Learning The Hard Way

When William Mayom Maker leaves home at eleven years to become a guerrilla fighter for the Sudan People's Liberation Army, he has one desire-to get a gun and protect his mother and the entire village. Caught up in the Second Sudanese Civil War, it will be thirty years before he returns home as a stranger to his Agaar culture and the people in his isolated village. In those intermittent years, the naked cattle-herder undergoes multiple transformations. First, as a guerrilla and boy monster where constant brushes with near-death experiences are the norm. Then, as a refugee in the desolate wilderness of the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, and finally as a new immigrant resettling in the West. In that journey across worlds, he endures nostalgia for his family and culture, faces the horror of war and agony of loss, and finally must embrace the modern world's "miseries" and its freedom and opportunities. William Mayom Maker now lives in Canada.