Dave Eggers - What Is The What

I would see a boy and would position myself under him, placing my hands under his arms and then I would lift him upward. I did this knowing that once I did so, that boy would be safe. He would live and breathe the air above again once I had sent him to the surface. While I did this, a part of me worried that I would tire. There was so much sending-up to do, and I was underwater for so long-surely I would tire and some boys would be lost. But my worries were unfounded. In the dream I never tired, and I did not need to breathe. I moved under the water, from boy to boy to boy, and I lifted them to the air and the light.

— Achak, they whispered to me, and I pushed them to the surface.

— Valentine, they whispered, and I pushed them up.

— Dominic! they whispered, and I pushed them up and up.

I was now eighteen years old. I had been at Kakuma six years. I was still living with Gop Chol and his family, and during that time I had dreamt this dream perhaps a hundred times, and its message was clear to me: I was responsible to the next line of boys. We were all treading water together, and I was meant to teach. So at Kakuma camp, I became a teacher, and at the same time, I became Dominic.

The name Valentine had been supplanted, at least in the minds of many, by the name Dominic, and though I did not prefer this nickname, it stuck to me tenaciously. It was my association with Miss Gladys, my own teacher and by all accounts the most desirable woman at Kakuma, that brought the name Dominic upon me, and so I made no complaints. Miss Gladys was my drama instructor and later my history teacher, a young woman of extraordinary light and grace. It was Miss Gladys who brought me in touch with Tabitha, and it was Miss Gladys who brought me to the lights of Nairobi and to the potential for escape from the winds and drought of Kakuma. It was while holding the hand of Miss Gladys that I listened to Deborah Agok, a traveling midwife who knew the fate of my family and my town. This was an eventful time for me and for so many young men at Kakuma, even though that year in southern Sudan, the Dinka who remained would know a horrible famine, created by God and helped along by Khartoum.

El Nino had brought about two years of drought, and aid was desperately needed in the south. Hundreds of thousands in Bahr al-Ghazal faced starvation, and Bashir took this opportunity to ban all flights over southern Sudan. The region was effectively cut off from relief, and when it did make its way through, it was first intercepted by the SPLA and local chiefs, who did not always see to its equitable distribution. All this made the prospect of living at Kakuma even more attractive, and the camp's population swelled. But once a person had escaped the mayhem of Sudan, and once that person was legitimately recognized as part of Kakuma, entitled to its services and protection, there was little to do but pass the time. Besides school, this meant clubs, theatrical productions, HIV-awareness programs, puppetry-even pen pals from Japan.

The Japanese were very interested in Kakuma on many levels, and it started with the pen pal project. The letters from the Japanese schoolchildren were written in English, and it was difficult to know whose English was worse. Just how much information was actually transmitted from Kenya to Tokyo and Kyoto was debatable, but it was important to me, and to the hundred others who participated. After a year of letters, the Japanese boys and girls who had been writing arrived at Kakuma one day, blinking in the dust and shielding their eyes from the sun. They stayed for three days and visited our classrooms and watched traditional dancing from the Sudanese and Somali zones of the camp, and I was not sure how much stranger the camp could become. I had seen Germans, Canadians, people so white they looked like candles.

But the Japanese continued coming, and continued giving, with a particular interest in the youth at the camp, which of course accounted for about 60 percent of Kakuma's residents. The Japanese built the Kakuma Hospital, which could treat the cases that couldn't wait for Lopiding. They built the Kakuma community library and donated thousands of basketballs, soccer balls, volleyballs, and uniforms so the youth might play these sports with a degree of dignity and panache.

The Lutheran World Federation was the primary administrator of many of the cultural projects, and found their instructors among the Kenyans and the Sudanese. I first joined the LWF's public speaking and debating club, hoping it would help with my English. Soon after, I joined the Youth and Culture program, and this would grow into a job for me. In 1997 I became Kakuma I's youth leader. This was a paying occupation, something very few of my friends, and none of the children in my Kakuma family, possessed. Youth was considered anyone between seven and twenty-four years old, so in our part of the camp, this was six thousand youths. I was the liaison between the UNHCR and these kids, and Achor Achor was more impressed by this job than he had been years before, when I was a burial boy.

— I'll be here if you need advice, he said.

Achor Achor had just acquired glasses, and looked very studious and far more serious than before. Everything that left his mouth seemed suddenly to carry the weight of deep contemplation and far-reaching intellect.

— I will, I said.

As the youth leader and coordinator of Kakuma I's youth activities, I came into contact with Miss Gladys, who soon every boy at Kakuma would know and would think about often at night and alone.

She was assigned to be the instructor for the Drama Club, of which I was a member and the ostensible student director. Twelve members of the group were present on our first day, ten boys and two girls, and for this one meeting I was the director. We were told by the LWF that the group's adult sponsor and instructor would arrive for our second meeting. It was because I was the director by default that I could try to convince Maria to attend. I went to visit her one afternoon after school, two days before the first meeting. I found her hanging the laundry behind her adoptive family's shelter.-Hello Sleeper, she said.

She did not hide her foul mood. She never did. When she was down, her shoulders slumped, and her face frowned almost comically. She had not been to school in weeks; the man acting as her father had decided it was too problematic for her to both attend classes and properly help with the chores at home. His wife was pregnant, and he insisted that Maria be on hand should she need anything. As the baby grew within the womb of his wife, he said, she would need more help as the weeks and months went on. School, he said, was a luxury an orphan girl like her could not afford.

Neither Maria nor I had hopes that she would be a long-term member of the drama group, but I convinced her to come to the first meeting. We arrived together and, with the other members, we read aloud the first few scenes of a play Miss Gladys had written. Maria, playing the lead, a woman beaten by her husband, took to it immediately. I knew she was a spirited person, for she had saved my life on the night of the spilled stars. But I did not suspect she had the soul of an actress.

Maria attended the second meeting of the group, but I do not remember much about what she said or did, for this heralded the arrival of Miss Gladys. When Miss Gladys emerged, I ceded all authority and thereafter barely spoke at all.

Miss Gladys was a young Kenyan, long necked and favoring floor-length skirts that swished flamboyantly as she walked. She immediately admitted that she did not have vast theatrical experience, and yet was in every way a performer, a woman who knew the power of every word she breathed and gesture she made. In her mind and in reality, there were no moments when she was not being watched.