Children of Sudan's Cattle Camps

"I suspect that if peace stays, camp will one day die out," Gong says.

"Become wise, like a doctor," he tells his younger son. "The hands of educated people don't get dirty," he adds, looking at his own hands, cracked and caked with white powder from the burned dung.

The father has another choice ahead: whether to let Machuei undergo his tribe's traditional manhood rites, in which six bottom teeth are removed and four incisions are made in the forehead. This signals that a Dinka boy is ready for marriage.

The cattle camp manager has advised parents against it, saying the ritual, a mark of ethnic distinction, makes it more difficult for Sudan's many tribes to blend in at school.

Gong looks at his son, dressed in dirty brown shorts, gulping fresh milk from a pail. The father says he will not make the boy remove his teeth or scar his face.

"I've made my decision," he says. "School is more important."

A Man's Job

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Bakic Magol has just been paid, so he and his friend Mangui Yuot can buy breakfast. Usually they just drink milk, but on paydays they can afford a bowl of beans. In the shade of a grass hut, they hungrily eat from bowls of oily mush without speaking.

As they walk back to the cattle pen, an old woman with a torn dress begs Bakic for money to buy tobacco. Farther down the dirt path, another woman clutches Bakic's arm, asking whether her daughter can come and milk the cows for some free milk.

Bakic's carefree mood is gone. He lowers his head and sprints back to work.

The next day his father, Alfred Magol, crippled and blinded from a land mine, rests under a tree and talks about how even peace has not brought relief to his family. No one from the new government has come to pay disabled veterans, he complains.

And if peace doesn't last, how can he afford to let his son leave work and go to school? The country is still not stable, and the family is worried.

Bakic's mother, Mary Achol, would also prefer him to be in a classroom. When he visits home these days, she says, he doesn't like her to touch him or make him food.