A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park

“Stay calm when things are hard or not going right with you. You will get through it when you persevere instead of quitting. Quitting leads to much less happiness in life than perseverance and hope.”

Salva Dut

A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park

A lean novel more precisely novella … published in 2010 is contextualised at the backdrop of South Sudan.

The novel alternates between two plots, the story of Nyra, an 11-year-old girl and the story of Salva Dut, an 11-year-old boy. But they represent two different timelines and two different crises: the scarcity of water and civil war.

Nya’s story is told in 2008. She has to walk 8 hours to fetch water from the pond twice a day for her family. Her sister Akeer’s persistent illness is diagnosed as the cause of poisonous water.

Salva Dut’s story starts in 1985. He has to escape the sudden catastrophe of civil war by fleeing to a refugee camp in Kenya. He waits to meet his family. But they never arrive. Salva is sent to America along with other refugees where he is adopted by an American family in Rochester, New York. He studies business there. Finally, after many ups and downs in life, Salva meets his father after 19 years in a hospital bed.

In the same chapter two stories are narrated side by side using two different fonts. For Nya’s story, the bold font is used and for Salva another one.

Two divergent lines of Nya and Salva meet at a point when a well is drilled in their village and a schoolhouse is set up for the children by an American… whom Salva represents.

The story is poignant with Salva and Nya’s journey through Sudan one with a water crisis and the other with war.