For months Tabitha and I had lived in the wilds of Southern Sudan. All that while the elders in our group had told us that we were going to a new home where we would be safe and there would be lots of other Sudanese people who had had to run from their villages and who were homeless like us. At last the big day came. We got to Pinyudu.
But it wasn’t a town, or even a village. It was nothing but a big open field. Standing and sitting and lying around that field were lots and lots and lots—hundreds, maybe a thousand—of us Sudanese. But there was no UN and no food. Like John and his group of Lost Boys, we went to bed hungry again, finding a place to lie down on the rocky red soil of Ethiopia to sleep. Tabitha was so skinny then that her bones poked up through her skin.
A few days after we got to Pinyudu, though, things changed. The UN’s refugee agency had heard about all of us waiting in that field, and they arrived with dried corn, beans and lentils, oil, and salt. We were all so hungry that when we smelled the corn and lentils cooking, our bodies just couldn’t wait. We started eating when the food was still hard, gobbling down the kernels and the lentils as fast as we could. Our stomachs couldn’t take that hard food, and we just got sick. And the more we got sick, the more diseases spread.