Part 6
The drill strikes muddy water in Nya's village as Salva survives the Gilo River and leads fifteen hundred boys to Kenya.
Muddy First WaterIn Nya's village the drilling is slow: the tall red drill pounds, breaks down, and is coaxed back to life while men haul lengths of pipe and women carry gravel on their heads. Nya still walks to the pond — her family must drink today. After three full days the crew strikes water at last; the village cheers, but what rises is brown with mud, and Nya privately doubts anyone will ever drink it.
The Gilo RiverIn 1991 Ethiopia's government falls, and the new rulers want the refugees gone. Soldiers empty the camp at gunpoint in driving rain, forcing the crowd into the Gilo River — at full flood and full of crocodiles. Salva, a poor swimmer, is dragged under by a drowning boy whose grip saves his life: a bullet finds the boy instead. Salva reaches the far bank; more than a thousand people do not.
Leading the BoysWith no camp behind and no safe road home, Salva turns south for Kenya, and hundreds of boys turn with him, looking to him to lead. He gives out jobs, settles quarrels, and sets a pace the smallest can manage; the group swells to about fifteen hundred boys. The walk takes about a year and a half, and some twelve hundred reach Kenya alive.
A Posted ListChapter 14 covers the years that follow: life behind the fence at Kakuma, where local people resent the refugees and steal from them; a months-long walk to another camp, Ifo; and, when Salva is about twenty-two, an Irish aid worker named Michael, who teaches him to read English and play volleyball. Then a rumor races through camp — boys will be chosen for America — and one day a posted list carries the name Salva Dut: Rochester, New York.
| Section | What you will practice |
|---|---|
| Vocabulary | Flight, flood, and the road south: topple, gunpoint, frantic, submerge, trudge… |
| Literary Elements | A climax staged in a flooded river, situational irony that saves a life, and the character development that turns a follower into a leader |
| Cross-Curricular | The Lost Boys of Sudan — how the 1991 expulsion from Ethiopia, the Gilo crossing, and the walk to Kenya became a named chapter of history |
| Ch. | What happens |
|---|---|
| Chapter 13 | The Gilo and the Long Walk — Nya (2009): the drilling drags on — the tall red drill stalls and restarts, men haul pipe, women carry gravel, and still there is no water. Salva (1991–92): Ethiopia’s government falls, soldiers empty the camp at gunpoint, and thousands are forced into the flooded, crocodile-filled Gilo River under fire; a drowning boy’s grip drags Salva underwater and shields him from the bullets. More than a thousand people die. With nowhere left to go, Salva leads a group that grows to about 1,500 boys on a walk of about a year and a half — and some 1,200 of them reach Kenya. |
| Chapter 14 | Camps, a Teacher, and a List — Nya (2009): after three full days of drilling the crew strikes water; the village cheers, but what rises is muddy, and Nya doubts it can ever be drunk. Salva (1992 onward): years crawl by behind the fence at Kakuma among hostile neighbors, then a months-long walk brings Salva to another camp, Ifo. There an Irish aid worker named Michael teaches him to read English and to play volleyball — and when word spreads that boys will be chosen for America, a posted list finally carries the name Salva Dut: Rochester, New York. |
ⓘ The vocabulary words in this list are selected to help you understand and complete this workbook. Some may not appear verbatim in the original novel.
- Soldiers force everyone out of the camp in a driving rain.
- About twelve hundred boys arrive after a year and a half.
- Salva survives the crossing of the flooded Gilo River.
- Salva decides to lead a group of boys toward Kenya.
- News spreads that the government of Ethiopia has fallen.
Picture a camp that has been home for six years being emptied in a single day. Rain is hammering down. Soldiers with rifles are shouting, and thousands of people are being herded — not toward safety, but toward a river swollen brown with flood water, a river everyone knows is full of crocodiles. Behind them, gunfire. Ahead of them, the current. Salva has survived a desert, a lion, and the loss of nearly everyone he loves, and now he is being pushed into the worst water in Africa with no choice about it at all. What happens in that river takes minutes. What happens after it takes a year and a half: a sixteen-year-old turns around, looks at the boys standing behind him with nowhere to go, and starts to lead. Meanwhile, in another Sudan — the Sudan of 2009 — a tall red drill is pounding at the dry ground of Nya’s village, stalling, coughing, starting again, while strangers keep insisting that water is waiting somewhere underneath.
In May 1991, the military government of Ethiopia collapsed, and its protection of Sudanese refugees collapsed with it. For years, camps just inside Ethiopia's western border had sheltered hundreds of thousands of southern Sudanese fleeing their country's civil war, among them thousands of boys who had arrived without their families. Within weeks of the government's fall, soldiers drove the refugees out of the camps and back toward Sudan. Across their path lay the Gilo River, swollen with seasonal rain and inhabited by crocodiles. Survivors describe a crossing made under gunfire, where swimmers were submerged by the current and never surfaced again; by most estimates, well over a thousand people drowned, were shot, or were taken by crocodiles within a few days.
What followed was one of the great forced marches of modern times. Groups of boys, many between about seven and seventeen years old, trudged south through Sudan for months, moving in slow, heavy-footed lines with the older boys leading, feeding, and carrying the younger ones. Relief agencies tracked the exodus as it crawled toward Kenya through hunger, heat, and constant danger. By the middle of 1992, roughly ten thousand boys had reached the newly opened Kakuma refugee camp in northwestern Kenya.
Aid workers, searching for a way to describe children who belonged to no household, borrowed a name from the story of Peter Pan and called them the Lost Boys of Sudan. Historians now apply the name to roughly twenty thousand boys separated from their families by the war. Their recorded testimony became one of the most detailed accounts of what the war did to Sudan's children. A name, in history, is a way of refusing to let a group of people disappear.
This writing task is optional and is not part of your auto-graded score. The feedback below checks only the basics — length, spelling, and grammar — not whether your ideas are right or wrong. It is meant for classroom discussion and creative practice, so feel free to use your imagination!
Writing Task — Part 6 “When You Led the Way”
In Part 6, Salva stops thinking only about his own next step and takes charge of about 1,500 boys — handing out jobs, settling quarrels, and setting a pace the smallest can manage. Write about a time you were responsible for someone or something that depended on you: a younger sibling, a teammate, a pet, a group project. Describe what depended on you, what was hardest about being the one in charge, and one thing you did to keep things together. 6–10 sentences. End with what being responsible taught you about yourself.
No right or wrong — close the screen and tell someone nearby what happened in this part. Can’t find anyone? Tell yourself out loud. The moment you teach it, you truly understand it.
Part 6 Complete!
You finished Chapters 13–14 of A Long Walk to Water.
Here are your auto-graded results:
Independent study guide by Garden Heights. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Linda Sue Park. Contains original analysis only; no text from the novel is reproduced. Reference text: This workbook follows Linda Sue Park’s classic text (the standard Puffin edition sold worldwide). Revised 2023 UK editions change some wording and may not match the vocabulary studied here.