BOOK REVIEW : They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky
They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky: The True Story of Three Lost Boys from Sudan
By Benson Deng, Alephonsion Deng, Benjamin Ajak, with Judy Bernstein. Public Affairs Books.
They were all under the age of seven when they were driven from a war-ravaged country. In this deceptively understated memoir, three boys recall in their own words their harrowing journey to safety.
Benjamin, Alepho, and Benson were raised among the Dinka tribe of Sudan. Their world was an insulated, close-knit community of grass-roofed cottages, cattle herders, and tribal councils. The lions and pythons that prowled beyond the village fences were the greatest threat they knew.
All that changed the night the government-armed Murahiliin began attacking their villages. Amid the chaos, screams, conflagration, and gunfire, five-year-old Benson and seven-year-old Benjamin fled into the dark night. Two years later, Alepho, age seven, was forced to do the same. Across the Southern Sudan, over the next five years, thousands of other boys did likewise, joining this stream of child refugees that became known as the Lost Boys. Their journey would take them over one thousand miles across a war-ravaged country, through landmine-sown paths, crocodile-infested waters, and grotesque extremes of hunger, thirst, and disease. The refugee camps they eventually filtered through offered little respite from the brutality they were fleeing.
In They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky, Alepho, Benson, and Benjamin, by turn, recount their experiences along this unthinkable journey. They vividly recall the family, friends, and tribal world they left far behind them and their desperate efforts to keep track of one another. This is a captivating memoir of Sudan and a powerful portrait of war as seen through the eyes of children. And it is, in the end, an inspiring and unforgettable tribute to the tenacity of even the youngest human spirits.
Alephonsion and Benson Deng, and their cousin Benjamin Ajak were relocated from the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya to the United States as part of an international refugee relief program. They arrived in 2001. Now all in their mid-twenties, Benjamin, Benson, and Alephonsion live in San Diego, California.
Excerpt
In the town of Pibor Post we found people waiting there for us because they had been told that the boys were coming. Our leader asked the people, “Please, can you offer them one cow so that they can come and eat the meat.” They agreed to cook us a cow. We ate the meat and found good shade next to big buildings. I just wanted to sleep for nine hours. I awoke when the sun was about to set. People said that we had to leave for Pochala and it would take three days to cross the desert. We worried how we were going to endure so many hours walking again. I told myself that if I worried I would have no hope of avoiding disaster. I made myself strong like an elder. I made my heart strong. I told myself that I was going to make it.
I walked through the desert in a big group. Sometimes people fell, just like that. At first we thought that when somebody fell he was going to wake up and follow us again. But when a person fell down, the elders told us, “Okay, come along. Now that he’s fallen down, he’s not going to wake up. That’s it. He’s dead.”
An elder told me, “You just take care of yourself and don’t fall down like him.”
I said, “How am I going to fall down? I feel I’m strong.”
He said, “Ok, if you’re strong like that, let’s keep going.”
But after a while, as I was talking to him, he fell down too. I tried to wake him up but he didn’t answer me.
Some bandits in the area started shooting at us so I took off my clothes because my shirt and shorts were white. I rolled the clothes under my arm and then I was a dark person, dark as nighttime itself. Nobody could see me any more. We reached Pochala on the border of Ethiopia early in the morning. People waiting there said it was good to receive us but that we were not the number they had been expecting. They saw that our number had been greatly reduced. A lot of people had been falling down.
Public Affairs Books