A Long Walk to Water Chapters 11–12 Summary & Analysis

Summary: Chapter 11 Nya: Southern Sudan, 2008

The two men leave the village. The villagers begin the task of clearing the land between the two trees. Nya continues to travel to the pond, twice each day. As the clearing grows larger, Nya asks Dep how there could be water where the earth is dry and hard as rock. He shakes his head, sharing her doubt.

Summary: Chapter 11 Salva: Southern Sudan and Ethiopia, 1985

The group buries Uncle and mourns his death. That night, they resume walking. Salva is numb with grief at the loss of Marial and Uncle, but he feels their strength.

With Uncle gone, the group complains about Salva. He is too young. He slows them down. Uncle had shared everything with everyone. Now they share nothing with Salva, yet he feels stronger for it, and will prove that he is not weak and useless.

Salva finally reaches the refugee camp, which, to his amazement, is filled with thousands of people, mostly men and boys, who have run to escape war. They have fled, like Salva, so as not to be forced into fighting.

Salva joins other children in the camp who are without their families. He wanders through the camp, determined to find his family if they are there. After so many days of walking, it is an odd feeling to not be on the move. He eats that first evening and again the next morning. That next afternoon, he sees a bright orange headscarf in the distance, worn by a woman, tall like his mother. He runs to catch up to her.

Summary: Chapter 12, Nya: Southern Sudan, 2009

Ten men and two trucks have arrived at the village, along with a drill that looks like an iron giraffe. They have brought other equipment, including plastic pipes. Men continue to clear the land.

Nya’s mother, baby on her back, walks with other women to a place where they collect rocks and stones into bundles. They balance these bundles, wrapped in cloth, on their heads and carry them back, emptying them onto the ground at the drilling site. Others break the rocks into gravel-sized pieces.

Every day when Nya returns with water from the pond, she hears the sound of machinery and the sounds of people working together. She does not hear the sound of water.

Summary: Chapter 12, Salva: Itang refugee camp, Ethiopia, 1985; Six years later: July 1991

The woman Salva calls after is not his mother. At that moment, Salva realizes that his family is gone. He wonders how he can go on without them. Then, Salva remembers how his uncle had coaxed him onward in the desert, by setting small goals for him to reach when he felt like he couldn’t go on. He decides to get through this day, just this day.

Six years later, Salva is almost seventeen. Rumors spread that the Ethiopian government is collapsing and that the camp will no longer be open. One day, trucks filled with soldiers arrive. Chaos ensues as the soldiers order everyone to leave Ethiopia. Caught up in the crowd, Salva hears that the refugees are being herded toward the Gilo River, which borders Ethiopia and Sudan. It is the rainy season, and the river is swollen and fast. It is also filled with crocodiles.

Analysis: Chapters 11–12

Though nothing changes in Nya’s daily routine once the two men leave, the village does begin to slowly change. Responsibilities shift among the villagers as some begin work to clear the land between the two trees. However, Nya’s responsibility remains the same: fetching water. One can imagine that each time Nya returns from her trips to the pond, she sees more changes. Yet, because her days are all the same, it’s hard for Nya to believe that the changes she sees are of any import to her. It is hard for her to imagine that water could come forth from the dry, hard earth she walks over every day or that she could live any other kind of life.

Nya has no frame of reference within which to define what is happening in her village as progress. Her life, and that of her village, has been one of sameness, day after day, season after season, year after year. For Nya, nothing has really changed, yet. She has likely never seen modern equipment such as that which the men have brought, nor can she make a connection between everything she sees and hears happening around her—the pounding of rocks into gravel, the drilling, the whir of machinery—and its capability to bring forth water. But the well is a symbol of progress, and though she cannot comprehend it, change is coming to Nya’s village.

One would think that the brutal death of Salva’s uncle at the hands of the Nuer tribe (which the reader now knows is Nya’s tribe) would be the climax of Salva’s story or the deciding factor that would send him on a downward spiral. Paradoxically, the opposite happens. Devastated as he is by Uncle’s brutal death, somehow the deaths of Uncle and Marial call forth a hidden strength and toughness in Salva and drive him forward with even more resolve to survive. Park’s portrayal of Uncle’s death is not overly emotional or drawn out. The group traveling with him does expend precious energy digging a shallow grave and burying Uncle, which reflects the esteem in which they held him. But time does not stand still when Uncle dies, perhaps because Salva doesn’t have time to dwell on it. Maybe he’s numb to it. Maybe he’s endured too much already. When the others’ treatment of him changes with Uncle’s absence, Salva once again finds himself in the position of having to prove that he can carry his own weight, that he is not useless or weak. He makes the choice to keep moving with courage and determination. He accepts the challenge willingly and refuses to succumb to self-pity. His journey must go on. He won’t quit.

When Salva reaches the refugee camp, rather than feel a sense of relief that he no longer has to walk every day, all day, he experiences a sense of restlessness, then a feeling of hopelessness, and finally acceptance and determination to survive. After walking for so long, the camp filled with thousands of people is a shock to his system, a significant adjustment. While he has walked to escape danger and to survive, his journey has always had an implicit purpose—to find his family. To suddenly not be walking causes him anxiety and unease. When he spots a bright orange headscarf far in the distance, he is filled with hope that he has finally found his family. But the woman wearing the scarf is not his mother, and Salva, faced with the harsh reality that his family is likely dead, is again on the verge of giving up. But like all the other times before, he chooses to do what his family would want of him, and what Uncle had taught him: take one step at a time.

The gap in Salva’s story suggests that during those six years in the refugee camp his life was characterized by sameness and safety in routine, day after day, year after year, similar to Nya’s life. Park doesn’t provide details about those years, just as she doesn’t provide many details about Nya’s walks back and forth to the pond. All we know is that she walked. And all that is known about Salva during those six years is that he lived in the camp. The pattern of both their lives, however, is about to change—Nya’s by the well being drilled, Salva’s by the collapse of the Ethiopian government and closing of the refugee camp.

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