Dominic stands with his sisters.
Photo by DAVE EGGERS
In this extract from "It Was Just Boys Walking", Dominic Arou, a Sudanese refugee now living in the U.S. city of Atlanta, Georgia, is on a plane from Kenya to the village of Marial Bai in southern Sudan, hoping to find the family he left when he was somewhere between six and eight years old.
Thousands of children, who became known as the "lost boys", were forced to flee at the start of Sudan's north-south war and walk hundreds of miles, surviving hunger, disease, and animal attacks. After four years at a camp in Ethiopia, and another eight years in Kenya, some of them were given new homes in the United States.
Installments of this forthcoming biography by Dave Eggers, U.S.-based author of "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius", are published in "Believer" magazine.
We are aloft again, now minutes away from landing in Marial Bai. Dominic has no clear idea what his parents look like, and though he has information that they’re still in Marial Bai, there’s no certainty to that.
He has one photograph of his dad. “A few years ago, one of my brothers sent me a photo of my father, but it’s not too clear,” he says, hoping that he will recognize them once he sees his family.
He knows, from a brother of his now living in Nairobi, that his father has five wives, and his father and mother still live together—they are the senior members of the family, which now includes many half-siblings whose names Dominic doesn’t even know.
Dominic does knows that his father, once a prosperous businessman and owner of hundreds of heads of cattle—the gold standard of southern Sudan—is no longer a wealthy man. The war has been very hard on him.
SPEAKS LIKE A PROPHET
The landscape below us is dry, beige, and the shadow of our plane is crisp as it moves over the shrubs and light vegetation and the occasional villages. We have not been given any sense of how long the flight will take, but we’re expecting to land soon, any minute.
With his usual sense of destiny and seriousness of purpose—Dominic, as do many of the Lost Boys, often speaks like a prophet—he assesses the impact the trip will have.
“I think it’s going to change the way I live my life,” he says, pausing to find the rest of his sentence, “… for the rest of my times. It will become clear what it is that I need to focus on.”
...I ask him if he recognizes the area from our vantage point. He shakes his head, no. The plane is now only about one thousand feet above the earth. It’s all unfamiliar, he says, especially from the air.
But of course Dominic could scarcely know this land any better than anyone could—he was only five or six when he left. Still, I hope for him a flood of memories, an instant recognition of place, a permanent identification with his homeland.
There are so many things Dominic wants to find in Marial Bai: his parents, his relatives, the many brothers and sisters he’s never met, some of the friends he left behind, the elders he might remember if their faces were presented to him, the few friends from Kakuma (refugee camp in Kenya) who survived the journey with him and who have returned.
PLACE OF HIS BIRTH
He wants to see the place of his birth, the land from which he fled. And among other small quests, he would dearly like to find out how old he is. He doesn’t know his age or his birthday.
“My heart is beating!” he says, as the plane lowers its landing gear. His hand is on his chest, and with his fingers he simulates the beating of his heart, as if it were bursting through his cowboy-style shirt.
It is 1:28 when we land in Marial Bai. Dominic steps down from the plane, onto the dusty dirt runway, and is quickly surrounded by people, easily a hundred people, moving in from all sides. Children run from every direction.
Dominic is taller than most in the crowd, and he is smiling, looking for people he knows. Young men in jeans and T-shirts approach him and shake his hand, hug him, pat him on the back, on the shoulder, laughing.
Everyone is smiling, and the girls, in brilliant colors, hold their hands in front of their mouths and whisper, watching Dominic cautiously. Young boys yell to him: “Achak! Achak!” Older women get close, only to touch his sleeves and shoulders.
After a few seconds, an old man in a white dashiki snakes through the crowd and puts his hand on Dominic’s shoulder. The old man is wearing large sunglasses, and is missing most of his teeth. He speaks into Dominic’s ear and they embrace. They pull away from each other and Dominic looks into the old man’s eyes and smiles.
“Hey,” Dominic says over the throng, grinning widely with his arm around the old man, who smiles a wide toothless smile. “This is my father.”
THIS BRIEF REUNION
They do not look alike in any way. Dominic and his father shake hands and pat each other on the shoulder many times, as is common in Sudan. After this brief reunion of no more than a minute, Dominic’s father walks off. Dominic will see him privately later.
The plane’s luggage is dropped onto the runway and the Russian pilots climb back into the cockpit. The crowd begins to walk away from the plane and toward the village, the edges of which abut the runway.
As everyone is shuffling away from the plane, a violet-clad woman of about sixty, weathered, very tall, frail, with small hard eyes and a thin straight mouth, app-roaches Dominic shyly.
“Achak,” she says to him quietly. “I am your mother.”
They embrace. She holds his face in her hands. He yells over the crowd—and again it comes without fanfare—“Hey! This is my mother!”
They walk arm in arm a few yards and through a corrugated metal door, which separates the runway from the compound owned by Save the Children, a relief agency that has agreed to host a gathering, to give Dominic and his family a degree of privacy.
Dominic walks through with about nine of his friends and relatives, his arm around his mother, whose head is on his shoulder, whose hand is on his heart.
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