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40 free A Long Walk to Water trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
A Long Walk to Water is a short novel most readers meet in a middle-grade classroom, and it sticks: two children in southern Sudan, a generation apart, one walking away from war and one walking for water every day. Linda Sue Park built it from the real life of Salva Dut, and the ending, where the two stories finally touch, is the kind teachers read aloud twice. The quiz covers the plot and its structure, the characters and what happens to them, the author and how the book came to be, and the history it rests on: the Lost Boys, the Dinka and the people of Nya's village, the war that split Sudan, and the charity Salva founded to drill for clean water. It suits students reading the novel, teachers building a reading guide, book clubs, and anyone who finished the book and wants to know how much of it really happened.
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Q 01The 'Lost Boys' label for displaced Sudanese children may derive from which classic children's story?
Peter Pan
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.
Q 02Before it became a novel, Salva's story first appeared in what form, illustrated by Jim Averbeck?
A newspaper serial
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.
Q 03What food does an old Dinka woman give the exhausted Salva after the first group leaves him behind?
Peanuts
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.
Q 04Salva's father needed surgery for which waterborne parasite, the news that set Salva drilling wells?
Guinea worm
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.
Q 05Reviewers note that the title of Linda Sue Park's novel echoes which Nelson Mandela autobiography?
Long Walk to Freedom
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.
Q 06Salva was resettled in which US city, now home to both Linda Sue Park and Water for South Sudan?
Rochester, New York
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.
Q 07How old are Salva and Nya, whose stories alternate through A Long Walk to Water, when their chapters begin?
11
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.
Q 08Nya, whose village finally gets a well, belongs to which ethnic group, long at odds with Salva's Dinka?
Nuer
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.
Q 09Salva's story opens in 1985; Nya's chapters, set after the war had ended, take place in which year?
2008
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.
Q 10Salva spends six years in which Ethiopian refugee camp on the Baro River, for a time the world's largest?
Itang
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.
Q 11Forced out of Ethiopia, Salva's group must cross which crocodile-filled river to get back into Sudan?
Gilo
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.
Q 12Driven out of Ethiopia, the Lost Boys trekked to which UNHCR camp in Kenya's Turkana County?
Kakuma
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.
Q 13Salva left the refugee camps of Ethiopia and Kenya for the United States in which year?
1996
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.
Q 21A Long Walk to Water won a 2011 children's book award named for which Nobel Peace Prize-winning reformer?
Jane Addams
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.
Q 22Who illustrated Nya's Long Walk, Park's 2019 picture book about Nya and her sick sister?
Brian Pinkney
Brian Pinkney, a Caldecott and Coretta Scott King Honor winner, painted the swirling, dust-coloured scenes of the sisters' two-hour walk.
Q 23Salva founded his well-drilling charity in which year, two years before its first drilling season?
2003
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.
Q 14Nya spends eight hours a day, seven months a year, fetching water from what kind of source?
A pond
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.
Q 15Nya's younger sister, carried home on the walk in Park's picture book, is named what?
Akeer
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.
Q 16When the well is finished, what is built beside it that leaves Nya overjoyed?
A school
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.
Q 17The drilling crew brings water to Nya's village in which year, the last date given in A Long Walk to Water?
2009
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.
Q 18Nya's half of A Long Walk to Water is invented; what did Park build it from?
Travellers' interviews and photos
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.
Q 19In which year was A Long Walk to Water published, the same year as Park's 39 Clues title Storm Warning?
2010
2010 saw both books: the spare Sudan novel and Storm Warning, Park's entry in Scholastic's multi-author 39 Clues series.
Q 20Which imprint, which also published Nya's Long Walk, first released A Long Walk to Water?
Clarion Books
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.
Q 24How many wells did Water for South Sudan drill in its first season, in 2005?
Five
Five wells came out of that first season; each well the charity drills now pumps about 1,800 gallons of water a day.
Q 25By May 2021, roughly how many wells had Water for South Sudan drilled since it began?
More than 500
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.
Q 26Water for South Sudan drills only during which months, aiming for 40 to 50 wells each season?
December to June
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.
Q 27According to the charity, building one Water for South Sudan well takes roughly how long?
About 3 days
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.
Q 28After settling in upstate New York, where did Salva continue his education?
Monroe Community College
Monroe Community College, in the county that includes his adopted city, is where Salva studied before returning to Sudan to drill.
Q 29Roughly how many boys are estimated to have fled southern Sudan on foot as the Lost Boys?
About 20,000
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.
Q 30The US resettlement that offered about 3,800 Lost Boys new homes from 2001 was paused after which event?
The 9/11 attacks
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.