A Long Walk to Water

The refugee camps, Kakuma in particular, are like prisons with their barbed wires—evidence of the scarcity that dominates life in this region and period. Even refugees’ belongings are not safe from marauders, who must be desperate themselves since it is highly unlikely that any of the refugees have anything of value. The camps are so overcrowded that anyone who leaves is barred from ever returning. In these camps, people from many different tribes, families, and communities are thrown together, demonstrating the fraught relationship between Identity and Displacement. For people whose identities are closely tied to the land on which they live, the condition of uprootedness is profoundly disorienting.

Things are a little different at Ifo refugee camp. Many Western aid workers come and go, sometimes staying for months. One of these aid workers, Michael, becomes one of the most important figures in Salva’s life. He teaches Salva the rudiments of English, which will later allow him to survive and become educated in the United States. In this way, Michael becomes a kind of family to Salva, who at this point believes he has lost all his relatives, and facilitates his introduction to a new family in the US. The Importance of Family is more evident at this point in the novel when Salva has no biological family left. The strangers who treat him as family make his future success possible. Michael also teaches Salva the sport of volleyball—a seemingly trivial pastime that nonetheless becomes important to Salva in the US, as it gives him a distraction from the anxieties of his life and helps him to make friends.

Salva gets his first big break in life when he is selected to go to America. To travel so far from home would have caused him grief before the war when his village and family made up the core of his identity. Now, however, he has been traveling for a long time and only wants to go somewhere safe. The theme of Perseverance as a Long Walk undergoes a transition here: Salva’s long walk to safety is coming to an end, and he will soon begin another long walk—one which will culminate in the organization Water for Sudan, as he returns home to bring a measure of stability to his people. Salva has never been on an airplane before, and he initially compares the plane to the only thing like it he knows—a bird—but he soon finds out it is something entirely different—evidence of the dramatic change his life is about to undergo.