Dave Eggers - What Is The What

— What isn't possible, boy? he demanded.-See where we are? You tell me what isn't possible at this time in Africa!

But I had no reason to distrust the UN. They had been feeding us at Kakuma for years. There was not enough food, but they were the ones providing for everyone, and thus it seemed nonsensical that they would kill us after all this time.

— Yes, he reasoned, — but see, perhaps now the food has run out. The food is gone, there's no more money, and Khartoum has paid the UN to kill us. So the UN gets two things: they get to save food, and they are paid to get rid of us.

— But how will they get away with it?

— That's easy, Achak. They say that we caught a disease only the Dinka can get. There are always illnesses unique to certain people, and this is what will happen. They'll say there was a Dinka plague, and that all the Sudanese are dead. This is how they'll justify killing every last one of us.

— That's impossible, I said.

— Is it? he asked.-Was Rwanda impossible?

I still thought that Gop's theory was unreliable, but I also knew that I should not forget that there were a great number of people who would be happy if the Dinka were dead. So for a few days, I did not make up my mind about the head count. Meanwhile, public sentiment was solidifying against our participation, especially when it was revealed that the fingers of all those counted, after being counted, would be dipped in ink.

— Why the ink? Gop asked. I didn't know.

— The ink is a fail-safe measure to ensure the Sudanese will be exterminated.

I said nothing, and he elaborated. Surely if the UN did not kill us Dinka while in the lines, he theorized, they would kill us with this ink on the fingers. How could the ink be removed? It would, he thought, enter our bodies when we ate.

— This seems very much like what they did to the Jews, Gop said.

People spoke a lot about the Jews in those days, which was odd, considering that a short time before, most of the boys I knew thought the Jews were an extinct race. Before we learned about the Holocaust in school, in church we had been taught rather crudely that the Jews had aided in the killing of Jesus Christ. In those teachings, it was never intimated that the Jews were a people still inhabiting the earth. We thought of them as mythological creatures who did not exist outside the stories of the Bible.

The night before the census, the entire series of fences, almost a mile long, was torn down. No one took responsibility, but many were quietly satisfied.

In the end, after countless meetings with the Kenyan leadership at the camp, the Sudanese elders were convinced that the head count was legitimate and was needed to provide better services to the refugees. The fences were rebuilt, and the census was conducted a few weeks later. But in a way, those who feared the census were correct, in that nothing very good came from it. After the count, there was less food, fewer services, even the departure of a few smaller programs. When they were done counting, the population of Kakuma had decreased by eight thousand people in one day.

How had the UNHCR miscounted our numbers before the census? The answer is called recycling. Recycling was popular at Kakuma and is favored at most refugee camps, and any refugee anywhere in the world is familiar with the concept, even if they have a different name for it. The essence of the idea is that one can leave the camp and re-enter as a different person, thus keeping his first ration card and getting another when he enters again under a new name. This means that the recycler can eat twice as much as he did before, or, if he chooses to trade the extra rations, he can buy or otherwise obtain anything else he needs and is not being given by the UN-sugar, meat, vegetables. The trading resulting from extra ration cards provided the basis for a vast secondary economy at Kakuma, and kept thousands of refugees from anemia and related illnesses. At any given time, the administrators of Kakuma thought they were feeding eight thousand more people than they actually were. No one felt guilty about this small numerical deception.

The ration-card economy made commerce possible, and the ability of different groups to manipulate and thrive within the system led soon enough to a sort of social hierarchy at Kakuma. At the top of the ladder as a group were the Sudanese, because our sheer numbers dominated the camp. But on an individual basis, the Ethiopians were the top social caste-a few thousand representatives of that country's middle class who were forced out with Mengistu. They lived in Kakuma I, and owned a good portion of the prosperous businesses. Their rivals in trade were the Somalis and the Eritreans, who found a way to coexist with the Ethiopians, though their countrymen were at odds with each other at home. Meanwhile there was tension between the Somalis and the Bantu, a long-suffering group who had been transplanted from another Kenyan camp, Dadaab. The Bantu had first been made slaves in Mozambique and in the 1800s migrated to Somalia, where they endured two hundred years of persecution. They were not allowed to own land, or given access to political representation at any level. When civil war engulfed Somalia in the 1990s their situation worsened, as their farms and homes were raided, their men killed, and their women raped. There were eventually some seventeen thousand Bantu in Kakuma, and even there they were not always safe, as their numbers brought resentment from many Sudanese, who considered the camp theirs.

Just below the merchants were the SPLA commanders, and under them, the Ugandans-only four hundred or so, most of them affiliated with Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army, a rebel group at odds with the ruling National Resistance Movement. The Ugandans couldn't go back; most were well-known at home and had prices on their heads. Sprinkled around the camp there were Congolese, Burundians, Eritreans, and a few hundred Rwandans who many suspected had been participants in the genocide and were unwelcome in their homeland.

Somewhere near the bottom of it all sat the unaccompanied minors, the Lost Boys. We had no money, no family, and little means to attain either. One step up from this low rung could be gained if one found his way into a family. Living with Gop Chol had afforded me some status and a few privileges, but I knew that once Gop's family arrived, it would be difficult to spread the family's rations around, and the many items necessary-with so many young girls in the home-would mean that there needed to be more income in our home, and an extra ration card was the beginning of the flow of wealth.

— One of us will have to recycle once the girls get here, Gop said one day.

And I knew this to be true. I received my own rations every week, and when his wife and daughters arrived, Gop would qualify for a family ration. But the rations for a family of five would be insufficient, and we knew that the prime time to recycle again would be immediately after the census, when there would be extra vigilance about how much food we would be given.

— I will go, I said, and I was sure of it.

I would go as soon as his wife and girls arrived, I announced. Gop pretended to be surprised by my offer, but I knew he expected this of me. Recycling was always done by the young men at Kakuma, and I wanted to prove my worth to the family, to earn their respect shortly after they arrived.

For the weeks that followed, Achor Achor and I spent many nights lying outside my shelter, doing our homework in the crisp blue light of the moon, plotting my recycling trip.

— You'll need extra pants, Achor Achor said.

I had no idea why I would need pants, but Achor Achor enlightened me: I would need pants because with the pants I would get the goat.

— One pair of pants should do it, he surmised. I asked Achor Achor why I needed a goat.