[1] Reading Response on: A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park

The story of the Lost Boys of Sudan is an extremely tragic one. The Lost Boys were roughly 20,000 refugee orphans who were caught in the middle of Sudan’s Civil War, which lasted from 1983 to 2005. In her amazing novel which was based on a true story, A Long Walk to Water, Linda Sue Park describes the Lost Boys’ story through the eyes of one child, Salva, who must overcome a series of enormous obstacles in order to survive. His tale is one of hardship, but eventual escape. Living the relatively sheltered life I live, it is extremely hard for me to even imagine how Salva survived.

Salva’s story begins when he is eleven and his village is attacked while he is at school. As gunshot after gunshot rings out, the schoolmaster shouts for the children to run. Terrified and not even knowing if his family is alive, Salva flees his home. "Go quickly, all of you," his teacher says. He tells them to go into the bush. "Not home. Don't run home. They will be going into the villages. Stay away from the villages-run into the brush." 

Salva joins a group of other refugees who are also attempting to escape the violence. He endures near starvation and terrible conditions. Fleeing from the fighting, he must run down a shrinking corridor. His village was in central Sudan, and so he runs between two armies, the rebels from Southern Sudan and the government forces from Northern Sudan. As both armies close in, he must get out of Sudan quickly or he will be drafted into one of the two armies or killed on the spot. He often wonders: "Where is my family? When will I see them again?" 

Eventually, he manages to find his uncle. They retreat, making narrow canoes to cross the Nile River. They narrowly escape the immediate violence by crossing the water. After braving crocodiles in the Nile River, the two must the face the incredibly harsh conditions of the desert. They persevere, but while crossing the desert, Salva’s uncle is shot and killed by a gang of marauding tribesmen with AK-47s. Salva is distraught, but must find a way to go on. In the desert, he reaches a refugee camp.

After all his struggles, Salva is selected for adoption by a family in Rochester, New York, but he never forgets his past. After ten years of life in America, Salva returns to Sudan in search of his mother and father, who, to his great joy, he disovers living in his old village. An adult, he founds Water for Sudan, a program in which schools in America sponsor wells for villages in Sudan.

All in all, I think that A Long Walk to Water was a fantastic, eye-opening book. It exposed me to what life was like in a third-world country in the midst of war, and how hard it is to survive in that kind of environment. Through the great obstacles that Salva was forced to overcome, A Long Walk to Water showed me what real hardship is like, and how far it is from anything that I have ever experienced. Even though I have read a great deal of history, this book opened my eyes to a terrible situation which I had never before heard about. Salva’s experience and the incredible strength he develops through his struggles are things that I will never forget.