One Day the Soldiers Came

by Charles London

  There are common features, regardless of geography it seemed, to life in a refugee camp. When I entered Lugufu camp in Tanzania, I saw a group of boys playing with a small wooden car they had made out of twigs and scraps of wood, though their car had what looked like part of a bicycle in it. Another group of boys played soccer with the ubiquitous trash and rag bundle that seemed to be the regulation ball for youth all over the country. A true World Cup Soccer Match, I imagine, would be played in the dust with an improvised ball. That’s how the world plays, at least the world in which play is the most precious thing, hard won and lost too easily.

  There was red dust everywhere, covering the sides of the white UN jeep, in the folds of my clothes, in the cracks of everyone’s skin, in all our hair. Refugee camps are usually established on the worst piece of land a country can find, the places no one wants, at least no one of any importance to the government. Dust seems to be a universal feature. Refugee camps are the world’s waiting room, its repository for the unwanted, the disregarded, and the dispossessed. This is where people go when power fails them or when it bares its teeth.

  This was true in Kakuma and it seemed true in Lugufu. Rugged, inhospitable land with inhospitable neighbors. Of course it is easy to judge the host countries, seeing the land on which they put the desperate people who come to them for safety. However, some of the poorest countries in the world host two-thirds of the world’s refugees. That they have anything to give is remarkable enough; that they give it is miraculous. The needy always outnumber the generous. It is true the world over, in Kakuma near the Sudan-Kenya border and Lugufu, near the Congo-Tanzania border, on the Thai-Burma border, and in the Balkans.

  Another thing that was the same in any camp I visited were the problems faced by young women and girls, the threats, the forced submission, the shriveling of choices.

  Jeanine was fifteen years old when we met. She came from Burundi, where her family worked a small plot of land. The war between the government and rebels forced her to flee. She wore a white dress with flowers on it. The white had faded to a reddish yellow with the dust. Her hair was braided. She looked like any number of girls I met, dressed up for her meeting with the mzungu, perhaps wearing her only dress. Jeanine is classified as a “street child” in the camp because she left her foster family and lived on her own without permanent residence.

  She asked me very early in our conversation if I was married. As I had already had one young woman ask if I wanted a girlfriend and a marriage proposal from someone who wanted to come to the United States, I was hesitant to tell Jeanine I was single. I told her I was engaged, which was a lie.

  “Oh,” she said. “You have no ring.”

  Well, I thought, lie to one of these kids who have few advantages but their savvy, their ability to read people to get what they need, and of course you’d be caught out. I worried right off that I had negated any trust she and I might have built.

  I told her she was very observant and that I was caught in my lie. I explained to her why I had lied, my (self-centered) worry that I would be put in uncomfortable positions by the truth, as I had been already.

  She laughed at me and said she did not want to go to America. She wanted to go home, back to Burundi. The longing in her voice was clear when she spoke about her homeland, an ache for the land that made me think of the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath. She wanted her own bit of soil, rich black soil to run through her fingers. Her soil; her family’s soil.

  “We had land and many types of food. It was good land to farm. We would do some farming and some trading, growing many things,” she said. “We were happy. During the war, there was much fighting and I hid in the bush. When the fighting around my home stopped, I left the bush to find my parents. I found that they were dead. I saw their bodies, and I went to Tanzania with strangers. The strangers would not care for me. I met a woman who was kind and she brought me here to safety.”

  “Were you afraid when you arrived?”

  “When I arrived, there were rumors of a bad spirit in the camp, and outside the camp there were blood suckers and animals that kill people. I was afraid then. I’m not afraid anymore. I have gotten used to living here.”

  “Do you feel safe here?”

  “Living in the camp is too difficult. It is hard to build a home. It is hard to get enough food, and we always eat the same yellow peas. It is hard to get enough supplies, women’s supplies.”

  Safety and supplies are one and the same for girls. If girls do not have access to sanitary napkins, then once a month they must stay out of school until their period is over. If their clothes are torn, it is impossible to go to school, as they could be seen as goading men on. Falling outside of accepted norms can be an invitation to violence against them. Non-food items are essential to the well-being, education, and safety of school age girls and are often in short supply.

  “Some people go into the Tanzanian villages [to get supplies] but it is dangerous to go without permission. Sometimes you are beaten and sometimes you are not. They may rob you and leave you with nothing. You cannot go alone, and I have no one to go with me.”

  “Does your foster family help you?”

  “They mistreat me. I have left their home.”

  “Your foster parents mistreated you?”

  “No, there is a brother and sister. They mock me for being an orphan. They insult me so I do not stay there anymore.”

  “Do you know other children who have lost their parents, in school maybe?”

  “No, I do not go to school. I stopped going because the other children tormented me about my past. About being an orphan.” She sat with her dress tucked between her knees and looked over her shoulder out the window. “I want to learn to read and write. I would go back to school if they would not torment me. One day, when there is peace, I want to go back to Burundi and take my inheritance for my family. For now, I am getting used to living here.”

  Jeanine felt very alone with her problems. In Burundian culture, women cannot inherit property, and somewhere in her mind, she must have known that. The land would go to her uncles or brothers, if she had any. I didn’t want to remind her that her plans were nearly impossible, because her regard for the future seemed to be a source of strength for her and perhaps she would grow up to challenge societal norms, to get her own piece of earth. She had already chosen to leave her foster family and live on the streets rather than endure their taunts. I got the sense from one of the social workers in the camp that she was a troubled girl, who made a lot of trouble for the agencies that tried to help her (specifically for this one social worker), though towards me she was polite. I think her troublemaking was not too different from many adolescents who act out to get attention, but in this case the attention she sought was to help her survive, to help her get a better break and put an end to her abuse. I had arrived in a UNHCR land cruiser, though I had only hitched a ride. I assume that seeing my mode of transport influenced Jeanine’s behavior towards me. She figured I had influence and put on her best behavior. She was not at all oblivious to power relationships in the camp, knowing that a white UN officer would have some pull over the social workers to whom she had been rude.

  Jeanine did not realize that there were well over a hundred unaccompanied minors living in the same camp who had experiences similar to hers. Though she felt it, she was not alone. Many other orphaned girls have faced similar problems, sometimes without anyone finding out about them.

  Mathilde, who was thirteen, lived with other unaccompanied minors in another camp for Burundians. Firewood, it seemed, was the first thing on her mind. She drew me a picture of girls collecting wood. She mentioned wood in her answers to nearly every question about life in the camp. She was determined to talk about collecting wood, though she was not doing it out of a love for the task.

  “I do not like collecting firewood,” she said while looking at the floor. “In Burundi, I stayed home to guard the house while my parents worked,” she said, puffed a little with pride. �
�I did not have to carry food or water or firewood.”

  Her father died, she told me, of disease in Burundi. Then her mother took her to the Congo, where she died of disease as well. It could have been any number of diseases that killed her parents, but given the stigma attached to AIDS, it is possible that her mother moved after her husband’s death to avoid harassment within her community. This would explain why her daughter now lives outside the care of a foster family in the refugee camp. Often, children whose households have been devastated by AIDS, as Keto explained to me earlier, are shunned by the community out of fear and can find no one willing to care for them.

  “On my own now, I am responsible for getting wood with the other girls in our house. Our neighbors,” she said, meaning the Tanzanians, “come and attack us while we gather wood. They come and beat us and kill us.” She would not elaborate any further. When asked if she had been attacked she simply said yes and fixed her gaze on her big toe. The male translator advised me not to push any further, and I could tell what he meant when he translated “beat us and kill us.” He nodded to me that I had understood correctly.

  Though there has been a decline in sexual violence against women gathering firewood in Mathilde’s camp, young girls who are walking to remote areas are extremely vulnerable to attack, especially since they are considered “safe” targets for sexual violence because the risk of STDs and AIDS is lower. In the case of Mathilde, if she was attacked, she did not have any adult to inform in her life. I learned from a rape counselor later in the day that Mathilde had never spoken to anyone about being attacked, at least any adult.

  By living with other children in a similar situation, Mathilde did not suffer from the social isolation that Jeanine felt. She went to school and wanted to be a teacher when she grew up, like many children I met. Teachers were some of the very few positive adult figures in their lives, which might explain why so many of the orphaned children wanted to be teachers. Additionally, school was a child-friendly zone in the camps, a place where they were free to be children, usually the only one, and attending was a privilege that not everyone had. In school they could play and learn and goof off. I think some of the children saw teaching as a way to stay in school all the time. Children saw that teachers got to go to school every day, unlike most of the children. They liked the stability that implied, stability that their own lives lacked. On a more practical note, teaching was one of the few jobs one could get in a refugee camp, one of the few adult employments any of them saw.

  With the other children, Mathilde laughed and played with ease. She would like to improve camp security, “so there are no problems for girls,” she said.

  Nicole, who was ten years old when I met her, had been a refugee in Tanzania since she was six. She came from the Congo and lived in Lugufu camp with her grandmother. She had been brought to me by the same aid worker who introduced me to Keto, Michael, and Melanie, though Nicole did not know them before that day. She was extremely quiet, shy with the other children and very shy with the strange foreigner who was looking at her drawing.

  “I don’t know what to say to you,” she said. She liked to draw. Her favorite subject was Art. She sang a song to the translator and myself instead of talking. Her favorite song, she said, taught to her by her mother. It is one of the songs women sing when they are getting water from the well, to pass the time together. After the song, she spoke a little more freely and told us about her daily routine.

  Nicole went to school in the mornings, but only if her grandmother did not need her for work until later in the day, and only if her clothes were in good enough condition for her to feel decent. If her clothes were soiled or damaged, she stayed home, she said. It is not appropriate for a girl to go out in torn clothing, and as she approaches puberty, not safe either, said my translator.

  At school, she recited her lessons and obeyed the teacher. She is polite without being exceptionally astute, I was told. I have met other girls a little older than Nicole who say more, who reflect more deeply, but Nicole possessed a gentleness that I found endearing.

  Her face flickered with a nervous smile every time I asked a question. I got the distinct impression that Nicole was not often asked what she liked or thought. Even though she had trouble thinking of what to draw and had to be prompted to depict her favorite game—Monkey-in-the-Middle—I detected in her a creative impulse that far exceeded her resources. Her desire to communicate in song spoke to this, as did the depth of her Monkey-in-the-Middle drawing. In the picture there are three girls, no more than stickish figures in the kinds of little skirts most children draw to show what is female. One of the girls faces out of the perspective of the drawing with a downturned mouth. She is the girl in the foreground of the picture and looks quite a bit like little Nicole in crayon on paper. She had drawn a self-portrait, she confirmed (Figure 16).

  What she could not express in words, she showed me with the little picture of herself in her perfect red dress. Nicole’s real dress is slightly worn out and beginning to fray at the edges.

  “My favorite place to be is the well,” she said. I can picture her, the little girl in the picture, tossing a ball back and forth and splashing around in the water.

  “I have lots of friends to play with at the well,” she said. “I like the well more than any other place. In school, the boys take the balls away.” Even doing drawings before our interview, the boys took half of Nicole’s paper away.

  “At the well,” she explained, “I can play with my friends and have no worries. I play jump rope and monkey-in-the-middle, and this is my best time.” She smiled proudly, unlike the little girl in the drawing.

  This is not to say that girls are the only ones who have a hard time in refugee camps or that they are the only ones who have to manage their own survival or that of their friends and families. Boys face many problems as well. The lack of opportunity can make them feel inadequate, unable to make the leap to manhood that employment and self-sufficiency signify. Without much to do, they are easy targets for military recruiters, criminals, pimps, or drug pushers. Seen as adult-like, with adult capabilities (look at Johnny and Luther Htoo, look at Paul, the precocious child-soldier), boys are often sent from the camps to the cities to work on their own, support themselves. They become part of that mass of boys on the streets of cities of all the world, hopefully finding fellowship with each other, staying clear of crime and unscrupulous police officers, and surviving.

  To go to the city where there are opportunities or stay in the camp where there is international aid? To go to school and prepare for the future or to work now and have something to eat, to feed the younger siblings? These are no easy choices for young people (or adults either!). The most resilient kids I have met seem to be the ones who engage with these choices, who think critically about them, who feel a sense of responsibility towards others but also towards what they often call “the right things” or “good things” or sometimes frame in religious terms with “God.”

  For children who do not make it to a refugee camp where at least some measure of protection and stability is provided, these choices are all the more important.

  Furaha was fifteen years old when we met in Bukavu, the war ravaged Congolese city on the lake. We met in a children’s shelter in one of the neighborhoods high above the city. Groups of children ran between the buildings carrying shovels, digging drainage ditches to keep the water from tearing apart the buildings, which were all in danger of toppling due to the heavy rains and the unstable ground.

  Furaha and her four young brothers fled the fighting in their village outside Bukavu in April 2000. She is a tall girl with short hair and a severe expression. She speaks very quickly. When I ask a question she always looks down at the floor to listen, pauses, looks up at me again and rattles out her answer as if it had been waiting in her all the time.

  “Furaha,” I ask, “how did you come to the city? What happened?”

  “My father and mother were killed by the soldiers. We couldn’t stay
because of the violence. After my parents died, we had no home, no place to stay. We came to the city on our own,

  PHOTOGRAPHIC INSERTS

  Figure 1. Miroslaw’s depiction of the Battle of Kosovo and the Death of Lazar. The 1389 battle still haunts the province of Kosovo.

  Christof, a boy of mixed Croat-Serb parentage, suffered torment for his ethnicity in the years after the war in Bosnia.

  All drawings and photographs courtesy of the author

  Figures 2, 3. Images of school, soccer, and violence dominate the drawings of most former child soldiers.

  A group of former child soldiers in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, some of them, including Paul and Xavier, had been there for months, unable to find relatives or a foster family willing to take them. Reintergration into civilian life is often the hardest part of recovery.

  Figure 4. Keto’s depiction of his escape from the war in the Congo.

  AIDS is destroying the fabric of society in much of sub-Saharan Africa. One boy’s drawing of “AIDS Man.”

  Figure 5. Melanie drew images of different things she saw when she fled the Congo. The weapons remain ingrained in her mind.

  Figure 6. Justin found comfort in the rhetoric of children’s rights. Here he states that children have the right to go to school and to work.

  A group of Sudanese children living in Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, horsing around with the author in the summer of 2003.