Learn Something New

THE ONLY ONE GOD LEFT ALIVE

''The dead still speak in his dreams. They ask if he remembers their time together in the container. And they tell him not to forget.

The 13-year-old boy sits on a mat in a darkened hut not far from Leer Town in South Sudan, his skeletal knees pressed against his ears, and tells the story of what happened to him and more than 50 other men one day late last year. That morning—he wasn’t sure if it was Oct. 22 or 23—South Sudanese government soldiers rounded up the boy and 10 men as they grazed their cows. The soldiers moved them to a new military garrison that had been thrown up on the grounds of a Catholic mission abandoned the month before, part of an ongoing and bloody civil war between government and opposition forces.

Wielding electrical cables as whips, the soldiers herded the men into an old shipping container once used to store mission supplies. Then they slammed the door. “The container was so hot,” remembers the boy, tears streaming down his narrow face. “When nobody was checking on us, then we knew we were going to be killed.”..'''

by ARYN BAKER