Emmanuel Jal: A Child Of War, a Voice of Peace

Killing came easily. "If you are sitting in your own home and the thief comes to attack, the dog, the baby, they will all fight back. We had experienced it, we had seen the terror. Most of Sudan's lost boys were bitter and wanted revenge. Just a bit of an ignition could set us off," he recalls in a telephone interview from London. "You are hate-driven. I was hate-driven."

When the rebel-led child soldiers would capture Arab soldiers, "we would beat them with machetes," Jal says. They had heard tales of torture from southerners who had been taken captive in the North. They told of hands dipped in boiling oil, the severing of arms, other abuses.

"I'd rather die on my feet," says Jal.

I lived with an AK-47
By my side
Slept with one eye open wide
Run
Duck
Play dead
Hide
I've seen my people die like flies

-- Emmanuel Jal, "Forced to Sin"

"We did not have the proper artillery or weapons to shoot down helicopter gunships. This was terrifying," says Jal. He has a recurring nightmare of being in a helicopter crash. "I get shot in the head. The others return fire. Then I wake up and I am still alive. That is my trauma. When I don't talk about my story, I don't have dreams, and when I do, it all comes back," he says.

* * *

Scared and exhausted from running between exploding bombs, the children deserted the rebel lines. The "lost boys," as they came to be called, trekked across Sudan's cracked, barren badlands, its crocodile-infested rivers and snake-laced mud patches, to flee the war and be with their own tribe, the Nuer. Four hundred began the trek; only 16 survived. The others fell victim to ambushes, disease, hunger and suicide.

As they approached the entrance to a refugee camp in Waat, Jal says he saw a vulture begin to peck at the back of a starving infant, so weak he couldn't move. "I cannot forget this image," Jal says. "His mother tried, but was too emaciated and limp to save her child. He died later."

The lost boys joined a swelling camp of refugees. Naked survivors crouched on the edge of flatlands shrouded by ribbons of smoke from bonfires of excrement. Emaciated, they waited for airdrops of food.

But Jal's time in the camp was brief. Emma McCune, a flamboyant British aid worker of grand impulses who had wed a warlord from Jal's tribe, was taken by the boy's compelling story and the twinkle of mischief in his eyes. When she boarded a U.N. plane to be evacuated to Nairobi, she took him with her, pressing her expat friends and foundations in Kenya to pay for his education.

This bewitching activist treated him as her own. She read him stories, let him snuggle in bed with her and sent him to the most prestigious school in Kenya. She coaxed him to play soccer and basketball like other children his age to overcome his traumas. She gave him her clothes to wear. But then, eight months after he had found safe haven, fate struck again. McCune was killed in a car accident in Nairobi. She had devoted much of her energy to trying to save southern Sudanese children from the kind of life Jal had. In the short time he was with her, Jal says, "she planted a good seed in my life."