Nya's Struggle In A Long Walk To Water

881 Words4 Pages

Southern Sudan is an incredibly difficult place to live, with unbearable hot temperatures and lack of water. Many people in Sudan struggle each year just to stay alive. In Linda Sue Park’s novel, A Long Walk to Water, one character that struggles to make a life for herself in Sudan is Nya. Nya is a young Nuer girl living in a poor village with no plumbing or running water. Despite the harsh environment of Southern Sudan, Nya is able to survive due to her hard work and her family working together. One factor that helps Nya survive is her hard work. When Nya’s family is living at their regular home, Nya has to travel every day to a pond very far away to get water. The trip there and back takes her half a day and she must make this trip twice …show more content…

While Nya is walking to the pond to get water, her mother is taking care of the younger children and cooking. When Nya returns from her morning trip to the pond, her mother is waiting for her with a meal. Linda Sue Park illustrates this on page 20, “Nya’s mother took the plastic container from her… she handed Nya a bowl of sorghum meal and poured a little milk over it.” In Nya’s family, each member must work hard at their own job to help the family along. Mother’s meal helps Nya to have the strength to make her second trip of the day to the pond and back to get the water that they all need to survive. Nya’s family also pulls together later in the book to help her little sister. When they are staying at the lake camp, Nya’s family must drink water that has not been sterilized. They can’t afford to boil the water because there is so little of it in the first place that it would all evaporate. Due to the unsanitary conditions, Nya’s sister Akeer gets sick and her family has to decide if they will make the long trek to see the doctor. Park states, “Nya’s father had decided that Akeer needed a doctor. So Nya and her mother had taken Akeer to the special place- a big white tent… with doctors and nurses to help” (45). Nya’s father had to make the difficult decision of whether they should take Akeer to the far away doctor or not. Then Nya and her mother had the job of walking Akeer to the medical tent to see the doctor and get medicine. In the difficult living conditions of Sudan, each person in Nya’s family has a specific task and they must complete that task to help keep the whole family