Opening paragraphs..............

The night the Djellabas came to Duk Payuel, I remember that I had been feeling tense all over, as it my body were trying to tell me something.  I could not sleep.
     It was a dark night, with no moon to reflect off the standing water that pooled beside our huts.  My parents and the other adults were sleeping outside, so the children and elderly could all be inside, away from the clouds of biting insects.  My brothers and sisters and I, as well as about a dozen refugees from other villages in southern Sudan, stretched out on the ground inside a hut that had been build especially for kids.  I lay in the sticky heat, tossing and turning on a dried cowhide, while others tried to sleep on mats of aquot, a hollow, grasslike plant from the wetlands that women of my Dinka tribe stitch together.  Our crowded bodies seemed to form their own patchwork quilt, filling every square foot with arms and legs.

-John Bul Dau, from the Introdution to God Grew Tired Of Us:  A Memoir