ABENY KUCHA TIIR

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All of Abeny Kucha Tiir’s children knew the plan.  They had needed it many times. 

 

When you hear gun shots, she told them, Mareath will take the baby, I will carry Kut, and Atong will hold the hem of my skirt. 

 

“This is how we used to run all the time,” Tiir said.

 

Tiir was born in South Sudan in a town called Bor, although she is not sure of the exact date because there were no doctors or birth records.  Her parents gave her the name Abeny Kucha Tiir, according to tradition.  Abeny is her father’s grandmother’s name, Kucha is her father’s name, and Tiir is their family name.  She remembers living a happy childhood, playing in the mud with her many siblings from her father’s four wives and going to school.

 

“Everything changed totally when the war broke out in 1983,” Tiir said.

 

A brutal civil war between north and south Sudan caused millions of people to be driven from their homes.  There has been over 200,000 people killed and it still continues today. 

 

Tiir decided she needed to leave the town she was living in to find safety in a smaller village.  Her home town was no longer safe for girls as the army was raping and kidnapping them. 

 

During this period, Tiir married the man who would father four children with her.  Soon after their marriage, the military began murdering any educated young men who they feared could start a rebel group.  Her husband, along with many other young men, fled to a refugee camp in Ethiopia for safety. 

 

A few months later, the north cut off all food supplies from the south and Tiir was warned that if she stayed in the village she and her newborn baby would die of starvation along with everyone else. 

 

“I decided to leave with my baby,” Tiir said.

 

She spent the next two months walking in the direction of her husband with a baby on one hip, her 12-year-old sister Adol on one side, and Bok, her four-year-old cousin on the other. 

 

This was a time without choices, Tiir said.  Although she knew these children would slow her down, she had no choice but to take them along—leaving them would mean their deaths. 

 

“It was lots of walking,” Tiir said. “Thousands of people and mostly women and children.  You know when something happen in those wars, especially the one that happened in Sudan, most of the people who suffer are women and children.”

 

Tiir finally made it to the camp in Ethiopia where her husband made a small hut for them before leaving to train for the Sudanese People Liberation Army, a rebel group that was fighting for the safety of southern Sudanese.  He spent the next few years going back and forth, leaving Tiir as a single mother for the majority of the time. 

 

After Tiir became pregnant with their fourth child, her husband left to fight and never came

back.

 

One morning there was an announcement over the loudspeaker saying everyone had to leave. 

Ethiopia had begun having problems of their own and could no longer host the refugees.  Tiir

said she hoped to return to her home in Bor but the closer she got the more she realized this was not a possibility.

 

For an entire year, Tiir and her children walked with no home.

 

“She was a superhero,” Atong, Tiir’s oldest daughter, said.  “She was pregnant, carrying food on her head, and carrying me on her side through a river…she had superhuman strength.”

 

In mid-July, as Tiir and her family reached the Ethiopian-Sudanese border, she saw injured people being taking from war zones in the bush to a village called Kaoita.  She found out that these people had been fighting alongside her husband and asked if they knew where he was.

 

“Even in their eyes I can tell nobody is alive there,” Tiir said.  “But one of them told me, ‘Ma’am, you need to move on with these children.  Move on.  There is nobody alive behind there.’”

 

Tiir had little time to grieve her husband’s death—shortly after receiving the news, she lost her youngest daughter, Aduot to sickness and starvation.

 

“That was a very bad village,” Tiir said.

 

Tiir said her daughter was sick even before they were forced out of the refugee camp.  While walking, her condition only worsened.  It rained every night and they had no shelter, no home and no food.  One village they stopped in only had leaves for them to eat, but Aduot was too sick to even try them, Tiir said. 

 

The night Aduot died Tiir remembers her begging for food but she had none to give her.  

 

“I get feeling really bad sometimes, like this is my fault.  I keep blaming myself,” Tiir said.  “She was the beautiful one.  A very beautiful child…It was not easy, and it’s still not easy.  When I think about her it makes me cry a lot.”

 

Tiir said the death of her daughter was the hardest thing she faced in Sudan. 

 

“It was difficult to accept,” Tiir said, “but I accept the fact that we are in a bad war.  A very bad war that takes our children, takes our husbands, and there is nothing you can do.”

 

Tiir remembers seeing her children playing in the mud and wondering how they had the strength to play.  She remembers sending her children to sleep hungry and them crying out for food.

 

“It’s difficult to send your child to sleep hungry,” Tiir said.  “Very difficult…That was killing me inside”

 

Tiir said she also questioned how she had enough strength to keep going.  She was so hungry and became dizzy whenever she got up to walk, but still kept going. 

 

“I know there is a God somewhere who give us that strength no matter what situation we are in,” Tirr said.  “No matter if we are skin and bones there is a spirit somewhere that can keep us up.  So in that situation all I did was turn to God to help me.  To send me any kind of help.”

 

Tiir would turn to God for help in her time of deepest need.  When she had to send her children to sleep hungry she would wait until they fell asleep and then bend down and call upon God. 

 

“God, let us make it to tomorrow,” she would pray.  “That’s it! No more question.  Only one question.  Keep us until tomorrow so in the morning if I see the sun I know we made it.  I don’t care what will happen, where we will get food, but at least I see the sun.”

 

After eight years of being displaced from her home, Tiir finally found hope of a new life.

 

She heard America was sponsoring refugees so she applied and was accepted.  Things started to change, she said.

 

Tiir says change is like the rain.  She remembers waiting many months for it to rain in Sudan.  When it finally did, the ground became soft and there was new hope.  This is what it was like when she was accepted as a refugee to the United States.

 

Soon after, she boarded an airplane for the first time with her daughter, Atong, her sons, Kut and Jok and her brother, Mareath.

Life in America was difficult for Tiir and her family to adjust to.  Atong said it was if discovering that magic was real.  Things such as a washing machine, running water and a gas stove were both amazing and terrifying.

 

“I’d never seen buildings as tall,” Atong said, “I’d never seen cars.  I’d never seen more than two or three white people and then I came to a country where they were everywhere.”

 

The first day they arrived in the U.S. a woman from Catholic Social Services gave them

a quick tour of their new apartment in Portland, Maine.  She made sure to explain the

fire alarm and the importance of running out of the building immediately after hearing

the alarm.  Later that day, a loud noise rang through the apartment. 

 

Tiir and her kids knew exactly what to do—run.  After all, they had done this many times

in Africa.  Little did they know, they were actually fleeing from the noise of a door bell.

 

When hiding in the bush during her escape from the war, Tiir told her infant son that he

needed to tell their story if she died.  But it was, Tiir wrote the book, “Tears of a Mother,”

about her families struggles both in Sudan and the United States.

 

With Tiir’s limited English vocabulary and difficulty writing, Atong finds the fact that her

mother has published a book simply amazing. 

 

“She loves to prove people wrong,” Atong said.

 

Atong says that being raised by her mother and watching what her struggle has been like has given her an accurate view on struggle. 

 

“I don’t freak out when something goes on, like maybe I would have if I hadn’t seen the worst of the worst already,” Atong said, “not like the single mom in America who can’t pay the bill and your lights go off worse, but like the full on third-world country, no shoes, walking from one country to another while people chase after you and try to kill you kind of worse.”

 

“Her super strength—it goes beyond the physical,” Atong said, “to live through that and to be functional is a miracle. But she’s not just functional—she’s happy.”