They Poured Fire On Us From The Sky: The True Story of Three Lost Boys from Sudan

Benjamin’s village was attacked while he was herding goats. Hiding in the bushes, he watched gunmen destroy his home. Afterward, Benjamin managed to find his cousins Lino and Emmanuel. Once darkness fell, the elders advised the boys that it was not safe for them to stay there, and the boys joined the adults to walk in search of shelter. After a couple of days, the group arrived at a town called Tonj, where Benjamin found Benson, his cousin.

Benson was happy to be reunited with his cousins but was also very sick; his chest hurt, and he was unable to eat or keep walking. Kuany took him to see a rebel captain in another village, who gave Benson penicillin.

The group kept moving, crossing rivers, forests, and snake-infested swamps. Many died of exhaustion along the way. After two months of walking, they finally reached the Upper Nile region, where they had to cross through muddy waters before arriving at the river. They eventually crossed by boat in multiple batches, as crocodiles and hippopotamuses lay in wait in the waters. While they escaped these creatures’ jaws, the group was swarmed by mosquitoes in the reeds. As they crossed the river, Benson contemplated the homeland he was leaving behind, wondering whether he would ever see his parents again.

After crossing the Nile, the group walked to villages where the SPLA soldiers requested the villagers to give the children in the group some food. The group kept refreshing and refueling at the different villages they passed, stopping one last time at a town called Macdeng. This was the last place they would get food and rest before they began to traverse the Ajakageer desert, the most dangerous terrain they had encountered yet.

After crossing the Nile, water and food grew scarcer, and the group experienced increased hunger, thirst, and exhaustion. Benson struggled with a pink eye infection and lice infestation, both keeping him from sleeping properly at night.

The group experienced a stroke of luck when they ran into some SPLA soldiers who were being escorted by a water tanker. Some of the younger boys were allowed to ride the tanker. It was Benson’s first time on a vehicle, and he was initially terrified when it started moving. Boys also kept falling off the tanker, and the vehicle had to keep stopping to pick them up again.

When the tanker stopped in the middle of the night, Benson was alarmed to find the area littered with human skulls. The soldiers explained that they belonged to people who had died of thirst while crossing the desert. Later in the morning, the group came across more skulls under a tree, of people who stopped to rest there and never got up again. On one of the nights in the desert, lions attacked the group and tried to pull a boy off the tanker.

The tanker dropped the boys off at a village called Gumuro. The thousands in the group walking behind eventually caught up to boys, with many having perished of thirst along the way. After just a day’s rest, the group continued walking to reach the last town of Sudan before the Ethiopian border.

It would take three days to cross more desert and finally reach Pochala, the final town on the Ethiopian border, and Benjamin wondered how he would survive. He decided to be “strong like an elder” (83), willing himself to make it.

Many people fell down along the way and never got up again. When the group finally reached Pochala, they rested for a night before preparing to cross over, which would entail a 17-hour journey. A tired Benjamin was thrilled to hear that all the children would be taken across in an armed truck.

Benson befriended a young boy in the group who proved himself to be one of the bravest and strongest of them all, never complaining despite all the hardship and walking. However, Monyde contracted yellow fever and passed away in Pochala. Shortly after, Kuany was conscripted by the SPLA. Without both of them, Benson began to give up hope that he would survive.

The boys were taken to Panyido, a refugee camp in Ethiopia. They were originally told that there would be thousands of people there as well as a school; they would be safe. While Panyido did have thousands of people, there were only a few shelters made of sticks and branches and no school at all.

Emmanuel, Lino, Benjamin, and Benson stuck together at Panyido. People were unfriendly and violent, and Benson was denied water by everyone he asked. With not enough food, water, or medicine and no latrines, many died of common diseases like dysentery and diarrhea. The boys scavenged for anything they could eat, including grass, which they turned into soup; they ate this soup despite it making them sick.

The only clothes that Benson owned were his red nylon shorts and an old shirt he found in the trash. They became infested with lice, and when he tried to get rid of them by warming them near a fire, he accidentally burned a hole in the shorts. Despite this, they continued to be Benson’s favorite thing because they were a gift from his father.

Members of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) from Addis Ababa visited Panyido and were moved by the children’s plight. They promised to return with resources, but it was months before help arrived. Even then, life did not improve much at camp. Besides physical disease and illnesses, many young boys suffered from mental illness induced by all the trauma they had endured so far.

After Benson disappeared, the family looked for him relentlessly for an entire year. Meanwhile, the village attempted to rebuild itself, but a nearby village was attacked yet again just a year later. Alepho was sent to Angong’s place to help with the goats and discovered that Benjamin was also missing. He met a five-and-a-half-year-old girl there, just a year younger than him, and was warned by Angong not to tease or insult her about her limp. Later, Angong told Alepho that the girl was raped by a grown man when her village was attacked.

Alepho didn’t enjoy his time at Angong’s and walked back home by himself one day. A year after Benson’s disappearance, his father set out for Toch to see if Benson was there. A week later, the family received news that he had passed away. Alepho still doesn’t know the manner of his father’s death. However, upon hearing the news, he fell sick himself. Even after he got better, his heart continued to ache for his father, and his mother decided not to send him back to Angong’s again.

A year after Benson arrived at Panyido, the camp finally started a primary school. Classes were held by Sudanese adults who used charcoal to write out the English alphabet on cans. The English teacher told Benson that he had to answer the question “Why?” with “Because.” However, Benson knew no further English, and when he answered his math teacher’s query about his lateness to class this way, he was punished for his insolence.

At Panyido, Benson met a man named Kuot who knew Benson’s family back in Juol. Kuot’s right leg had been amputated, and it was tough for him to fetch water or take care of himself, so Benson moved in with him to help him out. Life was better with more food and an education, but Benson still dreamed of the day he could return to Sudan.

A little after Alepho’s father died, Juol was suddenly attacked. Alepho managed to survive by hiding in the bush, and he then walked a hundred miles to Tonj country with the rest of the survivors. He found his five-year-old half-brother, Peter, there, and in another town called Tiet, he found an older cousin, Joseph, and his older brother, Yier, who was now an SPLA soldier. Alepho was relieved to have someone older around again and was dismayed when Yier was called away to fight.

Alepho continued to move south with another group of soldiers. It was a difficult journey, and many died of snakebites and starvation along the way. They even had to watch out for hyena attacks at night. Finally, they reached a town called Yirol, where 200 boys were given shelter in a cement building. The town was bombed every single day, but Alepho and the other boys managed to survive by following the soldiers’ instructions to lie still whenever they heard a plane.

A bomb finally fell extremely close to the shelter. Luckily, it didn’t explode, but the soldiers decided that it was not safe for the boys to stay there anymore, and they began walking again. Things were hard for Peter, who cried often and was terribly homesick. Alepho counseled him to be stronger, as he wasn’t in his mother’s house anymore; he had to be tougher to survive.

The group reached the Upper Nile region and were ferried across the river in motorboats. They were told that they were being taken to Palataka, which had a missionary school and where they would be safe. They had already crossed 400 miles by this point and had to cross 200 more to first get to a town called Torit. The group stopped at Gemmeize for the night, and the soldiers managed to commandeer some trucks and order the drivers to transport the boys to Torit. On their way, the group passed through numerous villages that had been destroyed. Alepho gravely contemplated the complicated, ongoing war, which involved “slavery, apartheid, racism, segregation and tribalism” (123).

Alepho was among the first set of boys to arrive at Torit. On the first night, everyone slept outside on blankets. Alepho loved his; it was “the strongest, the most beautiful and the best thing [he] had ever owned” (125).

The boys wandered all around town even though they were warned about live mines. A market slowly grew in the center of the town, and Alepho and Joseph started a business by collecting and selling mangoes. After a couple of months, the boys moved once more to Palataka in the south, where they were meant to stay until the war was over. Once Alepho arrived there and settled in with a group of boys, he noticed a change in himself: He moved from survival mode to actively trying to fit in.

Food was scarce at Palataka, and the boys often went days without any. When they heard about places in Ethiopia that were supposedly flush with United Nations resources, the boys felt sad, as no volunteers visited them. The adults encouraged the boys to work and give themselves a sense of purpose, so they chopped wood and helped build houses and latrines.

By the second year at Palataka, a school finally opened, but there were only six teachers for the thousands of boys. Alepho found it difficult to learn English and was especially discouraged by the teachers hitting him for making mistakes. Two years into life at Palataka, when Alepho was nine and Joseph was 11, the latter decided that they needed to escape—they would go back to Torit and find Yier. Joseph asserted that Peter was too young to survive the journey, which didn’t feel right to Alepho. Nevertheless, he waited for Joseph to come up with a plan.

Benjamin struggled for the first eight months in Panyido without enough food, shelter, or people to help him. Eventually, the UN high commissioner visited and took note of the situation and sent across more resources. Schools opened up for the younger boys, with the older boys needing to help out with work before attending school.

One day, as Benjamin was helping collect firewood, he heard shouts warning of an approaching lion and started to flee. As he ran, a piece of dry wood got stuck in his leg, which grew infected. No medicine helped his condition, with the clinic explaining that the trees and the wood in the area had been poisoned by the bombs.

After three years, life had become tolerable for Benson. However, in the summer of 1991, the EPLA (Ethiopian People’s Liberation Army) overthrew the government and ordered the refugees to leave their country. Large groups walked back to the border intending to make their way across the river Gilo. As they waited to cross the banks, an SPLA soldier arrived to inform Benson’s group that they ought to cross before the EPLA caught up with them.

Teachers began sending the boys across in canoes, but it would take days for all 20,000 of them to cross. Those who crossed over waited on the Sudanese side for the others. However, on the third day, the EPLA arrived and attacked those still on their side of the river. Many who attempted to escape by jumping into the river were killed by crocodiles.

Between the survivors, the group who made it across, and refugees from the Itang and Dima camps in Ethiopia, the group across the Gilo now made up a staggering 60,000, and they walked for days to cross the desert again. Benson lost track of Benjamin and Lino. Emmanuel eventually left again on foot, headed for another town in Sudan with a teacher, and Benson was left alone again. For two months, he waited at different camps for food to arrive by plane, trying to find Benjamin and Lino. The food eventually arrived, and Benson found another cousin, Athieng. He went to live with her, happy to be reunited with some family.