One Day the Soldiers Came

by Charles London

  “Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that…they would have no difficulty in exterminating each other to the last man,” he wrote. “And now it is to be expected that the other of the two Heavenly Powers, eternal Eros, will make an effort to assert himself in the struggle with his equally immortal adversary [Death]. But who can foresee with what success and with what result?”

  Looking for clues on what the future might hold for war’s children, I am reminded of an incident that occurred early in my travel. I had wandered to the school in the part of Lugufu camp where Justin, Keto, and Melanie lived. The school consisted of three low-slung buildings with thatched roofs and dirt floors. The buildings surrounded a large dirt field, and the children spilled out onto it the way children always spill out of classrooms when they are released: with a lot of shouting, shoving, and giggling. I kept my distance, not wanting to change anyone’s behavior by my presence. I watched as girls and boys ran off into the rows of houses and tents in the camp, holding hands and laughing. I saw little Melanie, wearing the same tattered red dress she wore when we met. She chased after two larger girls, all of them laughing, and disappeared into the camp.

  A group stayed behind to play soccer, this time with a real ball that belonged to one of the teachers. The moment he took it out of his bag, the boys crowded around him. He shouted out commands, dividing them into teams. This game was more organized than most and would, it seemed, have goals and points. The teacher acted as referee. He set the ball down, and the game began. The teacher strolled from side to side, calling out what sounded like reprimands or advice. He never stopped the play, even when one boy tripped Keto and Keto got up to shove him. They wrestled a moment, with everyone around watching, and the scuffle ended nearly as quickly as it started. Both boys returned to playing. They seemed to be on the same team.

  I saw Justin standing on the sidelines, not playing. He saw me and wandered over to where I stood. Several boys followed. The teacher noticed me, but exhorted the boys to keep playing.

  “You play football?” Justin asked, pointing at the field.

  “Not today, I think.”

  “Me not today too,” he said. His English was not half bad. The other boys around us whispered and poked each other, staring at me, wondering what Justin and I were saying.

  “They never talk to a mzungu before,” he explained, smiling. We had spoken the day before and he was, therefore, an expert. “You first time to Africa?”

  “Yes it is.”

  “This is our school. We have—”

  “Greetings!” the teacher trotted over, leaving the game to its own devices. The children kept playing as the referee quit the field and came up to me, interrupting Justin as if he weren’t there. “You are welcome.”

  “Thank you.”

  “This is our school,” he explained and offered to give me a tour. I accepted, and we walked together, Justin accompanying us and the other boys walking just behind.

  “Your first time to Africa?” the teacher asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You are with an NGO? Or UNHCR?”

  “I’m researching the lives of children.”

  “The children have it very hard in this camp. I try to teach them, but there is no money. I do not get paid, you know?”

  “I did not know that.”

  “And we have no money for materials.”

  “Where do you get your funding?”

  “The school was built by the UNHCR, but we get little bits of money here and there from the community. It is not very much.”

  “Justin was just telling me about the school.”

  “Justin, yes,” the teacher said, acknowledging the boy for the first time. He patted him on the shoulder. He said something to the other boys, and they answered. Justin looked at his feet. The teacher and Justin exchanged words briefly, while the other boys watched. I did not speak the language, but I could tell when a teacher lectured a pupil. He had the downcast look, part misery, part defiance. I looked to my translator.

  “He tells him that it is time for adults to speak and it is not right to listen,” the translator whispered. “He tells him to go play like the other boys.” With a quick pat, he sends Justin running off toward the game with the rest of the children.

  “This boy is troubled. I try to make him forget,” the teacher said. “He does not play like the others and he thinks about the past very much.”

  “Maybe this is his way of coping,” I suggested.

  “No, I know this boy,” the teacher said, watching him join the game. “He will not be well if he does not play with the others.”

  We watched the game together for a while, not saying much. Justin played reluctantly, hanging back, never rushing in to seize the ball. The others largely ignored him. As he played, he looked over at where we stood, his longing to return to our conversation obvious. He did not fit in, though his teacher was determined that he try to fit in.

  I suggested Justin might not want to play soccer anymore.

  “The children must be part of the community.” He said no more about it. Sigmund Freud also wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents: “There is indeed another and a better path [to happiness]: that of becoming a member of the human community.” I cannot imagine this teacher had read Freud, but through his own observation he came to the same conclusion as the founder of psychoanalysis. In order to survive, one must be part of something. We are social creatures; we cannot do it alone. Not he, not I, not little Justin.

  Within a few minutes, Justin had the ball and maneuvered it down field. One of the other boys knocked it from him. He chased after it and kicked at the boy’s legs. The boy stopped playing, threw a punch that connected with Justin’s shoulder. Justin smacked him back. They scuffled a moment, and the teacher beside me simply watched. The second fight of the game was brief and dusty and when it ended, the game resumed. Justin, visibly angry, kept playing. Within minutes he was part of the game again, smiling and shouting with the rest of them, having what looked like a good time, the scuffle forgotten, though his eyes flashed with anger whenever he passed near the boy who punched him. But the others seemed, for the moment, not to care that he was an outsider, a Tutsi among the Hutu, an orphan among the parented. They played together because that was the task at hand. Though Freud’s “inclination toward aggression” emerged for a moment, it was a form of love, the Eros of play, that won the day. The children played and kept the drive toward death at bay, at least for a few more hours. Gunfire often ripped the night air in the refugee camp, Thanatos giving the children no quarter, even as they slept.

  War’s children are not a lumpen mass, but a collection of little hopes and needs and impulses and desires lived out from day to day. They live their lives amid the backdrop of terrible violence and deprivation, amid constantly shifting loyalties and labels and dangers, but also amid the backdrop of going to school, of who-can-juggle-the-soccer-ball-better, of sewing torn pants, of funny pratfalls, and of family and friends. Of play. The children are a collection of all the things that happen to them, and the kinds of people they become is being decided every second, in the struggle of love versus death, in the battling of the primal urges and the relationships that form around them.

  The most important factor for children in war is building a day-to-day life, having somewhere to go, something to do, someone to count on, seeing Eros in action rather than its destructive brother. Justin played soccer and, though it would not change a thing about the reality of the world in which he struggles, the minutes of play and happiness will weave themselves into his life, just as the horrors of death and destruction have woven themselves into his life. They are all part of his story, the narrative of himself he shows to others, and the secret history he shows to no one.

  Children can survive without comforts—they are amazingly adaptable. They can survive without safety, even, drawing on what resources they have to get by, but they cannot long survive without hope. It is the job of every
adult, those who make wars and those who watch them unfold, to bend their mind to the task of giving hope, of creating a world where childhood can flourish, where play is possible.

  Embarking on this project I was amazed to find such a great crowd of remarkable children, struggling with the quotidian and the extraordinary, each in their own way. They have different levels of control over their lives, and they are all, to some extent, at the mercy of the adult world, subject to the policy shifts of governments and the mood swings of their caretakers, even their own contradictory impulses, as all children are. But they take control where they can, playing and dreaming and observing the goings-on about them. They remember what is done to them and what they have the power to do to others, and they will wield that power in the future when the world of the adults is their world, for good or for ill, to create or to destroy. The capacity for either is in all of them. Eros and Thanatos, Love and Destruction, fighting it out inside every one of war’s children, the soldiers and the students and the soccer players.

  After Justin, after Keto, after Christof and Nora and after Rebecca, after all of them are gone, whether they died still young or grew into adulthood, whether they were celebrated or feared, lost to the jungles, wandering from place to place, dispossessed, or brought inside to a warm bed or shot at or disemboweled or turned into killers or bandits or whores, whether they worked the land their parents worked or whiled away the evening hours kicking a soccer ball under an acacia tree humming an old song they heard when they were younger, whatever became of this one group of war’s children, there will be new children and new wars.

  The children of these wars, like those who came before them, those of whom they have no knowledge, will bear their riches inside themselves as well. Like Justin and Keto and Christof and Nora and Rebecca and all the others, they will face the dangers that they must, bearing their daydreams and ideas, their faith, their sense of play along with them. They will bear them into exile. They will bear them back again. Occasionally, they will count among their riches a jump rope or a pastiche soccer ball, or a tattered French grammar book.

  They will also have burdens to carry. The burdens that grown-ups have placed on them: ethnicities and histories, violence and politics, hunger and poverty. The past, the present, and the future. The children carry what the adults put down. They will carry these riches and these burdens across bomb-scorched deserts, through deadly jungles, and down bullet-pocked streets. They will carry them into adulthood, if they survive. Some will not survive.

  One boy haunts me more than any others. The night after Mount Nyiragongo erupted in Goma, I found myself in Kigali, Rwanda. I left the hotel where I was staying just across the street from the famous Milles Collines to exchange some money and to get a bite to eat. I walked up the hill toward the center of town. The road was packed dirt, and wide, deep gutters ran along the side. Palm trees gave a canopy of shade all the way to the town center, and it was a very pleasant walk as there were few cars. It was eerily quiet for a capital city. As one young woman described it, Kigali was a city with more ghosts than people.

  To get to the Indian restaurant that also worked as a grocery store and informal marketplace, I cut across an empty lot. As I crossed the lot, I saw a boy of about twelve years old. I had seen him before, several weeks earlier when we first came through Kigali. He had begged at the Indian restaurant, and the owner had chased him away with a stick. He and I were alone in the vacant lot now, no owners, no sticks. He wore torn blue jeans that had been cut into shorts and flip-flops to protect his feet from broken glass and sharp rocks. His shirt was a tattered tennis shirt, light blue, torn open all the way to the bellybutton and filthy. He wore a white hard-hat that made him look almost clown-like, and his face was all smiles.

  “Mzungu, mister. Mzungu, mister,” he said and came toward me with his hand outstretched. He turned his lips down immediately in an expression meant to look pitiful. I was alone and had no way to communicate with the boy except for broken French and hand gestures. “Hungry,” he said and repeated it again and again. “Hungry, hungry, hungry.” I gave him some change I had, and he patted me on the back, transforming once more to smiles, tipping his hard-hat back on his head. “Hey friend,” he said. “Friend man.”

  He laughed, a staccato laugh that shook his body. He seemed suddenly dangerous, though he was reed thin and several inches shorter than me. He pulled a cardboard box from his pocket. Glue. Cheap glue. The preferred drug of street children in this part of the world. He took a deep whiff, and his eyes went glassy, like big black marbles or tiny vacant cow’s eyes. His face turned blank.

  “My friend,” he said again and nodded. Two men entered the lot at the far end. They looked tattered, but not nearly as frail as the boy. They stopped and took me in a moment, a young white man standing in a vacant lot talking to a drugged street kid.

  “Hey!” one of them shouted, but I left the lot quickly, not wanting to find myself alone and outnumbered along what began to seem an unwise shortcut. I kicked myself for not doing more to help the boy, for not knowing what to do.

  That night, walking with two colleagues back toward the hotel from the very same Indian restaurant, I saw the boy again. He no longer had his white helmet on, and I wondered where it had gone. He followed us down the hill slowly, calling after us, trying to catch up.

  “Wazungu! Hungry! Hungry! Hungry!” His voice sounded pitiful. It was dark out and we were rushing to get back to the hotel, to get to sleep, to get on a plane the next morning. We did not stop.

  I knew, as all of us did, that we were actually rushing away from the boy. After our time in the Congo and after the volcanic eruption just a day earlier we were exhausted, and not only physically. I have to admit to a deeper kind of exhaustion that night in Kigali. I could not bear to face another begging child, especially this glue-sniffing child with whom I’d shared one brief moment of connection. I couldn’t bear to face my own helplessness that would be reflected back at me through his eyes.

  “My friends,” he called again, his voice reaching a new high pitch, practiced and pitiful. It hurt to hear it. “Hungry! Hungry!” And then, almost in a whisper: “Help me. Hungry.”

  He whined after us, his French vocabulary limited but confident. He followed like an injured dog, effacing himself of his humanity, whimpering. He did not care. Dignity would not get him the money he needed. Pity would. He knew the effect he was having on us. He was a skilled professional.

  We walked faster, our hearts breaking. Then the dirt beside us kicked up in the air as if a bullet had struck. We ducked and looked back. I thought of the two other men from the afternoon, thought of a gang. For a moment, fear erased my guilt. But it was just the boy, no longer walking. He stood still on the road, his hands clutching a pile of small stones. The boy had thrown a rock at us. He raised his arm to throw another. It hit the ground near one of my companion’s feet, kicking up another spray of dirt. The boy cocked his arm back to throw again, but we yelled at him to stop, turned toward him aggressively, and he ran off into the dark without a sound.

  I thought of the owner of the Indian restaurant chasing the boy with a stick and how I judged him for his lack of compassion. I thought of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, a wily street kid in India, and of Charles Dickens’ urchins in London. I did not think about that boy himself anymore that night, just the type of boy I imagined him to be. We got back to the hotel, slept soundly, and left Rwanda the next morning.

  I do not know what happened to this boy. I never learned his name, and I doubt he lived long. I think of him now, the nameless street child, among so many nameless children, and I wish I had spoken to him, wish I had learned his story, heard his words in his own language, his memories, his day to day strategies, his ideas about his place in this world. I wish I had asked his name. I am sure he held a great deal of hurt within him, but also strength and courage, and also ruthlessness, and regret. I am sure he had done awful things to people and had worse things done to him. I am sure his tale was
epic as any Aeneas, but he ran off into the dark, and I never had the chance to ask him.

  REFERENCE LIST

  BOOKS

  Apfel, Roberta J.; Bennett Simon, eds. Minefields in Their Hearts: The Mental Health of Children in War and Communal Violence. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

  Ariès, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. Trans. Robert Baldick. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962.

  Berkeley, Bill. The Graves Are Not Yet Full: Race, Tribe, and Power in the Heart of Africa. New York: Basic Books, 2001.

  Coles, Robert. Doing Documentary Work. New York, Oxford: New York Public Library and Oxford University Press, 1997.

  ———. The Moral Life of Children. New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986.

  ———. The Political Life of Children. New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986.

  Dallaire, Roméo. Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. Toronto: Random House Canada, 2003.

  Fink, Christina. Living Silence: Burma Under Military Rule. Zed Books, 2001.

  Freud, Anna. The Writings of Anna Freud: Infants Without Families. Volume 3. International Universities Press Inc., 1973.

  Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. 1930. Trans. James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1961.

  Gourevitch, Philip. We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda. New York: Picador, 1999.

  Heins, Marjorie. Not in Front of the Children: Indecency, Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth. New York: Hill & Wang, 2001.