Her older female relatives tell her to stay and keep milking. If she abandons her responsibilities to seek adventure, they worry, other girls will follow, and the older generations will be burdened with more work. If war explodes again, they could lose everything.
On their way to milk the cows, Alanitch and her friends pass family corrals full of cattle, each with a hut on stilts in the center. Most huts have an AK-47 assault rifle strung up next to gourds used to make butter or yogurt. Older women shake the gourds with a rhythmic sound. Calves nurse and their mothers kick up dust. Teenage boys, fighting each other with sticks, stop to glance as the girls pass.
For a long time, Alanitch found it hard to imagine any other world.
"Cattle are our lives," she says, pulling a calf off its mother's teats and roping it to a wooden peg. Then she kneels and milks, tugging with both hands. Her friend Nyaneyai Maker, a strong girl with a shaved head, crouches nearby.
In the Dinka language, highly valued children are often given cow-related names. Alanitch means "the place where cow dung is dried." The Dinka have more than 100 names and phrases to describe bovines by shape, color and strength.
Their chores done, the girls link arms and walk back through the camp. The orange sun is sinking. A full moon is rising. Some of the boys are parading bulls, their horns pierced and decorated with tassels. A drumbeat pulses, and a few boys begin singing songs of praise to their bulls.
Alanitch confides that she has become bored with the boys at cattle camp and plans to walk to Rumbek to sell some milk. There's a boy she likes there. He was once a cattle herder, but he left to work at a settlement set up for foreigners and Sudanese officials hoping to start postwar building projects.
Two days later, she returns in a restless mood. She has seen a school open in the town, but she is too old to attend it. Instead, she has sold her milk to buy a new dress, asking the boy to chip in. "And he did," she says, laughing in triumph.
Alanitch has few possessions -- two other dresses, a torn straw sleeping mat, a teapot, a milk pail, three plastic bracelets and a pair of flip-flops.
"I think the life of town is better," she declares suddenly. "They are always clean, and they have radios in the market."
Alanitch looks around the camp with new eyes. The boys dress with indifference to style or gender, sometimes wearing women's torn housecoats or dresses. In Rumbek, the boy she likes was wearing a smart, tan uniform -- and carrying enough money to treat her to beers in a new bar.
"I think I want to marry him and live there with him," she announces. "Easier life. He's making money."
Life in a Sudanese Cattle Camp