One Day the Soldiers Came (30 page)

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.

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.

Hochschild, Adam.
King Leopold’s Ghost
. New York: Mariner Books, 1999.

Jones, Lynne.
Then They Started Shooting: Growing Up in Wartime Bosnia
. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Maass, Peter.
Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War
. New York: Knopf, 1996.

Machel, Grace.
The Impact of War on Children
. New York: United Nations Publications, 2001.

Malcolm, Noel.
Bosnia: A Short History
. New York: New York University Press, 1996.

Mandelbaum, Allen.
The Aeneid of Virgil
. New York: Bantam Books, 1971.

Marten, James, ed.
Children and War: A Historical Anthology
. New York: New York University Press, 2002.

Marten, James.
The Children’s Civil War
. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Nzongola-Ntalaja, Georges.
The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People’s History
. London: Zed Books, 2002.

Postman, Neil.
The Disappearance of Childhood
. New York: Delacorte Press, 1982.

Rashid, Ahmed.
Taliban
. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.

Rosen, David.
Armies of the Young: Child Soldiers in War and Terrorism
. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005.

Rosenblatt, Roger.
Children of War
. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday & Co., 1983.

Scroggins, Deborah.
Emma’s War
. New York: Vintage Books, 2002.

Singer, Peter W.
Children at War
. New York: Pantheon, 2005.

Sluka, Jeff. “The Anthropology of Conflict.” In
The Paths to Domination, Resistance, and Terror
. Ed. Carolyn Nordstrom; Joann Martin. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992.

Ung, Loung.
First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers
. New York: HarperCollins, 2000.

Werner, Emmy E.
Reluctant Witnesses: Children’s Voices from the Civil War
. Boulder: Westview Press Inc., 1998.

Westermeyer, Joseph, and Karen Wahmanholm. “Refugee Children.” In
Minefields in Their Hearts
. Eds. Roberta Apfel and Bennett Simon. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

Williams, Elizabeth McKee. “Childhood, Memory, and the American Revolution.” In
Children and War
. Ed. James Marten. New York: New York University Press, 2002.

NEWSPAPER/MAGAZINE ARTICLES

Amornviputpanich, Punnee. “Daddy Htoo: The Teen Twin Rebels Grow Up.”
The Nation
(Bangkok), May 26, 2004.

Brennan, Richard; Husarska, Anna. “Inside Congo, an Unspeakable Toll.”
Washington Post
, July 16, 2006.

Derluyn, Ilse, et al. “Post-Traumatic Stress in Former Ugandan Child Soldiers.”
The Lancet
363, May 15, 2004.

DRC: From Protection to Insurgency: History of the Mayi-Mayi
. IRIN News Service, 2006.

Harnden, Toby. “Child Soldiers Square Up to U.S. Tanks.”
London Telegraph
, August 23, 2004.

Peterson, Scott. “Child Soldiers for the Taliban? Unlikely.”
Christian Science Monitor
, December 6, 1999.

Plemming, Sue. “Children Bear Brunt of Lebanon-Israeli War.” Reuters, August 15, 2006.

Singer, Peter W. “Western Militaries Confront Child Soldiers Threat.”
Jane’s Intelligence Review
, January 1, 2005.

Subotic, Tanja. “Suicide Rate Doubles in Post-War Bosnia.” AFP, May 6, 2003.

West Africa: Children in Danger; Begging for Teachers
. IRIN News Service, 2006.

REPORTS/PAPERS

Apple, Betsy; Veronika Martin.
No Safe Place: Burma’s Army and the Rape of Ethnic Women
. Refugees International, 2003.

Boyden, Jo. “Social Healing in War-Affected and Displaced Children.” University of Oxford Refugee Studies Centre. AsylumSupport.info, 2003.

Caouette, Therese M., and Mary E. Pack.
Pushing Past the Definitions: Migration from Burma to Thailand
. Open Society Institute, 2002.

Colombia’s War on Children
. New York: The Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict, 2004.

Democratic Republic of the Congo: Demobilization Programs Require Special Focus on Girls
. Washington, D.C.: Refugees International, 2006.

Democratic Republic of the Congo: Reluctant Recruits: Children and Adults Forcibly Recruited for Military Service in North Kivu
. New York: Human Rights Watch, 2000.

Edgerton, Anne.
Child Soldiers in the Eastern Congo
. Washington D.C: Refugees International, 2001.

Fitzgerald, Mary Anne.
Throwing the Stick Forward: The Impact of War on Southern Sudanese Women
. African Women for Peace Series: UNIFEM and UNICEF, 2002.

License to Rape: The Burmese Military Regime’s Use of Sexual Violence in the Ongoing War in Shan State
. Chiangmai, Thailand: The Shan Human Rights Foundation & The Shan Women’s Action Network, 2002.

Making the Choice for a Better Life: Promoting the Protection and Capacity of Kosovo’s Youth
. New York: Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children, 2001.

March 2000 Delegation to Sierra Leone Preliminary Findings and Recommendations
. Physicians for Human Rights, 2000.

Myanmar: Atrocities in the Shan State
. London: Amnesty International, 1998.

Pillsbury, Allison Anderson; Jane Lowicki.
Against All Odds: Surviving the War on Adolescents. Promoting the Protection and Capacity of Ugandan and Sudanese Adolescents in Northern Uganda
. New York: Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children, 2001.

Protection Through Participation
. The Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children, 2003.

Shukla, Kavita.
Ending the Waiting Game: Strategies for Responding to Internally Displaced People in Burma
. Washington D.C.: Refugees International, 2006.

Total Denial Continues
. Seattle: Earth Rights International, 2000.
Under Orders: War Crimes in Kosovo
. New York: Human Rights Watch, 2001.

Unsettling Moves: The Wa Forced Resettlement Program in Eastern Shan State
. Chiangmai, Thailand: Lahu National Development Organisation, 2002.

Untapped Potential: Adolescents Affected by Armed Conflict: A Review of Programmes and Policies
. Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children, 2000.

Youth Speak Out
. New York: Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children, 2005.