In 1987, Cola Bilkuei, a young boy from the Dinka tribe in the southern Sudan, was forcibly recruited into Sudan People's Liberation Army. For three months, he and hundreds of other children from his tribe were marched from southern Sudan to a military training camp inside Ethiopia. Once they arrived at the camp, exhausted and terrified, they were systematically brutalised as SPLA officers began to turn them into child soldiers. The children were taught how to handle a rifle, how to fight and how to kill. It was a programme designed to prepare them for the savage civil war being fought between the SPLA and the Muslim government of Sudan based in the north of the country.
Yet Cola refused to be brutalised. He knew there was a better life somewhere and he was determined to find it. After two years, he escaped from the camp and began an extraordinary odyssey down the length of Africa. Without money, a passport or official papers of any kind, he fled Ethiopia back into Sudan, from Sudan he travelled to Uganda, from Uganda to Kenya, from Kenya to Tanzania, from Tanzania to Malawi, from Malawi to Mozambique, from Mozambique to Zimbabwe and from Zimbabwe to South Africa. Finally, after getting accepted into a UN refugee program in South Africa he managed to come to Australia in 2003 as a refugee. His journey from that military camp had taken him fourteen years, living illegally, relying on strangers for help and scraping a living at whatever he could do, as well as educating himself to read and write along the way.
This book is the story of Cola's extraordinary journey. Although set against a backdrop of brutality and suffering, it is a story of incredible resilience and, above all, of hope.
