40 Fun Facts About A Long Walk to Water

The 'Lost Boys' label for displaced Sudanese children may derive from which classic children's story?

Peter Pan is the likely source: healthcare workers in the refugee camps borrowed J. M. Barrie's name for his band of parentless boys. Salva becomes one of them in the novel's opening chapters.

Before it became a novel, Salva's story first appeared in what form, illustrated by Jim Averbeck?

A newspaper serial, drawn by Jim Averbeck, was the story's original form; Park now recommends Averbeck for classroom visits about the book because he knows Salva's story so well.

What food does an old Dinka woman give the exhausted Salva after the first group leaves him behind?

Peanuts from an old Dinka woman keep Salva going after the first group abandons him as too small to keep up; he then finds new travellers and a friend named Marial.

Salva's father needed surgery for which waterborne parasite, the news that set Salva drilling wells?

Guinea worm had infected his father after years of drinking stagnant water, and it was this news that pushed Salva to found Water for South Sudan.

Reviewers note that the title of Linda Sue Park's novel echoes which Nelson Mandela autobiography?

Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela's memoir of the fight against apartheid, is the allusion Booklist's starred review urged teachers to point out to their classes.

Salva was resettled in which US city, now home to both Linda Sue Park and Water for South Sudan?

Rochester, New York took Salva in through a host family, and it is where he later founded Water for South Sudan and where Park, who would tell his story, lives.

How old are Salva and Nya, whose stories alternate through A Long Walk to Water, when their chapters begin?

11 is the age of both narrators, a match Park uses to set a Dinka boy's wartime escape beside a girl's daily walk for water more than two decades later.

Nya, whose village finally gets a well, belongs to which ethnic group, long at odds with Salva's Dinka?

Nuer is Nya's people, and their history of conflict with the Dinka is why she is puzzled, at the end, that a Dinka man led the crew that brought her village water.

Salva's story opens in 1985; Nya's chapters, set after the war had ended, take place in which year?

2008 is the year Nya walks eight hours a day for water; the chapters alternate between her and Salva until the two timelines meet at the new well.

Salva spends six years in which Ethiopian refugee camp on the Baro River, for a time the world's largest?

Itang, in Ethiopia's far west, held Salva and his group for six years; its population of southern Sudanese refugees briefly made it the largest refugee camp on Earth.

Forced out of Ethiopia, Salva's group must cross which crocodile-filled river to get back into Sudan?

Gilo is the river between the emptied Ethiopian camps and Sudan; a 1904 expedition already noted that at midday nearly every sandbank on it was covered in crocodiles.

Driven out of Ethiopia, the Lost Boys trekked to which UNHCR camp in Kenya's Turkana County?

Kakuma took in the boys from 1992 and still holds around 200,000 people, most of them refugees from South Sudan's later civil war.

Salva left the refugee camps of Ethiopia and Kenya for the United States in which year?

1996 is when Salva flew to America after ten years in camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, arriving as a young man who had to learn English from scratch.

Nya spends eight hours a day, seven months a year, fetching water from what kind of source?

A pond is Nya's water source in the dry months, and its unsafe water is part of why the visitors choose her village for a well.

Nya's younger sister, carried home on the walk in Park's picture book, is named what?

Akeer is the little sister whose illness from unsafe water shows why the well matters; Park's 2019 picture book Nya's Long Walk retells the day Nya carried her home.

When the well is finished, what is built beside it that leaves Nya overjoyed?

A school rises next to the well because the children no longer spend their days hauling water, the novel's closing argument that clean water buys time.

The drilling crew brings water to Nya's village in which year, the last date given in A Long Walk to Water?

2009 is when two visitors, having consulted Nya's uncle, drill the well that ends her walks, and the year the crew's leader reveals his name to her.

Nya's half of A Long Walk to Water is invented; what did Park build it from?

Travellers' interviews and photos gave Park the details of Nya's village: she questioned people who had watched wells being drilled and studied their pictures and videos.

In which year was A Long Walk to Water published, the same year as Park's 39 Clues title Storm Warning?

2010 saw both books: the spare Sudan novel and Storm Warning, Park's entry in Scholastic's multi-author 39 Clues series.

Which imprint, which also published Nya's Long Walk, first released A Long Walk to Water?

Clarion Books issued the first edition and, in 2019, the picture-book companion Nya's Long Walk, which revisits the sisters' walk for younger readers.

A Long Walk to Water won a 2011 children's book award named for which Nobel Peace Prize-winning reformer?

Jane Addams, the Hull House founder who shared the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize, lends her name to the children's book award the novel won in 2011.

Who illustrated Nya's Long Walk, Park's 2019 picture book about Nya and her sick sister?

Brian Pinkney, a Caldecott and Coretta Scott King Honor winner, painted the swirling, dust-coloured scenes of the sisters' two-hour walk.

Salva founded his well-drilling charity in which year, two years before its first drilling season?

2003 is when Water for South Sudan began, under the name Water for Sudan, in the city that had taken Salva in; drilling started two years later.

How many wells did Water for South Sudan drill in its first season, in 2005?

Five wells came out of that first season; each well the charity drills now pumps about 1,800 gallons of water a day.

By May 2021, roughly how many wells had Water for South Sudan drilled since it began?

More than 500 wells by May 2021, each serving roughly 500 to 1,000 people, is the scale the charity reached from its first handful of boreholes.

Water for South Sudan drills only during which months, aiming for 40 to 50 wells each season?

December to June is the window, in South Sudan's dry months, when the team based in Wau drills its 40 to 50 wells before the rains.

According to the charity, building one Water for South Sudan well takes roughly how long?

About 3 days, 3 to 4 in the charity's own figures, is all a well takes once the rig is in place; the hygiene course that comes with it lasts another three.

After settling in upstate New York, where did Salva continue his education?

Monroe Community College, in the county that includes his adopted city, is where Salva studied before returning to Sudan to drill.

Roughly how many boys are estimated to have fled southern Sudan on foot as the Lost Boys?

About 20,000 boys made the journey, often walking for weeks or even two years or more, many with nothing but the clothes they wore.

The US resettlement that offered about 3,800 Lost Boys new homes from 2001 was paused after which event?

The 9/11 attacks halted the programme for security reasons; it restarted in 2004, and many of the young men, too old for foster care, were placed together in shared apartments.

In the mid-1990s, which UN agency reunited about 1,200 Lost Boys with their families?

UNICEF traced the families of about 1,200 boys, yet some 17,000 remained in camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, which is why resettlement abroad followed.

What do Nya's people, herders of the Upper Nile, call themselves in their own language?

Naath is the self-name; outsiders' label for them is the one the novel uses, and they also form the largest group in a neighbouring region of Ethiopia.

The Dinka are noted for their height, sharing the title of Africa's tallest people with which other group?

The Tutsi of Rwanda match the Dinka, whose men averaged about 182 cm in a 1950s survey, though later undernutrition and war reduced that.

The Dinka and Nya's people both belong to which wider family of cattle-herding peoples of East Africa?

Nilotic peoples include both groups, and tradition holds that Nya's people began as a branch of the Dinka that migrated into drier land to the south.

The First Sudanese Civil War ended in 1972 with an agreement signed in which African capital?

Addis Ababa gave its name to the 1972 accord that granted the south autonomy; its breakdown in 1983, when Salva was a small boy, started the war that drove him from home.

In May 1983, the army mutiny seen as the second civil war's opening act broke out in Pibor and which town?

Bor, a Dinka town on the Nile, saw the 105th Battalion rebel in May 1983; government troops failed to put it down, and the SPLA was founded that same year.

Salva's father's parasite enters the body inside which small creatures, swallowed in unfiltered water?

Tiny crustaceans called copepods carry the larvae, which is why a simple cloth or straw filter, not medicine, is the main defence; there is no vaccine or drug.

Before A Long Walk to Water, Linda Sue Park won the 2002 Newbery Medal for which novel?

A Single Shard made Park's name, and its potter's world is typical of her books, most of which draw on her family's heritage rather than on Africa.

At Stanford, where she took her English degree, Linda Sue Park competed for the university in which sport?

Gymnastics was Park's sport at Stanford, before jobs in oil-company PR and food journalism led, at last, to her first novel in 1999.

Linda Sue Park published her first poem, in Trailblazer magazine, at what age?

Nine was her age when Trailblazer printed the poem; she had been writing since four, and her debut novel came thirty years later.