A Long Walk to Water Tugs at All the Heartstrings

It’s hard not to get lost in Linda Sue Park’s A Long Walk to Water, as the main character Salva Dut faces seemingly endless trials on his long walk to water.

Set primarily in southern Sudan starting in 1985, the book recounts Salva’s journey from the point when the Second Sudanese Civil War, begun in 1983, reaches him at school. Amidst the chaos of gunfire in what had been up to that point a rather peaceful, family-rich life, 11-year old Salva is displaced from his tribe and family.

In the trek east to Ethiopia and a refugee camp, Salva encounters kindness, cruelty, and indifference from the people he meets, and the nature he contends with. As wonderful as a gifted bag of peanuts can be in Salva’s story, there is awfulness, too: he witnesses his uncle, whom he happens upon on his journey, murdered by thieves. Always, there is the thirst for hard-to-come-by water.

Salva eventually makes it to a refugee camp where he lives six years before being ejected by new soldiers, forced to walk again for another year and a half to Kenya, before immigrating to the United States.

Park does a rich job moving Salva through obstacles, humanizing him at every step by showing us that he is a child, but also showing us that he’s growing stronger with each threat. The Author’s Note at the end contextualizes Salva’s story as one of many about the so-called Lost Boys, who suffered loss and adversity as a result of the war. She juxtaposes his story with that of 11-year old Nya, who is carrying water to her village in south Sudan in 2011. When Nya and Salva cross paths at the end of the book, it doesn’t come as a surprise, but it is nonetheless emotionally satisfying.

Thank you to my writing group member Catherine Fabio for recommending A Long Walk to Water. As she was reading through my book One Little Bolshevik, she suggested I would find some common ground between Salva and my father, the main character in One Little Bolshevik. I did.