I awoke when the sun was about to set. People said that we had to leave for Pochala and it would take three days to cross the desert. We worried how we were going to endure so many hours walking again. I told myself that if I worried I would have no hope of avoiding disaster. I made myself strong like an elder. I made my heart strong. I told myself that I was going to make it.

I walked through the desert in a big group. Sometimes people fell, just like that. At first we thought that when somebody fell he was going to wake up and follow us again. But when a person fell down, the elders told us, "Okay, come along. Now that he's fallen down, he's not going to wake up. That's it. He's dead."

An elder told me, "You just take care of yourself and don't fall down like him."

I said, "How am I going to fall down? I feel I'm strong."

He said, "Ok, if you're strong like that, let's keep going."

But after a while, as I was talking to him, he fell down too. I tried to wake him up but he didn't answer me.

Some bandits in the area started shooting at us so I took off my clothes because my shirt and shorts were white. I rolled the clothes under my arm and then I was a dark person, dark as nighttime itself. Nobody could see me any more. We reached Pochala on the border of Ethiopia early in the morning. People waiting there said it was good to receive us but that we were not the number they had been expecting. They saw that our number had been greatly reduced. A lot of people had been falling down.