She Counted Her Worth in Cattle. The War Took Every Last One.

Nyakuei Deng did not know how to farm. She had never needed to. Then, the war came, and everything she had ever known was taken in a single night. What happened next in the dirt of a rented plot in Northern Uganda is a story about grief, motherhood, and the stubborn, miraculous will to begin again.

She still hears them in the night.

Not screaming. Not gunfire. But hooves. The low, rhythmic sound of cattle moving in the dark had been the heartbeat of her mornings for forty years. Nyakuei Deng wakes from these dreams slowly, the way a person surfaces from deep water, and for a short time, she is home again. The air smells of woodsmoke and dry grass. Her husband is beside her. Her children are sleeping. Her cows are outside, safe.

Then she opens her eyes.

The shelter ceiling stares back at her. Somewhere outside, a child coughs. She lies still for a moment not because she is resting, but because getting up means re-entering a world where everything from her dream is gone. Yet, she rises anyway. Because her children are awake. And they are hungry. Grief, she has learned, does not excuse a mother from addressing her children’s hunger.

“Grief does not excuse a mother from her children’s hunger.”

What It Meant to Own a Cow

To understand what Nyakuei lost, you must first understand what a cow means in Dinka culture, and how it differs from other cultures. A cow is not simply an animal. It is not merely food or income. A cow is proof that you exist in this world with dignity. When a Dinka man marries, he pays in cattle. When a child is born, cattle are slaughtered in celebration. When someone dies, cattle mark the gravity of the loss. The herd is the ledger of your life. Every joy, every sorrow, every alliance, every bond is written in livestock.

Nyakuei grew up knowing this fact, in the same way that she knew her own name. Her father had cattle. Her husband had cattle. She raised her children in earshot of cattle. She knew each animal by its markings, by the particular way it held its head, and by the sound of its breathing at night. She had names for them not as pets but as members of a world she was responsible for. The herd was not something she owned. It was who she was.

“In our culture,” she says, pausing to find the words in a language that is not her own, “a woman who keeps cattle is a woman who stands tall. People see you. People know you. Without them…” She does not finish the sentence. She does not need to.

The Night the World Ended

She does not give the date. Some things, she says, you do not put into numbers. You just call it “the night,” and everyone who lived through such a night understands.

The violence that came to her village in South Sudan in 2017 gave no warning and offered no bargaining. She grabbed three of her children, the youngest not old enough to understand why they were running, and ran. Into the bush. Into the dark. Into a long, punishing walk toward a border which she had never thought she would need to cross.

Her husband did not make it out with them.

She arrived at Mungula 1 settlement in Adjumani District, Uganda, weeks later. She had her children. She had the clothes on her back. She had a grief that she did not yet have the strength to name. And she had nothing else. The cows all thirty-seven of them, her life’s wealth, the proof of her family’s standing, the animals she had known since childhood were gone. Taken. Or scattered. She never found out what happened.

“I kept thinking: if I could just find one,” she says. “Just one cow. Then I would know something of my old life was still real. But there was nothing. There was only here.”

“I kept thinking: if I could just find one cow. Just one. Then I would know something of my old life was still real. But there was nothing. There was only here.”

The Sound of an Empty Pot

The months that followed were a slow education in a new kind of suffering. Not the sharp, sudden pain of loss she already knew that. This was the grinding, daily humiliation of not being able to feed your children.

The food rations from the World Food Program, already reduced due to global funding gaps, stretched thinner with each distribution. Nyakuei learned to divide an already small portion into smaller portions. She learned the art of cooking water into something that could resemble a meal. She watched her children accept whatever she put before them without complaint, but their silence hurt more than if they had cried.

“My daughter she was seven she used to say to me, ‘Mama, I am fine,’ even when I could see she was not fine. A seven-year-old should not have to comfort her mother. But she did. Every day.”

“A seven-year-old should not have to comfort her mother. But she did. Every day.”

Neighbors urged her to farm. A small plot had been allocated to her family that she could use if she chose. She looked at it and felt only distance. She had never held a hoe as a tool. In her life, farming was what you did if you had no cattle. It was the life of people who had less. And now here she was: a woman with nothing, being asked to become someone she had never imagined she would need to be.

“I looked at that soil and I thought: I do not know you. You are not mine. I do not know how to speak to you.”

The People Who Sat Down in the Dirt with Her

It was at a community meeting organized by South Sudanese Leadership and Community Development (SSLCD) that Nyakuei first heard a different kind of offer. Not charity. Not a handout. An investment in her own two hands.

SSLCD had identified families in Mungula 1 who were food-insecure and willing to try farming, if given a chance. The organization rented land for participating families to farm, removing the greatest barrier between a refugee and a harvest: access to soil they could cultivate. They provided seed packs. They provided tools. And then, they did something that Nyakuei still speaks about with quiet wonder.

They came to her garden. They knelt down. And they showed her.

“They did not stand over me and point,” she says. “They did not make me feel like someone who does not know. They sat with me in the dirt, and they put their hands in the soil next to my hands, and they said: here. Like this. Try.”

She had expected to feel embarrassed. A grown woman, learning to plant seeds like a schoolgirl. But she did not feel embarrassed. She felt, for the first time since the night she fled, that someone was standing beside her. Not ahead of her. Not behind her. Beside her.

“They put their hands in the soil next to my hands. For the first time since I fled, someone was standing beside me. Not ahead of me. Not behind me. Beside me.”

The Night She Did Not Cry

The maize grew slowly. Somedays, she wasn’t sure it was growing at all. She checked it the way she used to check on her cattle at dusk by walking the rows, looking for signs of trouble, and talking quietly to the plants like she used to talk to her animals. Her children laughed at these behaviors. She let them laugh. It was good to hear laughter again.

When the harvest finally came, she stood at the edge of the field for a long time before she began to gather in the crops. She cannot fully explain why. Perhaps, she was afraid that if she moved too quickly, it would disappear. The same way her husband had disappeared; the way her home had disappeared; and the way everything in her prior life had disappeared without warning. She stood still and looked at what her hands had made from nothing.

Then she walked in and harvested.

That night, she cooked a real meal, not a rationed portion, not water stretched into soup. A full pot of maize, enough to fill her children’s bowls and leftovers for morning. She watched her youngest eat with both hands, the way children eat when they are not afraid there won’t be more. She watched her daughter, the one who had been telling her that she was fine for two years, eat until she was actually fine.

“After they slept, I sat alone by the fire,” Nyakuei says. “I thought about my cows. I always think about my cows at night. But something was different.” She stops. Presses her lips together. “I did not cry. For the first time since I left South Sudan, I thought about everything I had lost, and I did not cry. Because I looked at my children sleeping with full stomachs, and I thought I did that. I grew that food. With these hands.”

She holds up her hands when she says this. Calloused now. Darkened with soil. The hands of a farmer.

“For the first time since I left South Sudan, I thought about everything I lost, and I did not cry. Because I looked at my children sleeping with full stomachs, and I thought I did that. I grew that food. With these hands.”

A Woman Who Stands Tall Again

Today, Nyakuei tends two plots. A small vegetable patch close to her shelter that her children water each evening before dark, arguing cheerfully about whose turn it is to carry the water jug. She has started asking questions that she never imagined asking: about soil and seasons, which crops survive the dry months, and how to save seeds so she does not have to start from scratch again next year.

She also has plans for sweet potatoes next season, and beans, if she can secure more land. They sell well at the Adjumani market on Thursdays. She is thinking about her daughter’s school fees and whether a good groundnut harvest could pay them. She is thinking about the future in a way that she had forgotten was possible.

She still misses her cattle. She always will miss her cattle. She will probably always wake in the night to the sound of hooves that are no longer there. But when she rises in the morning now, she does not reach for grief first. She reaches for her hoe.

“I used to say that without my cows, I was nobody,” she says. Now, there is something different in her voice: not the absence of sadness, but the presence of something stronger. “Now I know that is not true. I am still somebody. I am still Nyakuei. And my children will grow up knowing that their mother did not lie down when the world tried to bury her. She planted something instead.”

There are thousands of Nyakueis in the refugee settlements of Northern Uganda. Women who arrived with nothing, carrying children and grief in equal measure. Women whose identities were shattered by a war they did not choose, who are quietly, stubbornly rebuilding themselves in the soil of a country that is not their home.

SSLCD walks with them. Not in front. Not behind.

Beside them.

You can be beside her too.

Donate at hopeforsouthsudan.com

Every seed we plant together is a child who goes to sleep full tonight.