Ger Duany - Walk Toward the Rising Sun: From Child Soldier to Ambassador of Peace

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Text copyright 2020 by Ger Duany

Cover photograph copyright 2020 by Simon Maina/Getty Images

Interior art copyright by 2020 by Yvan Alagb

Map art copyright 2020 by Michael Reagan

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

ISBN9781524719401 (trade) ISBN9781524719418 (lib. bdg.) ebook ISBN9781524719425

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To my mother, Nyathak, who never got a chance to go to formal school to learn how to read and write.

For my sister Nyandit, who never got a chance to see sunrise, life. May your spirit live through, and on with, this memoir.

Dear Reader,

Violence is a strange monster. It takes many forms. From climate change and armed conflicts to pandemics and the small desperations that happen inside peoples homes and families. Yet when politicians and pundits talk about trauma or destruction, they most often use the word war as a metaphorwars on poverty, or illiteracy, or disease. But for those who have had to endure actual wars, the small ones or the big ones, the metaphor falls short.

In 2016, I was working with young Syrian refugees in Munich, teenagers who had to flee as the walls of their cities, of their communities, and of their childhoods crumbled around them. They looked at photos from two or three years before and told me that the buildings they posed in front of were no longer there, reduced to piles of bricks and faded photographs. My own understandings of the conflict in Syria, which had to do with everything from global politics to climate change, were useless in the face of these young men and women, who showed me piles of bricks, saying, This was my home.

If you pull back the lens, to global economies and climate changes, wars look very different, but up close they are the same. Perhaps the most important thing that unifies all these experiences, however, is not the horrors, but the tools we use to survive them. Walk Toward the Rising Sun, by Ger Duany, is a remembrance of the tools one young man used to piece together a world that was breaking around him. The friendships, the skills, and the belief in oneself that he had to develop in order to escape circumstances beyond his control became the building blocks of a remarkable life that has taken him around the world as an actor and activist.

There are wars everywhere. Some stretch across nations, and miles of wilderness and culture and families like Gers. Some smaller and no less important wars rage inside the hearts and heads of young people. There is a temptation to not tell these stories, to provide for young hearts imaginary worlds without conflict. There is also a temptation to assure young people that wars like this happen only in far-off places, to brand anything that is uncomfortable or challenging as foreign or other. War is scary. One of the bravest things Ger talks about is his own fear.

But there is another pathto pull the lens even closer and see how the conflicts that Ger has endured prepared him for the life he would lead, giving back to the many communities he has called home. To see this story, and stories like it, as providing pathways away from the conflict. To draw maps, for ourselves and our young people, that will lead to a place where no war is too far away for us to care about the people involvedmaps that will furnish us all with a safe passage to a world in which all these wars are distant memories.

Christopher Myers

This book is a memoir; it is a true story based on my best recollection of the events and times with friends and family. Due to the limitations of my perspective as a child and young adult, I was compelled at times to create what I trusted was plausible and likely dialogue to bring the actual scenes to life. Until recent times, South Sudanese people did not keep track of birthdaysor celebrate them in any lavish wayso such dates and ages throughout the story are based on my best assumptions.

I WAS ABOUT SIX YEARS old when I sat in the dirt clearing of Liet Village center in 1983 or 84, amid a few hundred other villagers, frozen in silence, watching my mothers youngest brother, Tut, lay his full six-foot, six-inch frame down in the dirt. The wind whooshed through the high grass, sorghum, maize, and tobacco on our subsistence farm, which surrounded our mud huts, and cattle lowed in the distance. Tut crossed his arms over his muscular chest and placed his shaved head inside a depression dug into the earth specially to catch the blood. He lay there without a trace of labored breathing or a single tremble while one of our village elders delivered a booming speech about courage, a mans responsibility to provide for his community, and his right to take wives.