II. To enter Ethiopia from Sudan you had to swim a river. It was dawn. The water was so clear I could see fish. Some boys walked in carefully but I jumped in. That water was so warm! We wanted to stay in the river, because it had been so long since we could swim and play and splash, because in the forest we could only run to the river to get water and then run back into the forest, but there was a hurry now to get across the border, so we hurried.

I was there along the border for five years, sometimes in one country and sometimes in another. There was always war and people after us, so after five years we began to walk again. There were thousands of us, all walking south. Boys were walking everywhere. We walked in groups of five, fifteens, fifties, and five hundreds. There were twelve groups of five hundreds where I was.

We crossed deserts and mountains and forests. We crossed places where there was no plant living there. There was attack after attack after attack. Different groups of men attacked us. In every attack you lost someone you knew. One time we were attacked near a river and we all ran away and I ran into the bush and watched as thousands of boys ran into the river and only a few came out.

We found a place to camp out for a while and we did. But there was starvation there. There was no food. Bones were sticking out of us. It was not good. We would eat anything that would not kill you. One time we ate an antelope. We ate leaves.

So we began to walk again. We walked across a desert toward Kenya but when we got near to the border we were attacked again and that was a very bad time. They killed many of us that time. A bullet went through my cousin’s back and came out his front. You can still see the scars.

I was very tired then. I thought that was the end of my life. But some people working for the Red Cross sent trucks out into the desert from Kenya to pick us up. The trucks picked up the weakest ones first. After a week a truck picked me up and brought me to Kenya, and that was the end of that journey and the beginning of another one.

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