One Day the Soldiers Came (6 page)

I thought about our soccer game again. Paul’s warm consideration for the other players struck me profoundly. I wish I
had asked him more about his feelings for the other kids in the center. I can only make assumptions from what I saw when we played, but his sense of the situation of others, whether they were the enemy army or other players fallen in the mud during a game, suggested a possibility I had never before considered: through the crucible of violence and hardship, some children can develop deep moral sensibilities and can flourish as individuals.

“I regret my time in the army,” he said when I asked him what he would tell the leaders who caused the war if he had the chance. “I would like to say to other children not to join the army. To those who cause war I have nothing to say because I am too young. If I had power….”

His voice trailed off here, and he looked at the floor. Paul seemed to recognize the sidelining of children’s views and experiences. “I am too young,” he said, but I wondered how that could be possible. Since he had fought in the war, I did not believe he was too young to have an opinion. He had been expressing complex ideas all morning.

He screwed his forehead in thought, his eyes focused past his shoes, seemingly through the floor at the mud just below the boards. I waited for him to continue. It had started to rain outside, and the drops played the tin roof of the center like a xylophone. I wanted to know what Paul would do if he had power; I wanted him to finish his sentence. Would he get revenge? Would he outlaw war? I thought these answers would tell me a lot about his “psychology.” He looked up and told me his answer in a level voice.

“Everyone is killing people, dying for nothing.”

Paul understood the reality of the war in the Congo. He understood it through all the propaganda pumped into him by the army. He didn’t know the nuances of the political scene,
the names of the players, or the interests profiting from it, but he understood an essential factor of the war: the reality for most Congolese civilians was that neither the victims nor the killers were fighting for any reason anymore.

After five years and an estimated four million people dead, the war in the Congo was declared over in the spring of 2003, though sporadic fighting continued in the east and the threat of renewed full-scale war looms. The violence of the war has its own momentum, not so easy to stop with treaties. Even in 2002, when we met, when the end of the war did not seem anywhere in sight, Paul did not want to discuss it much. There was not much point in discussing it, he told me. His worries when we spoke were about school and his future.

Paul took an active interest in what would happen to him next. He expressed hope for himself if he could go to school, hope that he could have a good life, as a mechanic, he suggested, if he could get out of the center and go to study.

“There is always work for a mechanic here,” he said. “The roads are bad, cars are always broken.” He smiled because he had seen the car in which I pulled up, a busted up taxi that my translator (who was a cab driver too) borrowed to take me around. When I mentioned our car, he laughed and suggested to the translator that he let him fix it, even though he had not been trained as a mechanic yet.

I didn’t really know how to think of him at first, this little boy who was quick to laugh and smile, who had fought with one of the most brutal militias in the world, with some of the worst killers of the twentieth century, who called himself a soldier and denied that he could be afraid, and who desperately wanted to leave the life of war and go to school.

He had a lot of self-confidence, which I was inclined to call a defense mechanism against all the stresses he had experi
enced. As defense mechanisms go, it seemed a pretty reasonable one. He had learned not only that he could not rely on adults to have his best interests at heart—adults had abducted him, after all—he had learned that he could have power over adults when he was a soldier. He could take control of his own situation, for good or ill, and behave like an adult himself. Considering his regard for others at the time we talked, I hope he will continue to nurture the impulse towards kindness. It could easily go the other way. He had been trained to kill and told it was okay to do so. I have no way of knowing what happened to Paul—fighting in Bukavu has displaced many residents since we met. He could have been compelled to rejoin the militia, or targeted by another army. He could have stopped being thoughtful of other children, started getting in fights. I like to think he got what he wanted, the chance to go to school.

“I don’t like it here, in the center,” he said over and over. “I want to leave. I don’t have anything to say to you except that I want to leave here and to study.” I imagine he did not like the confines of the compound, nor the boredom and uncertainty of waiting for parents or other relatives to be found.

Paul was vulnerable for recruitment because he was physically developed enough to carry a gun and because he did not have the same rights or protections as an adult (though adults are also forced to join armies). He was recruited
because
he was a child, not
in spite of
being a child. When the soldiers told him he would be accused of helping them steal, to whom could he appeal? Adolescents are often mistrusted. Paul sensed his position was weak and the soldiers were in a position of strength, so he made what I see as a survival calculation: stick with the strength, go with the soldiers. Otherwise, become a victim, either of the soldiers or of your own community who will suspect you.

He could be filled up with political propaganda because he respected authority and understood what was expected of him. After escaping the army on his own, failed by adults who could neither protect him from the military nor get him out of it, he found himself in a center waiting for other adults to come to his aid. But I believe Paul is quite capable of helping himself, if his altruistic impulses can be encouraged and he can have access to the resources he needs to get an education. He has not given up on the world or on the adults around him. He wants their help and is waiting for it, against the odds. He wants school and parental guidance, not the adulthood that was forced upon him by soldiering. I respect him not for the choices that were made for him—joining the army, waiting for help in the demobilization center, but for the choices he has made: kindness toward others, hope for the future, a desire to learn.

The lesson I took from Paul was this: In wars, when the world of grown-ups fails them, some kids can create their own conditions for survival, can help others to survive, can show amazing courage and strength, can carry the burdens placed on them for quite a while. They are capable of this and deserve, in fact need, respect and encouragement for these capacities. But it is up to adults, who are far more culpable in the political realities of the world, in creating the environment from which children learn to act, not to allow children to carry these burdens for long. They do not all hold up under the strain like Paul.

This project is the result of research missions in East Africa,
Thailand, and the Balkans. It is by no means a complete picture of the impact of war on children: I am no expert and my regional scope is limited. I worked with a translator most
of the time, and in some cases this translator had his or her own agenda. I tried to render the children’s words as faithfully as possible and made every effort to work with translators who had the skill and the ability to render the sense of the children’s words without editing them. This was not always possible, and there were times I might have missed what a child was actually saying or actually meant. I can only ask that the reader trust what I convey, as I had to trust what I heard and saw.

I have changed the names of the children and other people involved in these conversations in the interest of their safety. I have also changed a few details to further mask identities where appropriate, and the order of a few events for narrative clarity, but nothing of substance has been altered in their comments or stories. The conversations I recount are told much as they occurred, though, by necessity, many of the meandering discussions off-topic have been edited out.

Follow-up with the same children over time was possible only in a few cases, and I realize it is nearly impossible to predict how a child will grow up based on a few interactions, conversations, and soccer games.

I am not trying to come up with a general theory of how young people experience and cope with war. Anything that is true for one child in one conflict may not be true for another. Differences in culture, political structure, age, gender, and the social status of the child affect responses to stressful and dangerous situations to a great degree. I hope only to document a few young lives that have been touched by war, to pay my respects to their survival and to applaud the often startling intelligence and resourcefulness of young people who do get through war and can flourish afterwards. I will try to highlight the factors I noticed that might make a young person more resilient in war, but these are by no means “scientific”
observations. I hope to dispel the notion that young people are passive victims, vehicles for suffering, as they are presented in most news reports. Children are protagonists in wars, from Angola to Iraq, with their own needs and desires, and they cannot be ignored.

Children Fleeing

I
n his
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, the eighteenth-century British historian Edward Gibbon describes the scene of Romans fleeing the city of Nisibis in
A.D.
363 after it was handed over to the Persians: “The highways were crowded with a trembling multitude: the distinctions of rank, and sex, and age, were lost in the general calamity. Every one strove to bear away some fragment from the wreck of his fortunes….”

Gibbon could have been describing a photograph from the 1994 genocide in Rwanda or the 1998 campaigns of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo or the crisis in Darfur, Sudan. He could have been describing any number of forced mass migrations that have occurred all over the world in the last ten years, even the last five. The picture has not changed much since the fourth century.

Gibbon could have been describing the drawing that Keto, a fifteen-year-old Congolese orphan, made for me under a thatched roof in Lugufu Refugee Camp in Tanzania, where he
had lived for three years. As he drew, others came over to look at his drawing and he shooed them away so he could concentrate. I watched him gaze up at the roof while he drew, playing out the picture in his mind.

He labeled his picture, “The War in the Congo,” and in it he depicts his escape from the war zone (Figure 4). At the top of the page, in the mountains, a road begins. This road crisscrosses the page all the way to the bottom, taking a circuitous route past a helicopter that is dropping bombs on the fleeing civilians. The road opens out at the end of the page, wide and full of possibilities. Keto has made the road to that point as long as it could be on a piece of drawing paper, zigzagging from one side to the other. People bearing loads on their heads are rushing down towards a flag from which a boat is leaving, also packed full of people. Along the road, there is a dead stick figure, his head X-ed out in blue. A blue X also crosses his knee at a point where it bends off at a sharp angle. Next to the figure is the dropped load he was carrying; I wonder if Keto is depicting the actual wounds of a man he saw.

“She’s died by the side of the road,” Keto told me. “She was killed by the Mayi Mayi.” The figure had no gender markings—I assumed it was a man—nor any distinguishing features of any kind save the blue X’s, yet Keto seemed to be thinking of someone specific. In his mind, the wounds were the most distinguishing features of this woman, all he chose to depict, perhaps all that he remembered.

He seemed frustrated at our discussion of his drawing. I’d only known him for about an hour. Keto was the first boy I met in the refugee camp, the first Congolese child I was meeting in my life, the first person I’d interviewed about his experiences of war. I was nervous and did not want to frustrate him. I wanted him to like me. My mind raced. He was very quiet. He said
something quiet to the translator. I worried that he might be traumatized from his experiences, and I did not want to open up wounds in his mind and then leave him to suffer the consequences of them while I got back in the white UN jeep and drove away. I decided to change the subject, to talk to him about soccer, because he had also drawn a picture of a soccer ball.

“I like football,” he said, “though there are not enough balls here in the camp.”

I began to ask another question, neglecting whatever connection may have formed had I allowed soccer to take center stage. In my eagerness in this interview, I wanted to ask some
revealing
question, questions that would get to the
core
of Keto’s
being.
I had not yet realized that soccer could be the key, that play could reveal the secrets of Keto that words would not. His answer about the number of soccer balls contained a universe of information about how he felt, what he wanted, what he hoped to get from me. I plowed on, oblivious.

“Keto, can you tell me—”

My translator stopped me mid-sentence and paused for a moment. He turned to me. Keto was not going to let me get by that easy, not going to let me miss the connection his answer about soccer balls demanded.

“Before you go on, Keto would like to ask you a question, if it is all right.”

“Of course,” I said. “He can say or ask anything he likes.” I smiled to show without words that I was very happy to answer his questions. The interview still felt more formal than I had wanted my interviews to be. It would take a bit of practice, letting a conversation flow between a child, a translator, and me.

Keto sat up straight and looked me right in the eyes to ask his question.

“How will talking to you about the war help me to get shoes
or more food or a blanket?”
Or more soccer balls,
his question seemed to say. Perhaps he was too polite to throw that in as a dig against my obliviousness. I had much to learn.

I was not sure how to answer. This was a question I had been thinking about since I thought of this project, since I arrived in Africa for the first time a few days earlier. It was a question that would haunt me for the next three years as I returned to Africa to meet other children, as I met children who had become illegal migrants in Thailand to escape the junta in Myanmar, as I met orphans struggling to grow up and build their lives in the stunted economy and traumatized villages of post-war Kosovo. The implications of this question harass me as I write this now.

Anyone who does “field research” (I hate that term; implying pith helmets, Stanley and Livingstone) in communities that are less fortunate than one’s own—whether it be documentary work, social science research, humanitarian assessment, anthropological study, or journalism—has to deal with the moral and psychological tensions, as Robert Coles calls them, that this kind of work creates.

How do you arrive as an outsider among people who are struggling to survive, observe and interview them, take their lives as “material,” and leave? If you are successful, it will be in large part because of the quality of the material (the content of the lives researched) that you have gathered. Your career will advance or your reputation will be made. Yet what of the people you have observed or, to put it another way,
exploited
? How does telling their story help any of these children, and how can I sleep at night having taken their stories and left them in war zones, still hungry, still at risk?

There are no easy answers to these questions, and few resolutions to the tensions. I believe there is value in being heard, in sharing your experiences with others. There was a value for
the youths and adolescents I met while doing this work: I communicated their concerns to those who might make changes, I helped to validate their thoughts and ideas, and they began to learn how to express themselves to those with different experiences and backgrounds. There is also the hope that their stories can be used for advocacy, to stimulate more or better assistance to them or children in the same situation as they are.

But there is also the worry that discussing what can often be painful and frightening memories will lead to harm, further traumatization, revisiting horrors without the resources available to counsel the child, to work through a healing process. There is also the problem of disappointment when the interviewer with whom the child formed a connection and some degree of friendship leaves again, never to return.

“How sad I am that you do not think of me anymore,” Barika wrote me in a letter just days after I left the camp in Tanzania where I had met him.

He was an orphan, like Keto, and at twelve years old was struggling to make a difference in his community. He performed in a theatrical group that demonstrated lessons about AIDS and violence and other social concerns to youths throughout the camp. He is one of the most admirable young men I have ever met, and I had no intention of forgetting him. He would leap about as we spoke, acting out his story, miming machine gun fire, smiling like a sadistic soldier as he burnt the village down, and then whimpering like the little children—himself among them—who had fled across the lake to Tanzania. Barika did not have many friends, due both to the stigma surrounding orphans and the more mundane reasons that adolescent overachievers everywhere have few friends: he liked to study and to read and to think about difficult things. He reached out to adults looking for the friendship that his peers did not provide. When I came
along and took him seriously, listened and watched, asked questions and wrote down his answers as if he were the teacher and I the pupil, he felt, as he later told me, a sense of importance. His rage when I left—rage that continued in letters for over a year despite my best efforts to convince him I had not forgotten him—was understandable. All Barika knew was losing—his parents, his home, his friends. I was one more loss in a short life full of losses, and he did not want to forgive.

Anna Freud points out, from her research with children who survived the bombing of London during World War II, that children can generally cope with the day to day horrors of war—and even grow tired of them—“so long as it only threatens their lives, disturbs their material comfort” but when the war threatens to break up the family unit, it takes on far more serious significance. Psychological problems, Freud noted, were more prevalent in children who lost or were separated from their parents during the war than among those whose families survived intact. For those children the war was a chapter of their lives that could be closed for the most part. For orphans and separated youth, the war was the defining event in their young lives, the time when everything changed, when safety ended, when their place in the world was ripped from them, when they became alone. In her memoir,
First They Killed My Father,
Loung Ung writes about the multitude of horrors she suffered under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia as a little girl, but the theme pervading the entire book, from the first page to the last, is the loss of her family.

My leaving Barika after about a week of knowing each other cannot compare to the loss of his family, but it was, perhaps, a reminder of those other losses, a reinforcement that he was on his own.

I sent him a copy of
The Little Prince
in French and English so he could practice and so he could read a little about another kid on his own, having adventures. I sent the gift because he loved
to read. I sent the gift because he lived in a world filled with too little kindness. I sent the gift as a Band-Aid for the wound I had torn open, the kind of wound that never really heals.

I have tried to stay in touch with many of the children I have met, but the realities of war and displacement have made it difficult to keep track of the kids, to get messages to them or receive them again. Barika and I have stayed in touch a little, from time to time, though the distance and the vastly different worlds in which we live have limited our contact.

In that first meeting with Keto, I knew that the few hours we had together would probably be all there was. I wanted to connect with him very much, but I did not want to do him harm with that connection. No research was worth that. My desire for understanding did not outweigh his needs, not by a long shot. I had to tell him something in answer to his question, and it had to be true. You don’t bullshit a child who has seen what he’s seen, survived what he’s survived.

“How will talking to you about the war help me to get shoes or more food or a blanket?” Keto scratched his chin and waited for an answer.

“It won’t,” I said.

The noises of the camp, of the world outside the tent filled the space between us. I heard laughing and loud conversations. The silence was awkward in the dim light between Keto, the translator, and me. The silence was long.

“It might not help you get shoes or more food or a blanket,” I told him. “Talking to me won’t get you those things.” I paused and thought about what I was there to do, what I hoped would come out of it. He rested his chin in his hand and watched me speak, not understanding what I was saying until it was translated, but listening intently to the sound of my words.

“But if enough people hear your story, perhaps they can start a larger effort to help all the kids living in this camp. Your story
could help put shoes on the children after you. The people who read it, perhaps they will want to help other children, perhaps you can teach them about what it is like so it can be made better here one day.”

When I said this, I believed it. I cannot really imagine that Keto did. His face did not betray any reaction as my response was translated for him. It was not his first time being interviewed.

“I talked once with a
mzungu
”—a white man—“from the Methodist church. He interviewed me and he helped me, gave me a blanket. But it got stolen,” he said.

I told him that I did not have any blankets to give, though he had not actually asked. Savvy Keto knew how to get me to volunteer what he wanted to know. This gift for people, for reading them, for getting adults to open up to him, was a gift that had served Keto well in the past, would serve him well in the future. Maybe it was this that kept him alive when the world around him fell to pieces.

We were eating granola bars while we talked, and I think he enjoyed that, perhaps saw it as fair barter for his story.

“I’d like to help other children,” he said. I think he sensed my nervousness and wanted to make me feel more at ease. It was his turn to smile, to reassure me that he would talk, that he liked talking to visitors. It was embarrassing to be comforted by a child, a
victim
of war. I was supposed to be the expert here, providing the comfort, the support. My nervousness leveled the playing field for him, gave him a role to play. Keto did not want to be patronized; he wanted respect. He got it. He has it still.

“It’s okay,” he said and settled back in his chair and started talking again. He told his story without interruptions, except to let the translator speak or to nod when I seemed to understand something on my own because he had used a French word that I knew. Both of us liked those few moments of direct connection
as he spoke, but otherwise, he spoke without much emotion and without many pauses…. It amazed me at the time, though I grew used to it over the years, how so many children who had been through unspeakable horrors could talk about the most disturbing things with little emotion. These were the facts of their lives. These were their stories.