Review of "A Long Walk to Water" by Linda Sue Park

I decided to read this book in order to learn a bit about tropical Africa.

The main storyline is of a Dinka boy named Salva who loses his parents as a result of the Sudanese Civil War and walks from his school near Loun-Ariik in Tonj County, southern Sudan all the way to a refugee camp on the Ethiopian border in 1985 along with more than thirty other refugees. The refugee camp is closed with a wave of mass murder by the new Ethiopian government in 1991 and Salva ends up in a Kenyan refugee camp, where he learns the English alphabet. Ultimately, in 1996, due to good luck, he is sponsored by a church to live with a White family in Rochester, New York, where he gets an email that leads him, after nearly nineteen years, finding his parents back in southern Sudan. He and friends of his White family then start a program to build wells in southern Sudan. The main character is real and the story is mostly based on true details- “This book is based on the true story of my life.”.

The book is remarkably violent while having weak storytelling skills (it tells more than it shows), but an interesting, if straightforward plot (in my opinion, the fictional subplot with the Nuer girl walking to water every day of the year was unnecessary, or could have been merged and split off into a separate section).

I thought it remarkable that there was a stable refugee camp at all in Derg-controlled Ethiopia (which, of course, became a bloodbath once Ethiopian rebel forces took over and decided to force the Sudanese refugees back into Sudan).

Some elements of the plot are, to say the least, implausible -supposedly the main character led some 1500 lost boys from the Sudanese-Ethiopian border in 1991 to the Sudanese-Kenyan border over the course of a year and a half, some 1200 of them surviving, and that, earlier, the main character’s group of “more than thirty people” managed to cross the White Nile via multiple canoes.

The book makes it clear that the importance of the Internet is generally understated in modern Western media - it is difficult to believe Salva’s story would happen even in modern South Sudan, which at least has some cell phone and Internet service. Indeed, it is by an email from a cousin of his in Zimbabwe that the main character learns that his father is still alive, being treated for guinea worms at a southern Sudanese UN medical facility.

If there is one lesson of this book, it is to be nicer to refugees. After all, not everyone has had the opportunity to live like comfortable Westerners.

Rating: three out of five stars