They Poured Fire On Us From The Sky: The True Story of Three Lost Boys from Sudan

On the way to Athieng’s house, Benson ran into Benjamin. Benson was overjoyed but learned that Benjamin was being flown to Lokichokio in Kenya for special treatment for his leg. Benson wished him well and hoped that they would meet again.

Athieng’s name came up on a list of women and families to be flown to Kapoeta in the south of Sudan. Just before they were due to leave, Benson finally found Lino, who had survived the Gilo. However, Lino refused to leave with Athieng, claiming that the SPLA needed his help.

After some delays, Benson, Athieng, and her children finally managed to board a plane. Their permits were checked upon arrival, and they were put on trucks to Kapoeta. Athieng discovered Yier in Kapoeta and entrusted Benson to his care. Benson was overjoyed to be staying with a family member again and hopeful that he would find the others eventually. Yier, Benson, and Yier’s son took leave of Athieng and headed for Kidepo.

Alepho and Joseph escaped Palataka one night with a group of boys. Alepho felt terrible about leaving Peter without warning, but he knew that Peter wouldn’t survive the walk to Torit. The boys walked for days, battling hunger, thirst, and exhaustion. At an open-air marketplace, they met another boy, Anyar, who had escaped Palataka some time ago. He was now staying at an outpost called Kilieu, just an hour away from Torit.

Anyar’s uncle, Madieu, who lived in Torit, had a second wife in a town called Hambia. He offered Alepho, Joseph, and Joseph’s cousin Santino food and stay in exchange for helping his second wife care for her baby. The boys took him up on the offer for a while before moving back to Torit.

At Torit, Alepho discovered that Yier was in Kidepo just 50 miles south. The boys managed to work and save some money to buy passage to Kidepo. While Joseph tried to obtain an official permit, Alepho and Santino hitched a ride to Torit with a truck driver who promised to come back and inform Joseph about their departure.

Yier told Benson about the “1985 slaughter of the black students in Wau” (163). Yier was a university student then, and the Black students who refused to convert to Islam to continue their education were arrested. Some were massacred by special forces, and others were locked up. Yier was one of just three from his group who managed to escape and survive.

Benjamin returned from Lokichokio with his wound half cured, and Emmanuel made it to Kidepo soon after. Benson felt safe and happy again, but it didn’t last long; one day, while the boys were out doing chores, they were forced to run for their lives as tribesmen began shooting at them.

Alepho and Santino made it to Kidepo and were reunited with Yier, Emmanuel, and Benson.

When Yier asked Benson and the others if they recognized the two young boys who had arrived, he was overjoyed to see Alepho. Joseph also arrived some days later. Benson finally learned of his father’s death from Alepho, but the sadness of that couldn’t drown out the joy of being reunited with family again.

A few days after Alepho arrived, Yier was called away to the front again. Shortly afterward, Kapoeta was bombed, and the survivors arrived at Kidepo. It wasn’t safe for people to stay there either, so it was decided that everyone would evacuate to Torit.

Just as people were gathering rations and preparing to leave, Kidepo was attacked and bombed. Alepho lay still and pretended to be dead when soldiers came around checking the corpses. After the shooting stopped and the soldiers left, Alepho got up and ran for his life, separated from his family again. He joined a group of survivors who were on the move.

After getting separated during the attack on Kidepo, Benson found Alepho, Benjamin, Emmanuel, and Joseph again the next day. They moved to Lokapur, south of Kidepo, and waited there for two months in the hope that food would arrive from Ethiopia, but nothing did. They finally moved to Torit.

Within a day of their arrival at Torit, the town was attacked again, and everyone was driven out. As they ran in the dark across the sludgy terrain, Benson stepped on something sharp in a muddy pool, and his injured foot began to swell. Unable to walk, he managed to find passage on a truck, but got separated from Alepho, Benjamin, Joseph, and Yier’s wife, who headed in a different direction to Pageri.

In the town that Benson arrived at, he received no sympathy despite his injured leg. He was continually refused food, his bag was stolen, and he was whipped for attempting to collect grain from the sand on the ground. He felt so broken that he refused help from a woman who offered to take care of him, wishing that he would just die of hunger instead.

Alepho remembers a man who shared a spoon of grain with him on the walk, when Alepho was exhausted and close to unconsciousness from not having eaten for three days. War made Alepho believe that people were all bad, but he sees things differently when he remembers this as a man.

Benson took shelter in a church along with a large group of people. An Ethiopian woman there accused him of stealing her oil and kicked at him, reopening the wound in his leg. A Sudanese woman came to his defense and took care of him for the night, feeding him and cleaning his wound.

The next morning, the Ethiopian woman insisted on taking Benson to the army police station. As they talked along the way, the woman learned his story and apologized for misunderstanding him. He ended up staying with her for a week, and her husband eventually gave him a ride to Pageri so that he could find his family.

At Pageri, Benson ran into his distant cousin, Thiik, who promised to take him to Yier. Thiik invited Benson into his home first, and they listened to the news together on the radio. President Bashir was commanding 7,000 new recruits to go fight in the south and hurling racist slurs against the Dinka. Benson wondered about what kind of country his was, where countrymen were urged to kill each other.

Benson reunited with his brothers, and they all headed to Ashwa, which had more water. Americans visited Ashwa and showed the people there a picture of President Clinton with a promise to send more resources. Shortly after, trucks with food organized by the American government arrived from Uganda.

The boys visited an uncle in Ashwa who was a watchman for a library. The boys took a number of books, some for themselves and some to sell. Just as life became peaceful, Ashwa was bombed. However, by some miracle, the bombs were blown off target, and not a single person died in the attack.

Benson and Emmanuel had learned to read English in Panyido and would read the books out to the others. Alepho came to see the importance of education in understanding the world and in helping the world understand his country and culture. A school was started in Ashwa, and Alepho began to enjoy learning this time around. He kept some of the books from the library for himself.

Yier returned from his post for a month. In the meantime, his wife, Ayen, who was sick and unable to breastfeed her baby, managed to acquire some medicine for her child. She asked Benson to hold a bundle of grass alight so that she could inject her child by the firelight at night, but Benson couldn’t hold the bundle still for long. The baby eventually died, and a heartbroken Ayen blamed Benson for a while.

At the end of 1992, Yier organized for the boys to be taken to Kenya in a lorry. He heard of a new camp called Kakuma that had food, a school, and even a clinic. Benson was excited at the prospect of going to school and learning English and Kswahili.

Benson and the boys climbed aboard a lorry with 15 soldiers escorting 75 boys. They drove until they reached Magwe at midnight and alighted to sleep. When they woke up, the lorry had left to transport some wounded soldiers. The boys were told to walk to a place called Imarok; the lorry would catch up with them there.

The next day, a commander arrived in a different vehicle than the first one, full of soldiers. The boys were loaded into the lorry, and the soldiers were ordered to climb in on top of them, despite the soldiers’ protests that the boys were very small. Benjamin almost suffocated to death under the men’s weight, and the lorry had to stop for him to be dragged out. One of the soldiers protested that this was torturous for the boys, but no one listened to him.

A soldier was sitting on Alepho’s bag, and he refused to move despite Alepho’s request. The soldier defecated on the bag instead, reducing Alepho to tears at the thought of his spoiled blanket and books. At one point in the journey, the same soldier fell off the lorry along with another man when the vehicle hit a ditch. The soldier broke his tooth, and he was so angry when he climbed back on that he started kicking Alepho. Another soldier stopped him and reprimanded him, asserting that he deserved to have his tooth broken.

The next time the lorry stopped, all 75 boys abandoned it, tired of the soldiers’ behavior; they decided that they would rather walk to Kakuma. As they walked, they met another group of boys from Palataka, and the group’s commander ordered the 75 boys to join them. However, the latter refused, insisting that they were the commander’s children and that a vehicle would come for them.

The boys waited for a week, but no transport arrived. SPLA soldiers escorted the boys to a town called Chukudum on the way to Kakuma. Eventually, a lorry loaded with ammunition arrived there, and the boys were allowed to ride on top. However, they were taken to a place called Natinga, not Kakuma. Benson realized that they had been tricked and hijacked. They now had to live under trees and rely on soldiers. Benson thought of the camp that was promised to them and felt his dream of school slipping away.

Natinga had no food or water, and the young boys were forced to build a road up the hill. Benjamin’s leg got worse, and he became convinced that he would die there.

Rather than the school that was promised, the boys were made to do hard manual labor. Fifteen boys tried to escape but were caught and imprisoned inside a thorn-fenced pen for a month and lashed twice a day.

Alepho fell sick with yellow fever, but Benson had no resources to care for him. The only thing he could make was sour gruel out of flour and tamarind leaves from the forest. Emmanuel and Benjamin began planning an escape, but Benson refused to go with them, insisting that he had to stay with Alepho.

Benjamin and Emmanuel attempted to escape in the middle of the night but were caught by soldiers up the road and taken back to Natinga, where they were sent to jail.

Benjamin’s leg, which had begun to heal, became infected again due to the lashings in jail. After getting out, Emmanuel attempted to escape again and was successful.

Benson continued to care for Alepho, who was looking close to death. Benson found work hauling bags of maize from convoy trucks, which allowed him to collect some extra grain. He sold the maize to Taposa girls in exchange for sour goat milk for Alepho. The boys were eventually told that they would begin receiving army training, and Benson understood why they were brought there instead of Kakuma.

Alepho was not getting better, and he received permission to be shifted to Kakuma for treatment. However, no one was allowed to accompany him. Benson was sad at the separation but knew that this was Alepho’s only chance at recovery. As he bid Alepho goodbye, Benson decided to find a way to escape: “Sudan stank of blood. If [he] wanted to see [his] brother again [he] had to get away” (224).