Book Review: A Long Walk to Water, by Linda Sue Park, published 11/15/2010, 133 pages (Kindle edition), Lexile 720, awards and honors listed below* Recommended for ages 11 and up, or grades 6-8 through high school. Please note: although this book is in the Pageturner library, it will require additional student requests for purchases to be made.

“The war had started two years earlier. Salva did not understand much about it, but he knew that rebels from the southern part of Sudan, where he and his family lived, were fighting against the government, which was based in the north. Most of the people who lived in the north were Muslim, and the government wanted all of Sudan to become a Muslim country—a place where the beliefs of Islam were followed. But the people in the south were of different religions and did not want to be forced to practice Islam. They began fighting for independence from the north. The fighting was scattered all around southern Sudan, and now the war had come to where Salva lived.” (1)

A Long Walk to Water starts here, with a simple explanation of war.  We meet Salva, last name Dut, in 1985, when he is 11 years old.  Salva is altogether real, an adult now living in Rochester, NY, but his story is much longer than the book, which is quite short and an easy read.  The other main character is fictitious; her name is Nya, who also lives in South Sudan. In the book she is first depicted in 2008.  Salva is of the Dinka tribe, while Nya is Nuer--tribes living in close proximity, differentiated only by their scarifications, and historically, enemies. Nya, too, is 11 years old when the reader first meets her.  She has to walk 8 to 16 miles a day, in two long trips, to get water for her family, and the water, taken from a pond where animals also drink, is dangerously unclean.  We begin to understand the threat of unclean water when her younger sister Akeer gets sick with something that regularly recurs in survivors. “Nya knew many people who suffered from the same illness. First cramps and stomachache, then diarrhea. Sometimes fever, too. Most of the adults and older children who fell ill recovered at least enough to work again, although they might continue to suffer off and on for years.” And Akeer, too, must be trained to walk for water, as Nya will eventually be of a marriageable age, requiring her to leave her family. 

While Salva is in class, gunfire explodes in his village.  His teacher exhorts the boys to “run into the bush,” and Salva does.  He runs so far, he loses track of his family.  With a group of strangers who are of his tribe, he begins an endless trek; they aim to reach Ethiopia’s refugee camps.  He meets up with his uncle, who, having a gun, acts as the group’s leader and hunts food. Salva befriends a boy named Mariel, of the Jur-chol tribe, who will be lost to tigers along the way. Then a Nuer gang attacks, killing his uncle in front of his eyes. He will walk, with fewer and fewer people, more than a thousand miles.  It’s the desert that kills so many, when they run out of food and water. When they do finally reach the refugee camp, conditions are worse than dire:

“How could there be this many people in the world? More than hundreds. More than thousands. Thousands upon thousands. People in lines and masses and clumps. People milling around, standing, sitting or crouching on the ground, lying down with their legs curled up because there was not enough room to stretch out. The refugee camp at Itang was filled with people of all ages—men, women, girls, small children. . . . But most of the refugees were boys and young men who had run away from their villages when the war came. They had run because they were in double danger: from the war itself and from the armies on both sides. Young men and sometimes even boys were often forced to join the fighting, which was why their families and communities—including Salva’s schoolmaster—had sent the boys runninginto the bush at the first sign of fighting.

“I need only to get through the rest of this day, he told himself. This day and no other. If someone had told Salva that he would live in the camp for six years, he would never have believed it.”

After six years, Ethiopia decides to end the camp by any means necessary.  People are forced to the river and shot as they try to cross. Many die. “Later, he would learn that at least a thousand people had died trying to cross the river that day, drowned or shot or attacked by crocodiles. How was it that he was not one of the thousand? Why was he one of the lucky ones? The walking began again. Walking—but to where? No one knew anything for sure. Where was Salva supposed to go?”

Salva is resigned to walk again, and this time he leads 1,500 boys to refugee camps in Kenya. It takes them 18 months to walk 658 miles (2) because they so often find themselves walking in circles, and 300 perish along the way.

“Ifo refugee camp, Kenya, 1992–96 Salva was now twenty-two years old. For the past five years he had been living in refugee camps in northern Kenya: first at the Kakuma camp, then at Ifo. Kakuma had been a dreadful place, isolated in the middle of a dry, windy desert. Tall fences of barbed wire enclosed the camp; you weren’t allowed to leave unless you were leaving for good. It felt almost like a prison. Seventy thousand people lived at Kakuma. Some said it was more, eighty or ninety thousand. There were families who had managed to escape together, but again, as in Ethiopia, most of the refugees were orphaned boys and young men.”  The international community will call these survivors “the lost boys of Sudan.” Salva is now 22 years old and has been living in limbo for 11 years. But the kindness of a refugee aide from Ireland offers him hope when, “It was hard to keep hope alive when there was so little to feed it… “Salva learned two things from Michael: how to read and how to play volleyball.”  What could be better than literacy and physical play? Michael apparently also recommended Salva to be one of 3,000 young men and boys who would garner the opportunity to go to America.  

Salva had been living in Rochester for 6 years, studying business in college, when he learned his father was still alive, but very ill in hospital.  He gets on a plane for Sudan and is reunited:

“He learned more about his father's illness. Years of drinking contaminated water had left Mawien Dut's entire digestive system riddled with guinea worms. Sick and weak, he had walked almost three hundred miles to come to this clinic, and was barely alive by the time he got there.”

After visiting the rest of his family, intact but for his youngest brother, he returns to NY and struggles to find some way to help those at home.  For three years, he talks to people, establishes contacts with funding, and finally decides to construct wells so people will have clean drinking water. And here Salva’s story intersects with Nya’s.  

Nya calls the machine drilling for water “the red giraffe.”  She derides these workers for thinking there could possibly be water where the ground is always completely dry.  And when the first gush of water sputters up, she is chagrined to see it’s almost all mud.  But then--!  Clean water! She sees the leader of the team is unscarred but not Nuer; he must be Dinka.  She thanks him as Salva introduces himself.  Shortly thereafter, a girls' school opens, as now they don’t need to trek for water anymore; they have time to learn.

The book praises steady perseverance and ends hopefully.  But war has returned to South Sudan since, and with a vengeance--for the same reason Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.  A huge oil field, worth some $5 billions, was discovered under Gazan sands in 2019. (3) In Sudan, Chevron discovered similarly huge oil reserves in South Sudan in 1978, which the Islamic government ironically named “Unity.” (4) 

Today, more than 10 million people have been displaced in South Sudan. (5) The parallels between South Sudan and Gaza are so similar (6) because the world will run out of oil and gas long before we’ve changed the dynamic to have any other equally widespread source of energy. (7) These wars are therefore inevitable and will not be stopped any time soon.  And who controls what remains will rule the planet, which is also severely threatened by climate chaos, which is nature’s answer to human insanity. And more than half of the U.S. populations remains completely unaware, having been lulled into complacency by mainstream media.

Back to A Long Walk to Water, for an update. In twenty years, Salva Dut’s company has completed 628 wells with local workers through donations from the U.S. and around the world. They have also rehabbed over 400 wells, provided 827 training sessions in hygiene, created four water storage and distribution systems, and built 14 public toilets for multi-person use. While it has become increasingly dangerous to continue construction, Salva’s company will go on for as long as they can. You can learn more about their efforts to bring clean water to Sudan, here. (8)

FOR A TEACHERS GUIDE TO PRESENTING THIS BOOK FOR 7TH GRADE, PLEASE SEE: https://teachertalk107.wordpress.com/2018/06/16/a-long-walk-to-water/

image.png 1.37 MB
  _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

*2012 Black-Eyed Susan Award Nominee (MA)
 2010 Book Links Lasting Connections
 2012 Flicker Tale Children’s Book Award (ND)
 2013 Golden Sower Award Nominee (NE)
 2012 Great Lakes Book Award Nominee (MI)
 2013 Iowa Children’s Choice Award Nominee
 IRA Notable Books for a Global Society
 2011 Jane Addams Children’s Book Award (NY)
 Junior Library Guild Selection
 2012 Kentucky Blue Grass Award Nominee
 2012-2013 Lamplighter Award Nominee
 2012 Maine Student Book Award Nominee
 2012-2013 Maud Hart Lovelace Award Nominee (MN)
 2011 NCSS/CBC Notable Social Studies Trade Book for Young People
 2013 Nene Award Nominee (HI)
 2013 North Carolina Children’s Book Award Nominee
 2013 Nutmeg Award Nominee (CT)
 2016 Oregon Battle of the Books Nominee
 2013 Pennsylvania Young Reader’s Choice Award Nominee
 2015 Rebecca Caudill Young Readers Book Award Master List (IL)
 2013 Sasquatch Award Nominee (WA)
 Shalom Readers Book Club List
 2013 South Carolina Association of School Librarians Award Nominee
 2013 Sunshine State Young Readers Award Master List (FL)
 2013-2014 Virginia Readers’ Choice Award Nominee
 2012 Volunteer State Book Award Runner-Up (TN)
 2013 Wyoming Indian Paintbrush Nominee
 2013 Young Hoosier Book Award Nominee (IN)

 (1) Conflict in Sudan began as early as 1955.  An agreement was reached in 1972, but in 1983 was abrogated when the North imposed Sharia law on the South, abolishing the Southern Sudan Autonomous Region whose population traditionally embraced various faiths freely.  Therefore the rebellion of 1985 is called the Second Sudanese Civil War. During this time the North also attacked its own people in the Nuba Mountains. This war, too, ended in another agreement, in 2005. “Throughout, the conflict was marked by violence against civilians, which caused the deaths of a rough estimates of 1 – 2 million civilians, many of them a result of starvation and disease.” The government conducted war “on the cheap” by using tribal militias who wreaked havoc especially on the Dinka tribe’s civilians. “In 1987, when the militia unexpectedly encountered a large SPLA unit and suffered many fatalities, they took reprisals on displaced civilians in the south-eastern Darfur town of ed Da’ien, killing more than one thousand, many by burning alive inside railway wagons. Large-scale killing and displacement reached a peak in 1988. This episode of mass atrocities began to subside when the areas accessible to the militia had been thoroughly ravaged, and because SPLA units penetrated the area and could now challenge the army… [A]id workers reported on death rates in the camps that were higher, by an order of magnitude, than those recorded in other famines of the 1980s. The fact that internationally-donated aid had stood untouched in railway wagons for over a year, just yards from a camp where children were starving to death, caused outrage.” https://sites.tufts.edu/atrocityendings/2015/08/07/sudan-2nd-civil-war-darfur/

(2) https://distancecalculator.globefeed.com/Distance_Between_Countries_Result.asp?fromplace=Ethiopia&toplace=Kenya

(3) “Both off the coast and beneath the occupied lands of Palestine, over 3 billion barrels of oil are estimated to exist, according to a 2019 U.N. report. These numbers don’t even include the gas potential in Palestine. The Levant Basin, which sits in the Mediterranean, is estimated to have some 1.7 billion barrels of oil while over 1.5 billion barrels are estimated to lie beneath the occupied West Bank area that Handala calls home. Despite the billions of dollars these resources offer if extracted, Handala would prefer the oil and gas stay where they are—the world cannot afford more fossil fuel extraction… Israel, on the other hand, hasn’t wasted time in claiming these dirty resources for itself. On October 29, its government approved12 licenses for six companies to look for more gas fields offshore…Since the launch of the war between Russia and Ukrainein 2022, Europe has been in need of an energy provider that can fill in the gaps. For years, Israel has been trying to build a pipeline to export gas to European nations.” https://atmos.earth/this-genocide-is-about-oil/

(4) “Chevron discovered the two major oil basins, Muglad and Melut, and then in 1978 the oilfield in the Muglad Basin near Bentiu, which the Nimeiri government named al Wihda or “Unity”… (“Following the discovery of uranium at Hofrat en-Nahas in Bahr El Ghazal in 1961, the government had redrawn the western Bahr El Ghazal/Darfur border to give these mineral deposits to the northern state of Darfur. Although the Addis Ababa agreement (1972) provided that this territory should be returned to Bahr El Ghazal, it never was. Many pointed to this annexation of mineral resources to the north by the central government as a precedent for what would happen in the oilfields.”) “Chevron sold out in 1992 as the Sudanese government began to look for a way out of its serious economic decline: in 1990 the government, defaulting in debt service payments on the staggering debt incurred by President Nimeiri, was suspended by the IMF, a blow to its ability to borrow money. The Islamist-military government, desperate for oil revenues, had none because the oilfields were mostly in rebel-controlled areas…Many contemporaneous reports confirm the expulsion of Nuer and Dinka from the early oilfield areas of Western Upper Nile. Anthropologist Sharon E. Hutchinson lived in Tharlual, where a Leek Nuer chief resided, during her fieldwork among the Leek Nuer in the early 1980s. She described their clearance:

“‘By late 1984 I had learned that my principal field sites in both eastern and western Nuerland had been destroyed. Tharlual had been overrun and razed by a band of northern Baggara (Misseriya) Arabs that had been armed with automatic weapons and ammunition by the government and instructed to clear the oil-rich lands of the Western Upper Nile of its Nilotic inhabitants.’” https://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/sudan1103/10.htm

(5) “The power struggle between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) erupted into a large-scale conflict in April 2023 and has been driving humanitarian needs in the country ever since. Conservative estimates say the conflict has killed at least 15,500 people, while some estimates are as high as 150,000, and counting...Before the conflict, Sudan was already experiencing a severe humanitarian crisis. Long-term political instability and economic pressures meant that 15.8 million people were in need of humanitarian aid. The conflict has only exacerbated these conditions, leaving almost 25 million people — more than half of Sudan’s population — in need. The brutal conflict since April 2023 has forced millions of people to flee their homes, pushing the number of displaced people to around 12 million by June 2024. The vast majority—over 10 million people—remain within Sudan, representing the largest displacement crisis in the world.
"Amidst mass displacement and reports of mass killings, humanitarian access has been severely curtailed, making it extremely hard for aid to reach vulnerable communities.”  https://www.rescue.org/article/fighting-sudan-what-you-need-know-about-crisis

(6) “Many of the actors that have fueled the current war in Sudan are also complicit in strengthening ties with Israel, and thus in maintaining Israel’s war on Gaza. Key among them is the UAE: In addition to supporting the RSF in Sudan, the UAE was one of the first regional states to cement normalization with Israel through the 2020 Abraham Accords. This normalization deal has worked to expand trade and business partnerships, and strengthen military and intelligence coordination between Israel and other reactionary regimes of the region — emboldening Israel to ramp up its violence against Palestinians in the years since…”  N.B. The Abraham Accords were negotiated and settled as a prize of the Trump administration, the crowning achievement of his son-in-law Jared Kushner.

“Throughout the war of the past year and a half in Sudan, the RSF has also been seen using Israeli-made weapons. Leaders of the RSF — known as a predominantly Arab and sectarian militia — have expressed affinity not with Palestinians, but with Israel. Just before the war, in February 2023, Israel’s foreign minister visited Sudan and met with Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the leader of the 2021 coup and head of the SAF, for normalization talks. Israel’s support for counterrevolutionary forcesin Sudan should not come as a surprise, as Sudan’s 2018 uprising featured calls for solidarity with Palestine and an end to normalization with Israel, threatening to upend the region’s reactionary status quo. https://truthout.org/articles/from-regional-uprisings-to-reactionary-regimes-how-sudan-relates-to-palestine/

(7) “According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) International Energy Outlook 2023 (IEO2023), the global supplyof crude oil, other liquid hydrocarbons, and biofuels is expected to be adequate to meet the world's demand for liquid fuels through 2050. There is substantial uncertainty about the levels of future liquid fuels supply and demand.” https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=38&t=6


(8) “5 MILLION people in South Sudan live without daily access to safe water and sanitation services.Children, often girls, spend their days walking for water. They walk an average of 3.7 miles per trip. Sometimes they make multiple trips to obtain water, carrying up to 40 pounds of water each time. 10 percent of people in South Sudan have access to basic sanitation services…We help drill, maintain, and restore water wells so the people in South Sudan have access to clean water all year-round. We make sure to educate communities about hygiene so that the clean water from existing wells doesn’t get contaminated due to poor hygiene practices. Our sanitation program makes sure people have access to latrines so communities can prevent the spread of diseases…Water has the power to change lives. By empowering communities, hiring in-country employees, and collaborating with local government leaders, we are working together to create sustainable and holistic solutions.” https://www.waterforsouthsudan.org/