One Day the Soldiers Came

by Charles London

  Figure 7. Nicholas drew the attacks on his village, which continue to haunt him. In the picture, he hides behind a tree, a tiny witness to the carnage.

  Figure 8. May longs to attend school, believing that school, and only school, is the key that will open the door to a brighter future.

  An Albanian boy in the town of Zahaq. Zahaq, like many places in Kosovo, suffered from the campaigns of ethnic cleansing in the late nineties. Serb paramilitary units murdered the fathers of several children I met at this boy’s school.

  Figure 9. Ostar’s father, in better times, before they fled the civil war in Burma.

  Thinzanoo and Ostar pictured with the rest of their family in hiding in Bangkok. Shortly after our visit, they were forced to relocate, due to trouble with their neighbors. Very few Burmese migrants in Thailand were granted refugee status at the time of my visit. Without refugee status, this family was viewed with disdain as illegal immigrants.

  Figures 10, 11. The dream world depicted by exiled children of Burma. They are all homesick for land in their pictures.

  Figure 12. Flags and guns were linked in many of the drawings by exiled children from the Karen ethnic group in Burma. They are tied up in a sixty-year-old nationalist struggle.

  Figure 13.

  Aung Su, a Karen boy from Burma, lives in exile in a small town near the Thai-Burma border. His favorite hero, Spider-Man, cannnot protect him from the harrassment he sometimes receives at the hands of Thai teenagers.

  Figure 14. Aung Su’s full-color drawing of Spider-Man.

  Figure 15. The harrowing journey of the Lost Girls of Sudan has become a modern-day epic in the oral history of those in Kakuma Refugee Camp.

  This group of girls living in Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya came from southern Sudan, where the long war has robbed them of their parents. Unlike the famous “Lost Boys” these girls have little hope of resettlement in the United States, and many face forced marriage and a life of servitude, in spite of their ambitions to become doctors, nurses, and teachers.

  Nicole, a shy girl living in Kakuma Refugee Camp, loves to play Monkey-in-the-Middle. Even though she is very young, she has witnessed a great deal of violence and has lost much of her family.

  Figure 16. Nicole’s drawing of her favorite game, Monkey-in-the-Middle.

  Figure 17, 18. Robert, a street child, drew his dream of a house and of safety, though he also drew a kung fu fight, in case anyone wanted to mess with his dream house.

  Figure 19. Musa’s drawing of a soldier shooting a man in the back of the head.

  Figure 20. The generic images of weapons are far from generic to the former child soldier who drew them. They each represent a specific weapon or aspect of his training.

  Figures 21, 22. The children of Kosovo look at the country as it is, and put all their hope in independence to give them a brighter future.

  One of several outdoor schools in Lugufu Refugee Camp when I visited in 2001. The war still raged in the eastern Congo and new children arrived in the camp every week. Resources were always in short supply for the children who wanted to learn.

  Figure 23. Bujana’s house, ringed in barbed wire, reflected the feeling common among Serb children in Kosovo that they are trapped, penned in, and in danger from the Albanian majority.

  walking the whole way. It was a long journey and we were very tired. I led my little brothers here. When we got to the city we wandered the streets and met some people who told us about a center where they helped children. That is where we went, and they found people for us to live with. Strangers.”

  “Do they take care of you and your brothers now?”

  “One of my brothers went to another shelter, but I am still responsible for all my brothers. I feed them and raise them because there is no one else. I have big problems. I worry that we will have no place to stay; that the strangers will not take us into their home anymore. We have no place of our own and I have to care for my brothers somehow. I learned how to write, but would like to learn more skills. I want to make dresses and earn a living, to care for my family.”

  “How do you earn a living now?” She looked down at her feet, the same way she did for the other two questions, but the answer came up short and slow after a very long wait.

  “I get money here and there. I get help from the center, some.” She closed her mouth and did not speak anymore.

  “What do you want for yourself for the future?”

  “For me? I only want to make dresses and earn a living.”

  An aid worker told me later that many young girls in the city who are trying to make a living and stay off the streets will become prostitutes, selling themselves to men for, in some cases, as little as a small meal. When I told the aid worker about Furaha she told me that the sweet and well-spoken fifteen-year-old I met was probably selling her body to survive, though she could not be certain. For children in the war-strangled city, this is one of the few options open. A local NGO representative listed the choices facing children in the eastern Congo: “to join the military, to become a street child, or to die.”

  I spoke with a large group of street children at another children’s center one rainy afternoon. They were brought to me from the market by a man who runs an organization that tries to look after their needs for schooling and clothing. He told me it would be too dangerous to go to the market myself to find the kids. It would cause too much commotion and draw a lot of unwanted attention to me.

  He arrived at the center in a swirl of loud and rowdy kids, all excited to be picked out of the market and given lunch, crayons, a ball to kick around, and the ear of a foreigner. This certainly did not happen to them everyday. Many had never met a mzungu before.

  It was hard to discuss very much with any one child, as all the others would gather around to use the crayons or listen to the conversation. They liked to weigh in about their favorite movies, laughing and joking about the best parts: a cool gun battle in Rambo, a funny dismemberment in Starship Troopers. All the films were violent, and all ages attended the screenings. As we talked about Bruce Lee and some fantastic kung fu moves, I looked around and realized that twenty boys surrounded me. Among all of the kids who had come that day, not one was a girl. I asked the caretaker about this.

  “The girls are usually taken in before they come to us,” he told me.

  “Taken in by whom?” I asked.

  “Either the army or other men.” He told me what the aid worker had suggested. Young girls on the streets of this city have little opportunity outside of prostitution and the army and the pimps are quick to grab adolescent girls, taking advantage of their adult-like physiques and their desperation. There are few jobs for the adults, almost nothing for younger people. Many young people choose to sell themselves or go into the army because this increases their chances for survival. The pimps and the army recruiters seem to be the only options available, so children come to them. They are more than willing to put that youthful energy to use.

  Robert did not know his age. He thought that he was fourteen, like the boy next to him, but he said he cannot be sure. He was separated from his parents and lived on the streets of Bukavu with no idea of their whereabouts, whether they were alive or dead. The scabs on his skin, which he could not stop scratching, could be cured by a bar of soap, “but we have no soap,” he said.

  “During the Kabila war”—meaning the war in the Congo that began when Laurent Kabila overthrew Mobutu—“we ran away from Goma with my parents. But I got lost and separated from them. There was a boat leaving, and I wanted to get on it, so I asked a woman to please say that she is my mother if they ask, because I have no money to pay for the boat. She helped me, pretended to be my mother, and I came to Bukavu on that boat.” Like most of the street kids in Bukavu, his story of homelessness began with war. Uprooted and far from home, he had no family network to look after him, only the rag-tag wisdom of thousands of other street kids who have fled to Bukavu as well.

  “I met some kids when I got here and asked t
hem where to sleep. They told me about a place near the market and let me follow them there. I spent time with them begging, but only during the day. I do not beg at night because people don’t like it, only in the day. I never steal. I try to stay away from bad people.” I noticed a package of cigarettes in the pocket of Robert’s worn out shirt.

  “I am too young to smoke,” he told me. “I sell the cigarettes in the market one by one to make money.”

  Manu, a lean and hungry-looking young teenager had more trouble in the market than Robert. “At first, I did not know where to go. I slept in an alley and was obliged to steal because of hunger. I lived for a month like that. At night, the police came and demanded money from me, because they knew I was begging. But I didn’t have any money, and they beat me.” A local organization that helps street kids told me that this occurs regularly. Often, they say, street children are arrested for no reason and held in prison, where they suffer abuses and malnourishment. Human rights groups pay handsome bribes to get access to these kids and monitor them, so holding street children can be a very profitable business for unscrupulous policemen. And if the human rights groups don’t know about the kids or cannot pay, there are always the pimps and soldiers.

  Robert had his own problems with the police, he added. He described having a job for a while that gave him the means to eat and sometimes to see one of the videos that play in the movie houses. Rambo and Bruce Lee, he said, are his favorites. Everyone around agreed. When there is no money, he and the other children tell me, they wait by the butcher in the market and eat what falls to the ground, sometimes raw meat off the bone.

  “My job was calling out for passengers to fill a bus,” Robert said. “I don’t have this job anymore, because the man with the bus—the man who gave me the job—was arrested by the police and they sold his car. He crossed the border without permission, they say, so now I need a job again.” He picked up some crayons and drew a picture of himself begging, the sun shining overhead.

  “Once the war is finished, the street children will be finished. We can all go home.” He showed me his last drawing, a colorful house where he used to sleep (Figures 17, 18). The other kids looked at it with smiles. They liked the kung fu fighting Bruce Lee in the picture, because “Nobody can mess with him,” they said. “He can fight all the bad guys.”

  The lives of the boys on the street in Bukavu and the lives of boys in the refugee camp in Tanzania did not seem all that different to me.

  Justin, the Rwandan boy who liked to talk about children’s rights, told me about his life in Lugufu camp:

  “In the camp, it is suffering. When we sleep, we are four people under the same blanket. We are given a jerry can and one basin to bathe in. These are our possessions.”

  I was told by an aid worker that Justin probably had his own blanket taken by the foster parent or foster siblings he lives with, as sometimes happens to children who live with a family that is not their own. “I’ve gone through a lot in the camp. There are good people in the camp. My neighbors are good. They give me food. But it is hard. When I sit and cry, no one comes to help me. When I fell sick, I got no attention. I had a fever, and I had to walk to the hospital. I carried a boy who was wounded. I used to be healthy, but now…the environment here is bad. Sometimes people don’t use the toilets.”

  Keto described similar hardships:

  “Because of war, we don’t have people to care for us. Our education is harmed. In the camp we don’t get everything we need, especially when compared with what elders receive. We don’t get enough clothes, enough soap. This can cause disease.”

  Just like the boys on the street in the eastern Congo, the boys in the camp worried about cleanliness and also about “bad people,” who would judge them or try to hurt them.

  With Keto, I met a group of boys his age who complained that other children made fun of them because they had no parents, that local children taunted them because they were refugees.

  “Maybe the other children hate me inside, though they don’t say it,” said Abwe, who the other children told me was a good goalkeeper in soccer. They helped him with his drawing because he said he didn’t know what to draw. Keto helped him much of the time while I interviewed other children. Toward the end of our conversation, he said that “people don’t like us; they boo at us, say this is not our place. We don’t have anybody to take care of us, but people are always calling us in to eat with them in different places. I want stability. I have two neighbors who are not good people.”

  I asked him how he knew they were not good people.

  “I have a feeling they are not good people. They eat everything and don’t leave any food. They insult and abuse us.”

  Abwe kept returning to the abuse he suffered as a refugee. Like many of the boys I knew to be living on their own, he talked about “we” and “us” when telling about his problems.

  Samuel, two years younger than Keto, added, “You can see how shabby I am. I used to dress sharp. We are suffering. We left everything behind. In your country there is no war, but if there was war, you will also flee and lose everything that you have.”

  Samuel was embarrassed because he had lice.

  “Because of war,” Keto said, “we don’t have people who will care for us. If a person is not a refugee, he should not look down on refugees.” The others agreed.

  Adolescence is a complex series of navigations, even in the easiest of circumstances. People start treating you differently because you look like an adult but you still feel like yourself, and then your hormones go crazy and you aren’t sure what you feel half the time. You have to redefine yourself constantly, in your family, in society, even in your own mind. For adolescents affected by war and displacement, a range of complex choices and definitions is added to this mixture. The Lost Boys of Sudan had to learn to cook and clean for themselves when they lived on their own, which was unheard of in their culture. Keto, in Lugufu camp, had to choose with whom he should go after his mother died, where he should stay, where his chances were best. He had to earn money to pay for secondary school, which he could just as easily not have done, sitting around in boredom like many young men or working and not returning to school like many others. For him, school was the option that would give him the most chance for survival.

  I heard the phrase “Education is my mother and father” over and over throughout East Africa and have read it in several reports by other researchers. Keto’s regard for the future (he wanted to be a driver or a mechanic), his decision to value education as a goal worth striving for, kept him going in the present, just as Jeanine’s hope to go back to her parents’ farm kept her going. Their hopes might be unrealistic, even futile in the face of continuing wars and insecurity, but having those hopes for the future helps them to survive in the present.

  It was the children I met who had hopes and plans who did not fall into the depression that life in the camp can bring. Claudia, the young Sudanese mother, had no hopes or plans. She did not play an active role in her survival, beyond passing the time with beadwork. She was waiting for someone else to help her, to rescue her and take her away from the suffering. She became depressed because her chances of being rescued were slim to none. She had fallen into a despair common to people stuck in refugee camps but truly terrible when it afflicts someone who is still young. Not all young people are capable of great acts of will, of harnessing their survival instincts into creative energy.

  Lepaix, a gangly young teenager, told me he was five years old. My translator had trouble understanding him, told me that the boy was having trouble communicating. He looked closer to fifteen years old than to five.

  “Do you remember when you got here?” I asked.

  “Last year.”

  “Do you remember how you got here?”

  “There was a war.” He paused. He looked around. His head moved slowly, floating on his neck. He did not seem agitated, engaged in our conversation, or interested in being anywhere else. He seemed to be elsewhere already.


  “And you came here because of the war?”

  “I heard war, guns. I saw others running. I ran too.”

  “How did you cross the lake?”

  “A crowded boat.”

  “Did you know anyone on the boat?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know where you parents are?” This question was always hard to ask. It seems insensitive and foolish when speaking to war-affected children living in a camp on their own, but much of the work done by non-government organizations, in association with UNICEF and the Red Cross, is tracing unaccompanied minors to family members in the hope of reuniting them. Sometimes, I have been told by Red Cross employees working on tracing, a child says both his parents are dead though it turns out one is alive somewhere and the child can be reunited with family. The search is not always successful, but any information can help, so, after some time with the child, I ask the question. I worried when I asked Lepaix that it was too soon, that I asked only because I was frustrated that our conversation wasn’t going anywhere, that I wasn’t getting enough material. I was projecting my frustration onto him, deciding he was a bad subject to be interviewing. I wanted to be done, to get the facts and to get out. It is only now, looking over my notes, that I see, besides the likely developmental problems he had with language and body-weight—he was very scrawny—his disengagement was itself telling, and I should not have thought of it as my failure as an interviewer or, even worse, his failure as an interviewee. He had much to teach me had I been more patient, and I regret not spending more time with him.