One Day the Soldiers Came (28 page)

Next to us, the old police barracks still stood, though mortars had ripped it open and torn its guts out. The rooftop on which we sat took a hit and bore a huge gash in its side, the metal railing twisted and bent.

“They used to lob mortars at the station and hit our apartment building,” Omar told me. “I lived on the other side of the building, so it was okay. Though we still went to the basement when the shelling was close. It was an exciting time.”

Omar laughed and joked about the war. He was a young teenager during the siege and the whole thing had seemed like an adventure. He reminded me of Anna Freud’s conjecture about the children during the bombing of London in World War II; that the young could not only handle but even enjoy the chaos of war, so long as it only threatened their lives and disrupted their routine, so long as the family stayed together. He and his family survived. For him, the war was a distant memory, one that did not trouble him greatly.

“I’m not traumatized,” he laughed. “No more than anyone else in this crazy city.” He took a drag on a cigarette and ran his
hand through his dreadlocks. He wore a T-shirt that read
Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic
that he got a great kick out of quoting every time we mentioned that I was American.

“The economy, man, that’s my problem,” he finally said, after giving some thought to the host of problems facing a young Muslim man in the Balkans. “That’s what gives me nightmares. There’s nothing to do in this town and no way to make money.” He made a little, he explained, selling small bits of marijuana to his friends.

“There are some hardcore dealers in the city too, dangerous guys. They weren’t always that way though. I went to school with these guys. But now there’s no way out and no other way to make money, so they sell drugs.”

Before the war, the suicide rate in Bosnia was around eleven per 100,000 people. Since the war, the rate has almost doubled, to around twenty suicides per 100,000 people in 2003. Discussing the problems of depression in Bosnia—psychological and economic—a woman who had lost her husband to a mortar told me with a shake of her head, “You know…we’ve survived the war. Now we have to survive the peace.”

Her youngest son, a fifteen-year-old who had been a baby at home when the mortar came through the wall and killed his father, sat with us a while but felt no desire to talk about the past. He was more concerned with the present—the struggling economy, the war criminals still at large. He did not stay in the room long to talk, and he seethed with a bit of anger toward his mother when she spoke lightly of any times during the siege. He was not entirely comfortable with an American, his mother explained when he left to go out with friends. He suspected America was waging a war against all Muslims and thought I might be judging him, hating him secretly because he was Muslim. He may, however, just have been a shy teenager.

“After the war,” she told me, “he always tried to protect me, keeping the shades drawn, avoiding windows. He could not understand why people fixed the glass in their windows or greenhouses…he thought they would simply be shattered again by mortars or grenades.”

The aftermath of the war affected her youngest son deeply, and he remained terribly protective of his mother, even as she and I spoke. Before leaving, he ran me through an intense interrogation about who I was and why I was visiting. Though he spoke decent English and very good German, he refused to speak them in front of me, other than to ask what I was doing in Sarajevo, preferring to talk to his mother privately in Bosnian when I was present, even to have her translate, though he understood everything I was saying. His mother suspects that his anger and his trouble in school, despite his intelligence, go back to the loss of his father.

“He is very much like his father,” she said. “I loved his father very much, and my son is stubborn just like him. He reminds me more and more of him every day.” Her eyes grew moist, though she did not cry. She entertained countless journalists in her home during the siege, she told me, and had told her story many times. Telling her son’s story, however, was harder for her. He, like teenagers the world over, was struggling to figure out what kind of adult he would be.

As poverty grows in Bosnia, as the post-war economy stagnates, young people are left with few options. Frustration grows daily and politicians on all sides seem incapable of making things work. The two parliaments constantly block each other’s initiatives. Al Qaeda has begun to get a foothold in the region, forming safe houses in Sarajevo; right-wing clerics are gaining prominence. Several suspects have been arrested in Bosnia under terrorism laws, charged with
planning suicide bomb attacks on American and European interests in the Balkans.

At the same time, the Serbian nationalists continue to honor and protect former war criminals. At the funeral for the mother of the former Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, people carried signs and political banners proclaiming him and General Mladic heroes. This environment of high tension and little opportunity is a hard one in which to grow up, in which to heal. Everyone is tired of fighting, but peace has its own challenges.

Children manage the minefields of peace and of recovery from the trauma of war in radically different ways. Jaca engaged directly with her memories, telling stories, reading about politics, asking questions. Omar never thought much about it at all. Christof rarely spoke of the war, though the consequences of it loomed large in his interactions with the other children and with our dog.

I spoke with dozens of children in my time in all of the conflict areas I visited who did not want to talk about their experiences of war. Justin, the tall Rwandan boy who lost his mother and father, felt better because, as he said, “I am learning to forget.”

I was shocked to hear that sentiment echoed by adults all around him and around many other children in similar situations. The adults were trying to forget as well. They stated proudly how their programs were designed to help the children forget the terrible things that had happened to them, to not think about them at all. Words like repression and avoidance buzzed around in my head. I came from a culture where forgetting was seen as pathological. People in America spend small fortunes trying to remember traumatic events as a way to become healthy again. My gut reaction was that this kind of avoidance would only lead to problems, but I’m not a trained
psychiatrist. I said nothing. How else to cure trauma but by talking about it, I wondered. Avoiding the subject, repressing the memories of the terrible events of war, would lead these children to problems, I feared. Post-traumatic stress disorder. Pathological behavior. How could they move past the things they’d experienced unless they talked about them, exorcised the demons of their past, so to speak?

A thirteen-year-old Albanian boy named Peter had lost his father, who was shot by paramilitaries. He wore soccer shorts and a red tank top that needed washing. His face was downcast, and he did not join in the conversation with the other children on the day we met. He did not want to talk about the past or the future.

“They took my father and burnt him in a house with some other men, what does it matter?” he said, angry that I would pry, a total stranger. The principal of his school told me he was quite a good student, “well adjusted,” though a bit sullen at times, like any thirteen-year-old boy. His family was poor.

“It makes sense he would be sad,” the principal said. “If the ocean was a piece of paper and the sky was a pencil, that would not have been enough to write the suffering of the Albanians.” The principal was also a published poet and had spent years in a Serb-run prison for his political verses.

Despite my fears at Peter’s avoidance of past troubles, he was doing well under the circumstances. For him, avoiding the subject worked. Talking about it distressed him, being forced to remember and being helpless to change the past. He was not in denial, he just didn’t want to talk about it.

“They took my father and burnt him in a house with some other men, what does it matter?” His words echo in my head, the matter-of-factness, the tight grip on reality.

“We don’t talk about these things in my family,” eleven-
year-old Adem said. “Though I know that three houses in our village were burned down by the paramilitaries.” He looked around the classroom where we sat and stared at Peter a moment. I asked the group of kids how they dealt with memories of the past, memories that were unpleasant. Adem answered for everyone. “We play to get over it.” Peter nodded in agreement.

The
talking cure
, as it is sometimes called, is an individualistic concept. It fits well in the West, where the individual reigns supreme. But in other cultures, the individual is of far less importance on his or her own than the group, the community. In a society emerging from war, it is not just the individual who has been traumatized, it is society. Everyone has felt the sting, not just as individuals but as a community. The very institutions that make a community have been traumatized—laws, moral norms, family structure, economic security. Especially in cases of ethnic conflict, it is the group trauma that trumps all others.

In Bosnia and Kosovo, everyone talked about
what they did to us, what happened to the Serbs, what happened to the Muslims,
and so forth. Individual suffering was always set in the larger context of the suffering of a people. The children often saw their own suffering not as an individual event but as part of the campaign against everyone they knew or identified with.

In that light, healing for many of these young people could not happen in a vacuum. Their troubles were tied to the community’s troubles. Their worries were not symptoms of psychological problems, but real reactions to the situations in which they lived. As Sigmund Freud wrote, “In an individual neurosis, we take as our starting point the contrast that distinguishes the patient from his environment, which is assumed to be ‘normal.’ For a group all of whose members are affected by one and the same disorder no such background could exist.”

Safety and security tend to be the main concerns for young
people immediately after the end of a war, but as security threats lessened, access to education, better healthcare, and the means to make a living took the forefront. Social justice was also a concern that stayed on their minds. A sense of group victimization kept many of the children trapped in their wartime memories. Perhaps, for the young, it was better not to think about it.

Looking at the Albanian children of Kosovo, I saw that their sense of well-being depended on independence, the hope that history would not repeat itself. Their greatest fear was being tied to Serbia, once more at the mercy of the Serbs. For the Serb children, much of their anxiety came from their imprisonment in protected enclaves, their feeling that they were surrounded by a hostile nation, cut off from their own people in Serbia, left at the mercy of the Albanians. In Bosnia, crime and economic hardship dominated the worries of young people. They also worried about war criminals who were still at large, who were keeping populations in terror and keeping people from returning to the homes they lost in the war.

The problems of a post-war society are vast and complex and all of them are connected, especially in a society where ethnic conflict has torn everyone apart. As Kosovo looks toward independence and Serbia looks to block that hope, and as Bosnia tries to enter the European Union and bring its war criminals to justice, the region may once again find itself in turmoil, and many of the children who survived the wars of the 1990s will be the young adults who fight in the new conflicts. Meeting many of these young people, I cannot say if they will choose the path their parents took. I am sure many will. I like to think, however, of Mount Igman and the soccer games I played.

Every evening before dinner most of the kids would gather on that field littered with spent shell casings buried just beneath the dirt. The dog, Prijatelj, would trot along behind us,
ignoring the occasional unkind word or tossed stone, and flop himself down under the shade of a tree to watch and to pant. The children, a jumble of different histories and dreams, would pick teams with the toss of a rock, or a coin if one was handy. They put aside their parents’ violent history, their own troubled past, and they kicked the ball around, laughing and passing and dodging and slipping, the way kids do all over, in peace and war and poverty and riches. They played soccer together. They played every evening for as long as they could, at least until it grew too dark to play.

What Becomes of War’s Children

I
n the Autumn of 2004, I received an unexpected phone call from a young man named Joseph. He lived in Michigan, he explained, though he was not from Michigan. He came from a small town in southern Sudan near the White Nile. As a young boy, he had fled because of the bombings and attacks by the government army in Khartoum. He was separated from his family and wandered in the desert with thousands of other youths like himself, the youths who became known as the Lost Boys of Sudan. He had survived, he explained, through the grace of God.

He lived with the other boys, his brothers in suffering, he called them, in Kakuma Refugee camp in Kenya until, thanks to the U.S. State Department and American church groups, he was put on a plane and given a new life in an American city, resettled to a third country of refuge far from his homeland. He received basic training in what life would be like in America.
Simple things:
This is a flush toilet, this is a gas stove, this is a bread knife, a utility bill, a paycheck.
He was loaded onto a plane with hundreds of other boys, one of countless flights that left the refugee camp over the years during which the resettlement program was operational. It was his first time on an airplane. Until then airplanes had only dropped things on him, bombs or pallets of food aid (which could also kill someone crushed underneath). This acceleration away from the earth was something new to him, exciting and terrifying, a microcosm of the emotion he felt about abandoning his homeland and his people to start his new life in the United States. At twenty-three years old, America became the fourth country in which he had lived but the first that he did not arrive in on foot.

He had, however, left someone behind in Kakuma camp, he told me over the phone: his cousin, a young girl, his only family. He worried for her, all alone. He knew to contact me through his cousin; he had gotten my information from her, the young woman who chose to be called Rebecca.

“You have met her in Nairobi?” he asked me.

“Yes,” I told him. “I met her one year ago.” I didn’t want to give him too much information just yet. I didn’t really know who he was, calling me out of the blue. Rebecca had been in hiding, after all. A man was after her, a man who could have friends all over America through the resettlement program. Not all the Lost Boys were little angels, and most were grown men by now.

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 re
settlement 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 resettling 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.