One Day the Soldiers Came (14 page)

Children, however, are not an abstraction to the regime. Their education program acknowledges the role children can play in the future of their country, as dissidents or as loyal cadres. The army employs an estimated thirty thousand child soldiers, the highest number of any one army in the world. The junta has an acute awareness of children’s capabilities.

The young are just as capable of dissent as their parents, as Kin Wa and Win showed me, and are just as dangerous to the military government. Aung Su, even though he didn’t seem very concerned about the situation in Burma, had forged aspects of his personality in reaction to the conflict. Even though he wanted to be English, he could not escape his identity, and the policies of both Burma and Thailand will not let him or his peers define themselves any other way.

Sum Chai, a friend of Aung Su’s, lived his whole life in Thailand. His parents used to be plantation workers in Burma but now they worked in Bangkok.

“I’m worried for my parents’ safety in Bangkok,” he said. “There are a lot of drug addicts in the city. I live with my aunt
now. I worked on the construction sites with my father in Bangkok, carrying bricks. We made enough money to get by, I think. My mother would not let me stay with her because there is no school for Burmese children in Bangkok. I want to go to school and be a doctor in Thailand.”

“Why not in Burma?”

“I’ve never been to Burma. I’ve never seen a hospital in Burma. I want to stay in Thailand. There is more to see. My parents want to go back to Burma, when it is safe, but I like it here. I can speak Thai and Mon and Burmese. I would also like to study English.”

Sum Chai echoed a lot of the Burmese children. As far as national policy is concerned, he is Burmese. He lives with other Burmese. His family is Burmese. But he has grown up in Thailand. This is his home. He was not angry at Burma or at Thailand. Unlike his peers, he said he’s never been afraid of the police. (I don’t imagine he would have admitted being afraid of anything, not in front of his buddy Aung Su.) His predicament is simply that he has no nation. He is unable to hold property or receive a certificate of higher education. He will grow up trapped between the policies of a military regime and the policies of his country of refuge.

Together, they will deny him safety, schooling, employment, culture, language, and history. He is defined by all of these outside forces and labeled by them. He likes soccer and wants to learn English so he can study computers. His friends want to go to good schools and walk home unafraid, to become doctors and teachers, to work for democracy, to travel, to be superheroes.

When we spoke in the muddy schoolyard out of sight from the prying eyes of the police on the road, he was ten years old and already knew none of them could do any of these things.

Children in Camps, Shelters, and on the Streets

I
t was nine a.m. in Kakuma Refugee Camp and Charity was not in school.

On the way into the camp near the Kenyan border with Sudan, there were six boys squatting in the dust around a rough wooden toy, a handmade car. They fiddled with the pieces of it, hewn branches and scraps, trying to make them fit together so it would roll correctly. Up the road from where they played, men unloaded trucks. Each of these trucks contained several tons of food, meant for distribution to the roughly 80,000 refugees from six nations who lived in this camp. Dust covered everything, creeping into the folds of clothing, inching up the walls of buildings, seeping into the cracks of dry skin on my hands and face.

The sun had already started its brutal arc into the sky and shade was scarce. It was the rainy season and so allegedly cooler, but it was above ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit. It was above
ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit the day before. It would be again tomorrow. Because of the rains, there was less dust than usual. At certain times of year, I am told, the dust blots out the sky. There was some vegetation on the ground: scattered patches of what looked like dandelions bursting from the dirt, the first blossoms of what would become brambles of two-inch thorns.

A small cress-type leaf that starving Sudanese youths and Somali livestock eat has found its way into the crowded graveyard at the entrance to the camp, near where the boys are building their car. Sometimes violence erupts over who gets to eat the vegetation first, the goats or the Sudanese children. A few acacia trees stand in defiance of the hot and cracking ground, each by itself with no clear relationship to the others. Each tree is precious, because shade makes the best place to sit. Light, heat, and breeze dictate the real estate market in the desert. Leave the shade of one tree and who knows when you will encounter the next. The landscape is merciless. There isn’t enough water. Or rather, there is just enough for the few gnarled trees and no more. Each tree burns alone in the sun, defying the most human of desires: to gather together.

My translator, Simon, and I walked down a dirt path coming from the schoolhouse where we had hoped to speak with Charity. Simon is one of the famous Lost Boys of Sudan, who traveled on foot to Ethiopia and then from Ethiopia back to Sudan and then to Kenya, suffering bombings, starvation, and crocodile attacks. He was goaded forward by rebel soldiers who wanted to control the food aid coming to the parentless youths and by the bombs from the government in Khartoum that continues its campaign against the black Africans as I write this, now focusing on the Darfur region.

Simon has lived in the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya for the past ten years, since he was fifteen. Boys are especially
vulnerable because they are considered potential soldiers and because they tend the herds of cattle, and to destroy them is to destroy the southern Sudanese way of life. Simon is about six and half feet tall and walks with the loping gate of one who is used to walking everywhere. He has a warm smile, which does not betray the horrors he has seen in his twenty-five years of life.

We walked quickly, pouring sweat, and arrived at a gate made from oil tins donated by the World Food Program. Someone had pounded the tins flat and stuck them together to make a door. The gate was surrounded by thorn bushes to mark off the compound. Stagnant pools of water shimmered in the sun. We slipped through the door into the compound of low mud houses clustered together. No vegetation grew here. A group of small children leaned against one of the houses talking excitedly. When they saw me, one of them shouted:
“Khawaja! Khawaja!”
This is the Dinka word for white person. In the Tanzanian camps, the word was
mzungu,
and I had gotten used to hearing it chanted by flocks of children with bright and embarrassed smiles on their faces. The other young children joined in the
khawaja
chant and I waved, which resulted in an explosion of laughter. An older woman came out to see what the commotion was about.

“Hello, Mama,” I said, the “Mama” a term of respect. She nodded, but appeared skeptical. The usual conversation that I had with countless strangers throughout East Africa about her family and mine, our health on this day, whether or not it was my first time here, did not occur. It was too hot, I suppose. She just looked Simon and me up and down.

I tried to make an introduction, but she showed no interest.

“We are looking for Charity Anyieth,” I said. “I was to meet her at the school, but she was not there.”

The woman did not respond, but turned over her shoulder to one of the small boys, now silent but fixing an unblinking stare at the
khawaja.

“Charity,” she said, and the boy ran off to one of the little houses. A moment later, a tall and elegant young woman emerged. Charity. She saw me, though she did not smile. She came over and shook my hand.

“Charity, my name is Charles. I’d like to talk to you if you have a chance.”

“Yes,” she said in English. “I have been told you will come. I will meet you up at the school. I have to finish my work.”

I agreed and was promptly ushered back through the makeshift door onto the dirt path again. The walk to her school was short, but in the heat it felt like we were walking for hours. We found a spot in the shade and waited in silence. It was too hot for conversation. All one could do was sit and stare. At one point, Simon shook his head, went to look for some water, found none, and returned to rest his head in his hands. I looked at the groups of silent Sudanese men in the compound. They were tall and skinny, their skin a deep black. Some had parallel lines of scarification on their foreheads, a traditional marking for men in southern Sudan who have come of age, though it seems the practice was going out of style. Not many of the men I met in the camp had it. Most of them have grown up under the influence of Western aid groups and United Nations agencies, separated from the traditions of their families and homelands. Neither of the major Sudanese rebel leaders had this scarification either, and I wondered if this influenced the practice.

As we sat, I tried to imagine what the men were thinking. They sat on benches or pressed against buildings, trying to keep themselves in the shade as the sun rose higher overhead. They
looked at me and some came over to shake hands and exchange greetings.

“Hello. How are you?” they asked in English.

“Fine, thank you,” I said.

“Very fine,” they responded, smiling. And we shook hands again. Then someone else came and repeated the exact same exchange in the same intonations. A brief receiving line formed and the “conversation” replayed itself a few more times. When everyone had said his “very fines” we plunged back into silence. When it is too hot for action, too hot to entertain lively conversation, when no one has work and everyone is simply waiting for an undetermined event—an arrival, a departure—the days can stretch out forever, like the landscape, flat and unchanging. The morning was filled with stillness and penetrating, bone-boiling light. Another young man entered the compound and we shook hands. How are you? Fine, thank you. Very Fine. Yes. We shook again.

The young man exchanged some words in Dinka with Simon, who nodded, and then the young man went to another group of men, shook hands and sat with them. We were quiet for a several minutes. Noon approached, and our shadows melted into the light. I noticed no discernible change, but suddenly something prompted Simon to speak.

“Charity cannot come today,” he said. “She sent this boy to tell us she has work to do for the family.” He was silent again. We did not rise to go. We waited, preparing ourselves to step from the shade into the sun. As time passed, the temperature rose. I wondered how long we would sit here inactive, neither expecting anyone to come to us nor going anywhere to meet anyone. How could Charity work in this heat? What did she have to do? A fear entered my mind that I could not possibly step into the light again, could not possibly face the heat or
make it back to my air-conditioned room before I turned to vapor. I need not have worried. No one moved. No one spoke.

While we sat, I thought of the kids playing with the wooden car. It seemed so natural that boys would be tinkering with scraps, building all the possibilities of their imagination. They fled everything they knew and had to build their cars on strange soil covered in a foreign dust. Despite the violence in the camp (there was gunfire four nights in a row while I was there; one young man was killed due to a feud with a local tribe over livestock) and the chronic deprivations and stresses of refugee life, they still built toys, still dreamed up games, and still played. I considered that at the time, and still do, a triumph of life even more remarkable than those few trees that survive in this desert.

There is no easy life in a refugee camp. The total dependence on outside assistance for materials to build a home, food to eat, supplies to do anything at all, affects every member of the displaced society. There is psychological stress beyond what they survived in getting to the relative safety of the camp. Freedom of movement is limited due to legal constraints and safety issues; there are few activities and little work if you can’t get a job with the United Nations or one of the non-governmental organizations (NGOs), so men become listless and bored, sometimes depressed. I had been told by many women about their husbands who were productive and gentle men before arriving in the refugee camp but after time with nothing to do, these women would complain, their husbands became abusive toward them, towards their children. In many cultures, beating wives and children in order to discipline them is the norm, though there are socially accepted rules about what is appropriate and what is not. In southern Sudanese culture, you cannot beat a child with a stick any wider than a thumb, and then only on the thighs and buttocks. And if you beat your wife without good
reason—whatever that might be—her family can protest and initiate a divorce, though this is rare.

But with the deprivations of war, these social rules break down. Women, working hard to feed the children, maintain the home, get the water, clean the clothes, and tend the livestock, all with scant resources, can quickly become exhausted, physically incapacitated, and depressed. With the collapse of the adult’s world, the burden to keep society going often falls to adolescents, mostly to the young women and girls. And children who do not have the support structure of their families, orphans and other unaccompanied minors, are the most vulnerable to material shortages, exploitation of labor, forced marriage, sexual exploitation, isolation. These children have to learn how to navigate the risks around them, have to make a variety of choices for their own protection, as adults and NGOs too often fail to meet their needs, to address their concerns.

In Kakuma, the “Lost Girls” represent the extreme of this isolation.

Rebecca Maluok Mayom, a Lost Girl, told me her story, which was repeated with some variations throughout my time in Kakuma by dozens of other girls. Rebecca was sixteen years old and came from a town in the southeast of Sudan near the White Nile. She was tall, her jaw set firmly. She looked very serious and very sad. Her eyes shone all the time, the glassy look of someone who strains herself trying not to see what’s happening to her, because the danger is constant and to look it in the eye at every second would drive a person mad. She is looking through her life, to some place else, some future bliss that is forever out of reach.

She was in Nairobi, where we met, hiding from a man who attacked her in the refugee camp, who wanted to take her with him, who had come after her. She chose the pseudonym, Re
becca Maluok Mayom, herself, “because it is a Christian name,” she said. Her story, the story of her journey, is a common one among the Sudanese in the camp, as well as among the Lost Boys who were resettled. I heard countless variations on it, though Rebecca’s was the first, on my first day in Kenya. I will let her tell it:

“I arrived in Kenya in 1994, when I was a little girl. The Khartoum government attacked my village, killing indiscriminately. They killed my parents, and I fled into the bush with my cousin. We did not know where to go, we only fled and spent several months in the bush with other children. There were caretakers there as well—adults, but there was no food or clothes and many people died, eating berries that made them sick, eating nothing at all. We went to the border of Ethiopia”—she interrupted herself, wanting me to understand clearly—“this is a country neighboring the Sudan. We were received by the United Nations, who gave us food and clothes. But this man, Mengistu, he let the refugees stay in Ethiopia and when he was overthrown, we were chased back to the Sudan.”

Mengistu Haile Mariam was the Marxist dictator ruling Ethiopia from 1977 to 1991, when a coup ousted him from power. He fled to Zimbabwe, where Robert Mugabe allowed him to stay, as a favor between despots. His downfall was the second act for the harrowing journey of the famous Lost Boys, which ended with their resettlement in the United States. The story of these boys has been told countless times: After being chased from Sudan by the armies from the north of the country, the children from the south marched through perilous terrain, under regular bombardment to Ethiopia, where they thought they were safe.

Ethiopia gave them sanctuary in refugee camps from which Mengistu could use the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army
(SPLA), the main rebel movement in southern Sudan, to control the local Oromo population, which was not exactly friendly to his regime. When Mengistu fell, the Gambella camp was attacked by the Oromo Liberation Front, and the SPLA leaders in the Itang Camp, twenty-five kilometers away, decided to take the children back to Sudan rather than risk losing control of the aid packages coming to their charges. The
caretakers
of whom Rebecca spoke, were often SPLA officers benefiting from the food assistance provided for the children and preparing the boys to become soldiers. When they left Ethiopia, the boys’ numbers were estimated between 17,000 and 25,000. Fewer than 11,000 arrived in the Kenyan refugee camp to tell the story of their perils.