask for help, we figured there might be someone out there who could help us. We were lucky because at that time some people who were living in the camp had corn that they gave to people who were new to the village. We got some of the dry corn and some of the fresh corn and we cooked it and ate it.
