Peter doesn’t know how old he is. “I think I am maybe very old,” he said with a slight smile. He speaks with the hurried, almost breathless, enthusiasm of a teenager. His eyes, however, are lined with faint wrinkles and lay heavy within his chiseled face. “I have seen many things like an old man.”

He recounts his childhood in flashes of powerful remembrance. His mother tenderly nursing him back to health after a sickness that she thought would surely kill him. Drunken soldiers with loud voices and even louder guns shooting his grandfather in the back after stealing all of his meager possessions. “He did not fight them,” Peter said. “He gave them everything. They killed him just to play.”

The rest of his early days are blurred scenes of bombing, burning, and terrified fleeing to unfamiliar places deep in the bush.

“Everyone was hungry there,” he said. “Everyone was sick. My mother cried in the nighttime. She thought we would die.”

In fact, Peter did lose his mother to disease as they traveled from one hiding place to another, barely a step ahead of government soldiers. For him, this is the most painful memory of all.

“I was so small,” he said inching his hand down from his waist to just above his knee. “I saw my mother die on the ground. Then I was alone.”

He has almost no knowledge of his father, who left the family to join the resistance forces when Peter was still a baby. “My mother did not talk about him except to tell me his name,” he said. “She did this to protect me from the government soldiers. If they knew my father was a fighter, they would kill me so fast.”

Peter said he hopes that his father is alive and able to see the new South Sudan he fought to attain. “I am not angry with him for leaving us,” he said. “What he did has helped us come to this independence day. Everyone in southern Sudan had to make a sacrifice for this freedom. All of the families here have suffered like mine.”

After the death of his mother, he tried to stay close to other members of his village as they moved further south under the cover of darkness. At times, they would walk so far that his feet would begin to bleed, but he never slowed down.

“It was not strength,” he said. “I was afraid. What would I do if I was separated from the only people that I knew?”

Those who survived the trek, including Peter, eventually stumbled upon a refugee camp just across the border. Life should have been better there, but vicious raids by Ugandan rebel militias kept the camp’s residents living in fear for their lives. “People disappeared,” he said. With that statement, he stopped talking about this part of his life.

“I did not really believe in peace,” he said. “I had no hope for my future.”

After the war ended, he spent “many months” making his way back to his village. When he finally arrived, however, there was nothing left. “Every little part of our life was gone,” he said. It was as if his community had never existed. He decided to come to the capital of southern Sudan, Juba, to start his new life.

“I never had the chance to go to school,” he said. “I wanted an education. That was my only dream.”

In the past five years, Peter has doggedly pursued this goal. He started relearning the alphabet and basic math and moved into history and science. He is most proud that he is now able to speak English.

“I practice my English every day,” he said. “I want to continue my education and even help my government build my nation now. We will have freedom, and we must prove that we are worthy of this great gift from God.”

Samaritan's Purse , South Sudan , South Sudan , The Long Road to Freedom