The Dinka knew the importance of cattle, they lived it every day, so they decided to decline the divine offer of the What and were instead granted cattle in abundance. They did not find out what "the What" was, not until the war the great war that saw many families exterminated, whole generations wiped out and bequeathed to millions of young Sudanese such eternal horrors as are to the rest of us unimaginable. This war pressed its survivors on a march from Southern Sudan to Ethiopia. They marched by their thousands, like streams to a tributary, a large migration of the young males escaping forced conscription, escaping certain death snaking into Ethiopia and then to Kakuma in Kenya and from there dispersed to the rest of the world.
 

This is their story, told through the valiant memory of a Sudanese man now living in America, Valentino Achak Deng to Dave Eggers in What is the What. Eggers interviewed Achak over several years, and by intertwining reality and fiction has fashioned a compelling, emotional book on the famed Lost Boys of the Sudan.

Imagine if you will, a procession of boys walking for months, even years on end. They retain only one goal in their hearts, to reach the safety of refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya. Achak's journey begins in Marial Bai, a village in Southern Sudan and ends in his resettlement in Atlanta, Georgia with hundreds of other young Sudanese. The epic is in many ways tragic, however, Achak and others demonstrate the resolution of the human will to survive some of the most adverse conditions on the planet. Starting of as a tragedy, this is a chronicle of the indefatigability of the human spirit; it is a testament to the courage and resourcefulness of these indentured lives. Plucked from their world, and the safety of the familiar, they manage in all of the sadness and pain to keep up their resolve to vanquish their nightmare, hanging on to hope. Their spirit survives through always diminishing numbers and lives on in the triumphant survival of those who make it into new lives in the peace of foreign shores.

Achak is six when his village is burned down by enemy militia. At the time of the attacks, the little boys and young men are out herding the families' livestock and so escape the bullets and bayonets of the invaders. They return to the smoldering ruins of their nascent lives, the charred remains of the arms that guarded them, the mutilated flesh of the breasts that nursed them. This is not home, and the enemy will be back. And so begins the great trek.  Making off into the scrub, Achak and his mates soon stumble into a trickle of young boys like them recently orphaned and doing the only thing they can in this parched forsaken land, walking to safety. Achak's account of this group of confused and hungry youths, under the leadership of a sixteen year old sees them through the badlands of Sudan and the Ethiopian wilderness.

They eat anything they can find. The kindness of those they pass on their trek sustains them even as it deprives them of their very last belongings. The trickle grows into a stream as those left-behind by the war, those with nothing left to lose make it for the border and the unknown. Women and girls add to their number, the remnant of the second Sudanese Civil War that led to the loss of over 300 000 lives.

One day, out of the horizon comes a river. They cross over it and enter Ethiopia. There Ayak meets an Anyuak woman and breaks down when she offers her home to him. In one of the most memorable and poignant moments in the narrative, he lays on her lap all evening thinking of his own mother.  It has only been four months since the beginning of the war, since the day when coming home from herding the goats; he found that his mother was not there for him anymore. He can barely remember her now, she is a fading memory but he misses her touch, and he knows that if he accepts this woman's kindness and her home, he will never remember his mother.

Throughout the book, the river of humanity is picked off by the Sudanese People's Liberation Army. Eight year old boys, ten year olds, teenagers they are pressed into service their mental anguish and physical frailties cannot allow them to perform in any meaningful way. Many more are kidnapped and sold off into forced labour. Thousands die in the cold, the rain, the loneliness and from attacks by animals. Disease and despair suck the energy out of the moving ranks, choking the life out of the frail, determined skeletons and adding to the anguish of the young survivors such terrors as pens on ink cannot hope to describe.

So persuasive is the tragedy to the human spirit that it is with shock that we come upon the news that the Ethiopian government is unwilling to host the Lost Boys. Sent off into the wilderness, they are now heading South for the border with Kenya and a refugee camp called Kakuma. The catastrophe is visited on them a second time as their numbers and resolve are severely tested. Achak loses some of his best friends in this second leg, the world knows of their plight, Ethiopia they thought meant safety but shunned and alone they are forced to do what they must. They walk.

Twelve years later as a young man hosted at the Kakuma refugee camp, the SPLA – the Sudanese People's Liberation Army comes calling looking to recruit young lives to its cause.

"You expect to return home when the war is won. But how will this war be won? Who will win it? Who is fighting the war? You are here in Kakuma, you have your food provided to you, you buy expensive shoes [..].  

But this is Kenya, and it is safe here, there is no going back. On a trip to Nairobi Achak realizes he did not even know this country. He is captivated by its verdancy and the wealth of its farms. He wonders at the richness of the land, and why it is that the refugees are parked off in the wretched desert where they are dependent on hand-outs of food and clothing, he comments,

 "Do not think it was lost on us that the Kenyans, and every international body that monitors or provides for the displaced, customarily places its refuges in the least desirable regions on earth."

Here is an account of a Kenyan working in Kakuma.