Learning The Hard Way: the boy who trekked across worlds

When William Mayom Maker leaves home at eleven years to become a guerrilla fighter for the Sudan Peoples Liberation Army he has one desire-to get a gun and protect his mother and the entire village. Caught up in the Second Sudanese Civil War it will be thirty years before he returns home as a stranger to his Agaar culture and the people in his isolated village. In those intermittent years the naked cattle-herder undergoes multiple transformations. First as a guerrilla and boy monster where constant brushes with near-death experiences are the norm. Then as a refugee in the desolate wilderness of the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya and finally as a new immigrant resettling in the West. In that journey across worlds he endures nostalgia for his family and culture faces the horror of war and agony of loss and finally must embrace the modern worlds miseries and its freedom and opportunities.William Mayom Maker now lives in Canada.