I knew that Rebecca was currently living in a protection area created by UNHCR, and her case was being reviewed for possible resettlement to the United States. Officials in Kenya with UNHCR and the State Department could not legally give me details about her case, but they told me she was anxious, not sleeping well, afraid of the others in the protection area. Her case, last I had checked, months earlier, was languishing in red tape, red tape that had gotten far thicker after 9/11. The United States was, reasonably, being very careful about whom it let in. They required countless immigration and security interviews, even after the UNHCR vetting process. Rebecca had told me when we met that she dreamed of going to live with her cousin, how she would continue to pray to be reunited with him. My heart leapt at the thought that this could be her cousin on the phone with me.
“I have news for you,” he said and did not wait for me to ask what it was. “She has arrived in the United States. She has been resettled here, in this town, with a foster family. She will begin the tenth grade in September.”
I don’t remember clearly what I said or what happened next. I wasn’t in my apartment anymore; I wasn’t on the phone. I was back in Africa, under a blazing hot sun, walking to the taxi with Rebecca after our interview. The driver did not want to give her a ride to Kibera, the giant slum in Nairobi in which she was staying at the time, awaiting word from UNHCR if she would receive protection. Kibera is a slum of six hundred thousand people, more its own ramshackle city than a part of Nairobi. I did not want her walking or taking the bus. There was a man after her, a rapist and kidnapper. She glanced over her shoulder constantly.
“Is not safe to go to Kibera,” the taxi driver said. “I do not drive there. They will rob you for sure.” From what I could tell, he was a decent man, fair and intelligent, making an honest living in Nairobi. He wore a simple button-down shirt and blue slacks. His hairline was receding and flecked with bits of gray.
His concern for my well-being was generous though not really his job, I told him.
What he said next shocked me. He looked Rebecca up and down, a withering stare, and then turned to me. He spoke quite loudly.
“Foreigners and terrorists live in Kibera. They come from Sudan and don’t want to work. They just sit around and get drunk and chew qat.” He shook his head and would not look again at Rebecca. He had no use for refugees, didn’t want them in his city, didn’t want one in his cab. They were backward, rural people exploiting the kindness of the Kenyan state, and, he implied, drug addicts to boot. He had no use for them. “Besides,” he added. “They have no good roads there. It will break my car.”
“I can look for another taxi if it’s a problem for you,” I told him. I had hired him for the day and not yet paid. He stood to lose some serious money.
“Fine,” he grumbled. “I will take her to the edge. She may walk from there. I will not go in. It is not safe.”
We drove through the city, past the university and the shopping areas, past the offices of international NGOs, past tall shining buildings and ramshackle lean-tos housing shoe repair stands, Internet cafes, odd assortments of clothing and cell phones for sale, and we arrived at the edge of Kibera. Rebecca got out of the car.
I wished her luck and gave her my card with my number written on the back and my personal e-mail address, told her to write me if she needed anything. She nodded, though in the space between us it was clear that there was nothing she needed that I could provide. The U.S. State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and the United Nations held her fate in their hands now. She thanked me anyway and turned to walk off toward the dirt and mud streets of the Kibera district.
She looked back to wave as we drove off, and I knew that was the last I would ever see of her. The road I imagined her heading down was not a pretty one, but it was well trod by girls just like her, centuries of girls just like her, lost girls in vast slums all over the world. Too many girls whose lives ended at sixteen, too many girls who had no choices left, no doors open, no other paths. Patience and Charity and Hope with those crazy pseudonyms I gave them to try and tell their stories without ever really knowing their lives. Or Melanie or Nora or Thinzanoo, all these girls penned in by history and culture, by violent men, by entire governments with policies intended to erase them. I did not like the path I saw ahead for them or for Rebecca, who chose her pseudonym herself because it was a Christian name. I looked back for as long as I could, as if my seeing her would protect her, but I lost her in the crowd and we drove back to the hotel.
However, Rebecca’s story did not end there.
“You hear this?” the voice on the other end of the phone exclaimed. Joseph. Rebecca’s cousin. Reunited. I remember smiling, a smile that nearly knocked me over. “She will start school only one year behind her age. She is working very hard to speak English better now.”
It would be almost two years before I spoke to Rebecca again.
“I am waiting,” she said over the phone with street noises behind her, her English confident. “I am waiting for my registration paperwork so I will attend college.” She lived in a small town in the Mid-Atlantic and was excited for all the opportunities ahead of her. She lived with her boyfriend, who would help support her as she went through school, though mostly it would be as it had always been for Rebecca: she would get by on her own.
Rebecca arrived in the United States in 2004, barely speaking a word of English. She was terrified and could not imagine going to high school, but she knew she had to do it to make something of her life, of the chance that had been given to her.
“I lived with a foster family and completed high school. It was strange, coming to America. I have a new life now. I experienced so many hard things, it was easy to give up, but God has something in store for all of us, I think.”
She did not yet know what she would study, but she was thrilled to have options. She had made a transition, across the seas. She carried the lessons she learned through “disaster, pain, and difficulty”; she carried her faith and courage, and some hard-won street smarts. These were the sum total of the wealth she brought with her to make a life in America. I picture her on a college campus. The leaves are falling from the trees in browns and yellows, the same shades as the desert floor. She tosses her textbooks into a backpack, her hair tied up behind her head, a coat thrown on to shield against the foreign cold. She rushes to class past the kids on the lawn playing Frisbee, playing soccer. She has places to go, no time to play right now, but she can’t help but slow her pace and look back over her shoulder a moment to watch the games unfold on the lawn. She’s transformed from a child of war into a woman at peace.
Despite Rebecca’s success in America, resettlement in a third country is not the solution for very many displaced children. A complex array of factors contributed to the massive resettlement program of the Sudanese youth, including pressure from religious groups, media attention and U.S. strategic interests in southern Sudan.
These factors do not exist for most displaced populations, and that aside, ethical considerations make third country resettlement problematic. Many southern Sudanese wondered aloud to me how their society would function with such vast numbers of their youth overseas. The hope is that the educated “lost children” will return and bring their skills and education back to Sudan with them when the violence ends. Many send money back to the refugee camps to support friends and family. Still others feel cut off from their people and find it difficult to adjust to a new and alien culture, suffering bouts of restlessness and depression.
Separating children from their culture and maybe even from family that may still be living is no one’s ideal way of protecting youth during war. Aid programs aim by and large to keep families together and to strengthen a family’s ability to care for itself. Often it is mothers who are the nexus of aid and assistance for their children and, when dealing with orphaned or separated children, much effort is made to find them foster parents within their communities. Rarely do affected populations think res
ettling children to third countries is a good solution, though sometimes, as in the case of the Lost Girls, more danger comes from their families and communities than from the war itself. That aside, however, the ideal for children of war is not exile but homecoming.
When I visited Kosovo and Bosnia, which I knew would be my final trip for this project, I brought along a book I should have read in college, Virgil’s Aeneid. The hero, dutiful Aeneas, escapes the burning city of Troy as it falls and sets off into exile, destined to reach a foreign shore that his progeny will call Rome.
On the night of the destruction of Troy, Aeneas races through the city, dodging marauding Greeks, crashing rubble, and flames—his account sounds oddly similar to the children’s accounts of fleeing their villages and towns. With tears in his eyes, he seeks his wife, his father, and his son, hoping to rescue them from the terror that will come at the hands of the city’s captors. He finds his father and his son, but his wife’s spirit appears and urges him to flee, tells him that she is already dead. He obeys and arrives at the shore to behold a woeful sight, one that I imagine every refugee entering a camp or escaping a conflict has seen at some point.
Aeneas speaks: Here I find, to my surprise, new comrades come together…joined for exile, a crowd of sorrow. Come from every side, with courage and with riches, they are ready for any lands across the seas…
When I look at this passage, I cannot help but think of the multitude of war’s children I have met, the littlest exiles, a tiny citizenry shuffling below the radar of history, and I think of the journeys on which they have embarked, the riches they carry with them, and the shores they strive to reach.
I think of Paul, exiled not just from his village, but from his childhood, pushed headfirst into adulthood as a soldier, longing to return to school. Paul who loves peace could, by now, be a soldier again. At eighteen years old, no one could stop him. I asked around in the region. No one knew what became of him, no one knew if he had the chance to go back to school. I like to picture him a mechanic in a peaceful city, grease on his hands and that same glowing smile he graced me with. But I’ve been stopped at checkpoints, and I can imagine that same smile terrorizing those at its mercy. Paul understood survival, and if survival meant a return to violence, Paul could have returned to it. How many times in his young life had he seen the power dynamic play out with brutality? How many times had he seen the grace of mercy? The math isn’t simple. But I remember when he told me that he could not be afraid, and I hope his courage gave him the strength to grow toward peace.
Keto’s an adult now too. Thousands of children in Lugufu camp took their secondary school graduation tests and thousands returned to the Congo ahead of the first free elections. Perhaps Keto was among them, a full-fledged citizen, a minor no longer, able not only to choose his own destiny but the destiny of his country, something previous generations had never fathomed. Keto was smart and could, more than likely, play the system well, perhaps become a Big Man, perhaps a doctor or a teacher. He could also be wallowing in that camp still, pining away the days in search of rescue, unable to wean himself from the habit of dependency on aid and unable to find a job in a nonexistent economy. No way to tell. My translator and I arranged to get him his treasured soccer ball after I left, and I heard later he was leading games on the dirt field near the school. That was the last I heard of him, calling out passes and field positions, guiding his team, even if there was no keeping tally of the points.
Christof did not return to the summer camp on Mount Igman; he stopped attending the Sunday program. In some neighborhood in Sarajevo he continued to work out his anger and his gentleness, figuring out which side of himself to follow. Bosnia seems poised for a hard time ahead, and young men with little money and a lot of rage could be the powder keg that sets off another war. As the most senior international official in Bosnia noted, the situation “can all too easily escalate into violence in a society where weapons are everywhere, alcohol plentiful, and the summer long and hot.” One likes to think that when the moment comes, Christof will remember the dog, Prijatelj, panting under the heavy sun on Mount Igman, that he will remember giving little Sofya a ride on his back, and how peacefully she slept with her arms around his neck. One hopes that he will join with other moderates and be a voice for cooperation. These decisions come from the fabric of a life, after all, and there is much sewn into the fabric of his life, of all their lives.
The riches each child of war carries into adulthood are forged from moment to moment; who they will be is built up quietly as events unfold, as they try to fathom the kindness they receive and the betrayals they feel, as they calculate their survival and learn who their friends are.
The young experience it all in war: the highs of human kindness and the lows of human cruelty. They are at both ends, giving and receiving, their stories unfolding without fanfare. Records are rarely kept on their movements and little notice is taken of their deaths unless it serves a political end. There is no prescription, no single way to ensure that children survive the hardships of war or flourish as adults but to eliminate wars altogether. Granted, for some children, the challenges they face in times of crisis can actually benefit them, help them build “character,” as I saw time and again among the children I met. But there is no way to know that they would not have flourished in peace-time as well, tackling the day to day challenges of living with the same energy and courage as they tackled survival.
If a society restores itself as part of the peace process, rebuilding its institutions and moral norms, if it includes the young in the dialogue of rebuilding and renewal, the odds for war’s children improve. Sometimes greater intervention will be needed—psychiatric care, physical therapy, job training, development aid, peacekeeping forces. Each culture and each conflict are unique, as is each child. They want different things for the future.
Jeanine, a fifteen-year-old Burundian girl sleeping on the streets of a refugee camp, wanted peace for her own country and the opportunity to move home again, to rebuild. “I want to return home, when it is safe,” Jeanine said. “I want to go home and farm my land.”
She scoffed at the idea of moving to the United States or Canada as many others from the camp longed to do. She wanted to go home. She did not want to live the life of an exile nor the life of handouts that refugees are subject to, and she had had enough of parents. Her own were dead and the ones who took her in, her foster parents, she said, mistreated her. The war in Burundi, the war that took her parents from her, did not define her, though it impeded her dreams. It was a distant memory and the day-to-day things, the chores, the gossip, the games, the work of living took up her time and her energy.
Paul too scoffed at the idea of moving to the United States or Canada, though he did indicate that he would like to be somewhere safe where he could attend school.
“Can a child do this in Canada?” he asked. Perhaps his reluctance to resettle if he had the option was due more to a lack of perspective than a lack of desire. Regardless, his main desire for the moment was to get an education and to get out of the demobilization center where he lived with the other boys. He also said he would like a real soccer ball. The other boys at the center seconded his wish. Their dreams for the future ran parallel to their quotidian desires: soccer and joking and scribbling in books and drawing pictures and still more soccer.
Marko, the ringleader of his group of friends in the Serb enclave in Kosovo, wanted to return to Pristina, the capital city, where he had lived before the war. He was tired of the provincial life and longed for the hustle and excitement of the city, which was cut off from him by ethnic conflict. He did not want to leave Kosovo, as his parents often mentioned.
“Kosovo is our place,” he said. “We don’t want to leave. We want to remain here and to remain part of Serbia.” Asked if he wanted that even if it meant another war, he toned down some of his bravado. “No one wants war,” he said. Having seen his displays of kung fu against hypothetical Albanians, I wondered, when he got older, whi
ch version of Marko would come to the foreground, the one who wanted peace or the one who was ready to “kick Albanian asses”? The question is hardly academic. War’s children will one day become the adults of their societies.
There is no way to know for certain what sort of adults they will become. Their actions probably suggest more about the moment in which they act; their inconsistencies the working arithmetic of building a life and of surviving. They showed me parts of themselves, the parts they wanted to show. I saw other parts of some of them when they let their guard down during a game or a long walk, as when Christof slipped our dog some water and patted him behind the ears when he thought no one was watching. Other parts of who they are I’ve guessed at, based on their drawings, on what other children and other adults told me, based on what I’ve learned about their history.
Christof’s cruelty and his kindness do not exclude each other, nor do they sum him up. Marko’s wish for peace and his inherent racism, though contradictory, hold the key to what he will one day be, though no one, least of all Marko, knows what that is yet. Paul’s capacity for violence and his generosity of spirit will vie with each other in his identity, his memories and his values often at odds.
In Civilization and Its Discontents, a book written when the possibility of a second war in Europe loomed large overhead, Sigmund Freud described the two primal drives in human beings: Eros, the instinct that drives us toward love, to seek out comfort and support (and pleasure) from others, and Thanatos, the instinct that drives of us toward death and destruction, the instinct that pushes us not to love our neighbor as ourselves, but to use our neighbor, exploit him, rape him, humiliate him, and burn his house to the ground. He implies that these two instincts are the two “Heavenly Powers” battling for supremacy: good and evil, God and the Devil, Life and Death. He ends his brief essay on human civilization with a passage added after publication to the second edition, as his own anxieties about Hitler’s rise to power grew stronger.
One Day the Soldiers Came Page 24