2006 - What is the What (59 page)

—He could be some sort of criminal in Japan, Ayen offered.

—Japan is very competitive, Gop mused.—Maybe he got tired of that life.

But they did not want to spoil it and I did not want to spoil it. It was an odd thing: there were few jobs for adult Sudanese with the UNHCR and NGOs, but they needed someone young who would understand the needs of the youth, so I was getting one of the best NGO salaries of any refugee at Kakuma. The project purportedly only had funding for a certain amount of time, but Noriyaki always talked about extending it.

—The Japanese government has plenty of money, he said.

He said that he and I would have to make sure to use the existing funding well, though, to involve refugees in the planning and stretch every dollar.

I asked him why he came to Kenya in the first place. Why the Sudanese? I asked.

—When I was growing up, my teacher had us do a report on a country in Africa. He was very interested in the continent, so he spent probably too much time on Africa. I wasn’t this teacher’s favorite student, I have to say. So he went around the room, asking everyone which country they wanted to research, and he called on me last. By then, only Sudan was left.

I would have suspected as much, but still, this fact hurt my heart. I thought of it many times over the next years, that Sudan was not wanted by any of these Japanese schoolchildren.

—There wasn’t too much information about your country, I have to say. It was a very short report, he said.

He laughed, and I managed to laugh. It was a goal of his, it seemed. He walked in the office every day, I am sure, determined to get me to laugh, no matter the subject matter. He talked about his family and about his girlfriend—his fiancée. Wakana he missed with an agony that was tangible. Many days I arrived at work to find him under his desk, on the phone. I am not sure why he chose to talk to her under his desk, but usually he did. After he was finished, I often found notes on the floor, as if he were consulting lists of things to say to her. When he would pine for her, I would listen until I could not listen any more.

—Your
girlfriend?
I would say.—You’re complaining about missing your girlfriend? I don’t have a family!

He would laugh and say,—Yeah, but you’re used to it.

We found this very funny, and it became a refrain between us:—Yes, but you’re used to it. And though I laughed about it, it also caused me to wonder whether this was a truth. It did seem to be true, that he missed his fiancée more than I missed my family, because he was certain she was alive. My feelings for my own family were more distant and vague, for I could not picture them, and did not know if they were alive or dead, in Sudan or elsewhere. Noriyaki, though, had his mother and father and two siblings, and he knew every day where they were.

—My family is your family now, he said one day.

They knew all about me, he said, and wanted very much to meet me. He added a picture of his parents and younger sister to the desktop, and he insisted I think of them as mine. It was a strange thing that his plan worked; I did grow to think of his family as people who were watching over me, expecting good things from me. I stared at the picture of his parents—his mother and father both in black, their hands clasped before them, standing before a giant statue of a charging soldier—and I believed that some day we would meet in their home, perhaps just before Noriyaki married Wakana, when I visited Japan as a prosperous man. I was not confident this day would come, but it pleased me to think about it.

One day a man came to Noriyaki. The man was a Sudanese elder, an educated man, respected among the Dinka. He had finished three years at the University of Khartoum, and his opinion was sought on any number of matters, political matters in particular. Today, though, he was agitated, and asked to speak to Noriyaki immediately. Noriyaki asked him inside, and gave him a seat.

—I would like to stand, he said.

—Okay, Noriyaki said.

—I need to stand because what I have to say is very important and upsetting.

—Okay. I’m listening.

—You need to talk to your people, your government, Mr. Noriyaki. It is the Chinese and the Malaysians who are making this war worse. These two countries alone own 60 percent of the oil interests in Sudan. You know how much oil they take? Millions of barrels a year, and it’s growing! China plans to get half its oil from Sudan by 2010!

—But sir…

—And we all know that the oil is what is driving the war. Bashir wants only to keep the south in chaos and the SPLA away from the oil fields. He does this with weapons from where? From China, Mr. Noriyaki. China wants the south insecure, because this keeps out other countries who don’t want their hands dirty with the human-rights abuses around this oil extraction! Your government is providing arms that are used against civilians, and they are also buying the oil that is ill-gotten and is the reason hundreds of thousands have died. I have come here to appeal to you, as a representative of your government, to speak out against these injustices!

When Noriyaki finally had a chance to speak, he told the man he was not Chinese. The man spent five minutes digesting this information.

—I do not mean to be rude, but you have the look of a Chinese.

—No sir. I’m Japanese. We’re not such great friends of the Chinese, either.

The man left, confused and disappointed.

There was blame everywhere for what was happening to the Sudanese. And the more we understood how we were connected to so many of the problems of the world, the more we understood the web of money and power and oil that made our suffering possible, the more we felt sure that something would be done to save southern Sudan. And a series of bombings brought us, we thought, to the forefront of the world’s mind.

I was refereeing a youth soccer game when I heard the news from a pair of boys passing on a bicycle.—They bombed Nairobi! And Dar es Salaam!

Someone had bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The camp ceased all activity. The Kenyans stopped working. Wherever there were televisions or radios, and there were not many of the former, they were surrounded. Hundreds dead, the reports said, five thousand injured. We watched for days as bodies were pulled from the rubble. The Kenyans at Kakuma raged for answers. When it was learned that it was the work of Islamic fundamentalists, there was trouble at Kakuma. It was not a good time to be a Somali or an Ethiopian. The Muslims of any nation kept themselves hidden those days, and made sure to be clear about their opposition to the work of these terrorists, to Osama bin Laden. This was the first I had heard his name, but soon everyone knew of him, and knew that he was living in Sudan. Gop spent every moment next to the radio, and lectured me at dinner.

—This is bin Laden’s work. And it’s Sudan that will pay for this crime. They helped him, and they will pay. And it’s about time they did.

Gop seemed almost happy about this development. He was sure that bin Laden’s bombings would turn the world’s attention to Sudan, and that this could only be good for us.

—Finally they’ll get this man! He’s been everywhere. He was at the center of the Islamist revolution, Achak! He provided so much money to Sudan! This man funded everything—machinery, planes, roads. He was involved in agriculture, business, banking, everything. And he brought thousands of al Qaeda operatives to Sudan, to train and plan. The companies he set up in Sudan were used to get money to all the other terrorist cells all over the world. This was all because of the cooperation of Khartoum! Without a government sponsoring these things, it’s much more difficult for someone like bin Laden, who is not satisfied with blowing up travel offices. So he owns a construction company in Sudan, and so he can buy explosives from anyone he wants, in whatever quantities he needs. It seems legitimate, right? And then with Khartoum’s help, he can ship these explosives to Yemen or Jordan or anywhere else.

—But he wasn’t the only terrorist in Sudan, right? I asked.

—No, there were groups from everywhere. Hezbollah had people there, Islamic Jihad, so many groups. But Osama is the worst. He claimed to have trained the guys in Somalia who killed the American soldiers there. He had issued a fatwa there against any Americans in Somalia. And then he financed the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. You know this building?

I shook my head.

—A huge building, as high as the clouds. Bin Laden paid to have a man drive a truck into the basement of the building to blow it up. And then he tried to kill Mubarak in Egypt. All the men involved in that plot were from Sudan, and bin Laden paid for everything. This man is a big problem. Terrorists could not do so much before him. But he has so much money that things become possible. He brings more terrorists into the world, because he can pay them, gives them a good life. Until they kill themselves, that is.

A few days later, Gop’s expectations came true, or seemed to. Again I was refereeing a soccer game when a UN truck drove by with two Kenyan aid workers in the back, bringing the good news.

—Clinton bombed Khartoum! they yelled.—Khartoum is under attack!

The game stopped amid wild celebrating. That day and that night there was considerable excitement in the Sudanese regions of Kakuma. There was talk about what this might mean, and the consensus was that it indicated that the United States was clearly angry at Sudan, that they were being blamed for the bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. It proved, everyone thought, beyond any doubt, that the United States sided with the SPLA, and that they disapproved of the government in Khartoum. Of course, some refugee pundits were more ambitious in their thinking. Gop, for example, who thought that independence for southern Sudan was imminent.

—This is it, Achak! he said.—This is the beginning of the end! When the U.S. decides to bomb someone, that is the end. Look what happened to Iraq when they invaded Kuwait. Once the U.S. wants to punish you, there is trouble. Wow, this is it. Now the U.S. will overthrow Khartoum in no time at all, and then we will return home, and we will get money from the oil, and the border between north and south will be established, and there will be a New Sudan. I think it will all happen within the next eighteen months. You watch.

I loved and admired Gop Chol, but about political matters—about any matters concerning the future of Sudan—he was invariably wrong.

But in smaller ways, a great deal of change was afoot among the people of southern Sudan, and there were developments that might be considered hopeful. Sudanese customs were bent and broken at Kakuma with more frequency than they would have been had there been no war, had eighty thousand people not been in a refugee camp run by a progressive-minded international consortium. My own attitudes and ideas certainly would not have been as liberal as they became, but because I was a youth educator, I became well-versed in the language of health and the human body, of sexually transmitted diseases and prophylactic measures. Often I spoke too informally with young women, and confused the language of health class with the language of love. I once ruined my chances with a young woman named Frances by asking if she was developing correctly for her age. My exact words were:

—Hello Frances, I have just been to health class, and I was wondering how your feminine parts were developing.

It’s one of the things that one says when young, and from which there is no escape. After that, she and her friends had a very low opinion of me, and the words have haunted me for many years after.

I learned many important lessons, first among them the fact that making forward statements in English was considered more acceptable than in Dinka. Because our grasp of English was tenuous, tone and precise meaning in that language was amorphous and shifting. I could never say ‘I love you’ to a new girl in Dinka, for she would know exactly its meaning, but in English, the same words might be considered charming. Thus I used English a good deal, always in the interest of appearing charming. It did not always work.

But I spent a good deal of time calibrating my approach to girls, and when I was ready to inquire about Tabitha’s interest in me, I was anything but bold. I knew by then that Tabitha was that rarest of girls who was still allowed to go to school, whose mother was at Kakuma and was enlightened enough to afford her a range of opportunities, academic and even those related to friendships with boys like me.

There was a certain day each year called Refugee Day, and I am quite sure it was the day that half of all youth relationships at Kakuma began or ended. On this day, June 20 each year, from morning to dusk, all the refugees of Kakuma celebrated, and there was less adult supervision, and more mingling of nationalities and castes, than at any other time of year. They celebrated not the fact that they were refugees or were living in northwest Kenya, but instead the simple existence and survival of their culture, however tattered. There were exhibitions of art, demonstrations of ethnic dances, there was food and music and, from the Sudanese, many speeches.

This was my opportunity to speak to Tabitha, who I was tracking all day. When she watched a traditional Burundian dance, I watched her. When she sampled food from Congo, I watched her from behind a display of Somali arts and crafts. And when the day was waning, and there was only a few minutes before she and all the girls would be expected to retreat to their homes, I strode to her with confidence that surprised even me. I was four years older than she was, I told myself. This is a young person, someone around whom you should not feel like a child. And so I walked to her with a serious face and when I stood behind her—she had had her back turned to me during my approach, which made it far easier—I tapped her on the shoulder. She turned to me, very surprised. She looked to my left and right, surprised to find me alone.

—Tabitha, for a long time, I said,—I have tried to talk to you about something, but the opportunity never presented itself. I was not sure how you would react to what I wanted to propose.

She stared up at me. She was not very tall at the time. Her head barely reached my chin.—What are you talking about? she said.