A Long Walk To Water By Linda Sue Park

“ Where is my family?” (9), that is the question that so many people living in Sudan had, just how Salva had asked a million times. A Long Walk to Water written by Linda Sue Park is a true story about the war crisis in Sudan. An 11 year old boy named Salva Dut has to leave everything behind, even his family when the gunfire from the war hit his village of Loun-Ariik (Dinka village). Salva walked for months and months across an arid desert to reach safety at a refugee camp in Ethiopia only to be kicked out. Then when he moves to another refugee camp in Kenya, he is chosen among many others to go to America where he now lives with his American family. But that still never filled the heart ache. Many people died from the war crisis, but some were …show more content…
He had nobody on his journey to safety, not even his family. Until one day while he was walking in the wide open desert, he met a young boy around his age named Marial. They became friends, but it wouldn’t last for long. “ Marial was gone” (40). Salva and the others in his group thought that Marial had gotten taken away by a lion, because it was lion country and there was no sign of him anywhere. But before Marial had been taken away, while Salva and him were walking in the desert. A man had called out Salva’s name. It was Salva’s uncle. His uncle used to fight in the army, and he was known to be a good leader. Since he was such a good leader, Salva’s group made him their leader. This arrangement was good for a while, but yet again it would not last. Men from the Nuer tribe came up to his uncle, robbed him along with the whole group and proceeded to tie him up to a tree. At that moment “three shots rang out” (63). Then the men ran away and the group was left flabbergasted, and without a leader. Now that Marial and his uncle were gone, Salva felt empty inside again. It reminded him that there was nobody there for him, he often felt like nobody cared about him. Then he remember what his uncle had told him “...few people survived the attack on the village” (60). And that made him feel even worse. “He was alone”, that's what he often thought to himself. So why not keep moving forward …show more content…
By now Salva had been in an Ethiopian refugee camp for about six years. The Ethiopian government were the ones who ran the camp, so when the government started to fail they had to shut the camp down. The word would soon be spread throughout the entire camp, and government guards would be coming to push the refugees back to Sudan. But Salva wasn’t going to let that happen. When the large group of refugees reached a river that was full of crocodiles, the guards started to fire their guns as a way to shoo them away. Salva took this moment of chaos as an opportunity to escape. All he did was walk away, and “crowds of other boys followed him” (80). He had no idea where to go, but he knew that if he went back to Ethiopia, he would be recruited by the rebels. So he chose to go South, to Kenya. His uncle had told him about a refugee camp there, before he got killed. And all those boys followed Salva, they had trusted him as their leader to save them. Once Salva and the boys reached the camp in Kenya, Salva learned that America would take people from this camp and move them to America for a better life. So he applied. A couple days had went by, and nothing happened until a boy named Michael told him that his name was on the list today. He was going to America. Even though he was now in America, he still wanted to help the fight against the water crisis in