'Don't Look Back': A Sudanese Refugee's True Story of Survival—and Arrival
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Loading... - Deladem Allotey
- 26 Sep 2022
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While Achut Deng’s journey to the U.S. began almost three decades earlier, the author of the forthcoming YA memoir Don’t Look Back first shared her story with an American audience in May 2020, at the height of the pandemic.
“Do you want me to go from South Sudan to Ethiopia to Kenya and to America?” Deng asked New York Times immigration reporter Caitlin Dickerson, who’d asked the then-35-year-old single mother of three how she had come to work at South Dakota’s Smithfield meat processing plant—the site of one of the nation’s largest coronavirus outbreaks.
Listeners of the Times’s Daily podcast then heard Deng start at the very beginning: in 1990, during the second Sudanese Civil War, a terrorist attack on the then six-year-old’s village separated her from her parents, forcing her and her grandmother down a dirt road, too afraid for their lives to take a last glance at all they’d left behind.
Almost unspeakable violence, loss, and trauma would follow this seemingly endless night on the run, as Deng joined tens of thousands of other refugees crossing war-torn South Sudan on foot into Kenya. There, in camps where food and fresh water were scarce, the few people she knew succumbed to violence or illness. Later, she found passage to the U.S.—one of few girls relocated along with four thousand so-called “Lost Boys”—where her hopes for the future were all but destroyed by further threats.
he Daily podcast had become, for Molly B. Ellis, executive director of publicity for Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group, a part of her pandemic routine. “I put [Deng’s episode] on in the background, but as soon as she started speaking, I stopped what I was doing and raptly listened,” Ellis told PW.
She heard Deng describe her job processing pork and her initial reaction to news about the Covid outbreak: “[I thought] if it’s going to be like malaria, I can go through it,” Deng said to Dickerson. “It’s just going to be like any other thing I’ve been through.” Read More...
