A friend of mine was recently telling me about a woman she sponsors in Rwanda. In addition to sending money to help her, my friend exchanges letters with the Rwandan. Both are mothers, but my friend has no idea what to write.

Does she write about her new house, or new car, or what she saw on TV? The Rwandan woman lives in a hut without electricity or running water. So my friend’s nice husband or great kids? Or does my friend write about her own sadness? About Prozac and depression?

But it seems offensive to be sad in a land of plenty.

This perplexed fatigue is at the melancholy heart of What is the What, Dave Eggers’s “novel” about Valentino Achak Deng, one of the Lost Boys of Sudan. It is called a novel, the very real Deng explains, because her cannot remember exactly how his chaotic young life unfolded, so he sat with Eggers and together they “created this work of art.”

Gunships and armed horsemen descended on Deng’s village in southern Sudan when he was a boy. The family fled, and then came back. So did the gunships and Arab militias. The screaming and the dying raged all day.

At night, the boy emerged from his hiding place and ran into the darkness, hands outstretched to ward off unseeable dangers. He left behind his home, his family and all his friends. Most of them were dead anyway. He took shelter where he could, and food and water where they were found.

Eventually, he found the Lost Boys – the thousands of child refugees who had fled like him, and who were walking alone across the vast deserts and jungles of Africa. The destination was vague, but anywhere seemed better than where they were. The gunships periodically returned, lazily killing boys who tried to hide in trees. At night, lions leapt out of the trees to eat stragglers. Deng kept walking.

The Lost Boys head for Ethiopia. It becomes for them a land of unimaginable wealth and prosperity. Once in Ethiopia, life will return. Food will be plenty. They will find their families. After crossing a river strewn with hungry crocodiles, Deng is told he is in Ethiopia. He looks at the unhappy land, identical to that he has just left, and decides it is a joke.

“We are not in Ethiopia,” he thinks. “This is not that place.”

But it is, and he remains there for a few years, until that country’s government falls and he and the other Lost Boys are again chased by armies. As he runs with a small band of boys, a woman emerges from the fields and promises shelter. Deng hesitates, but the other boys don’t.

They run to her. “I am your mother,” she says, then lifts up a gun and shoots them dead. Deng runs the other way.

A year on the move as his broken country fractured more only as “disconnected and miscoloured images.” As faction fights with faction in a brutal civil war, the world gives up trying to understand. Deng learns that there are no good guys and bad guys; or rather, there are, but they are not neatly allied one against the other.

An epic walk takes him to Kenya, and the notorious hot, windy and aired Kakuma refugee camp.

Its dusty fields come to hold 70,000 displaced lives. He stays there for 10 years. In the huts and permanently temporary buildings, lovers meet, babies are born, deals are made and stalled lives continue. It has the feel of a hellish airport departure lounge, so many people waiting to be elsewhere, not really there. Kakuma, Deng learns, is the Kenyan word for nowhere.

Of Kakuma, he dryly notes: “It is not the worst place on the continent of Africa, but it is among them.”

But Deng makes himself here. His charming and often very funny romance of first the Royal Girls of Kakuma, Miss Gladys and finally Tabitha.

Awful death follows Deng, ending the lives of those he cares about, scaring him, but sparing him.

“God has a problem with me,” he concludes.

Unexpectedly, the Utopia not found in Ethiopia is reborn when, incredibly, the United States of America takes an interest is the Lost Boys of Sudan. Planes land in the dusty fields of Kakuma, swallow up the Boys – now men – and spirit them away to a land where they know they can finally resume their lives. After much delay, Deng’s name finally appears on the board of the soon-to-be departed. He celebrates with a group of boys in the camp. “We ran, tears streaming down our faces because we were laughing and maybe crying and maybe just delirious.”

But America just brings more sorrow, more death and more miles between the Lost Boys and their homes. Many end up on drugs, alcohol, anything. Success proves elusive. “The story that broke everyone’s will,” he says, was that of a trio of Sudanese men in Atlanta who fell into a drunken argument about $10. One tried to kick another, but fell over and hit his head. The injury killed him the next day.

“Does this sort of thing happen to Americans?” he wonders in sorrow. But it seems offensive to be sad in a land of plenty.

“We were the model Africans,” Deng despairs. “But now the enthusiasm has dampened. We have exhausted many of our hosts.”

And what is the What? The question comes from the Dinka story of creation. God creates humanity, and presents them with the idea of the cattle, which would bring them milk and meat and prosperity. But God was not finished.

“You can either have these cattle, or you can have the What,” God says.

And what is the What? It is unknown. It is the unknown. It is what Deng has been thrust blindly into his whole life.

And finally, it is what he embraces. He finds his meaning in giving face to the faceless refugees, in telling his story to you and me.

The long walk continues.

First published in the Sunday Daily News November 4, 2007