One Day the Soldiers Came (15 page)

Even in Kakuma, the boys were monitored by the SPLA and were in danger from agents of the Khartoum government, and the international aid community decided it better to remove them from the camp, where they were likely to be turned into soldiers and returned to the war. Between the years 2000–2003, 3,276 boys were resettled from Kakuma camp to cities across the United States. In that same time, only 89 girls had the opportunity to resettle.

Rebecca’s cousin was one of those boys, and she longed to see him again. In Sudanese culture, it is neither safe nor socially acceptable for girls to live on their own, so while the boys settled among themselves in Kakuma, the girls were integrated into families, often before registering with UNHCR. Girls had traveled with the boys in smaller numbers, according the several sources in the camp, yet they were far less visible. There was almost no record of girls arriving with this wave of Lost Boys because they had already been taken into families, some of whom treated them as their own, many of whom treated them, according to a representative from the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, “as chattel.”

“I arrived in Kakuma camp after being chased from Sudan once more. Here I met my cousin again,” Rebecca said. She told me how he looked out for her because he was older, and while he was there she did not have as many problems as some of the other girls. “I was very disappointed when the boys left,” Rebecca said. “The boys told us we would come afterwards, but this is not our privilege. Perhaps it is a gender gap. Girls have no powers. We would like to join our brothers. I would like to join my cousin in America.” Rebecca sighed and picked at the fibers on her dress.

I finally met with Charity when she finished with school on yet another hot afternoon in Kakuma. It was a good day for her because she had been able to go to school. Her teacher told me she was a good student, intelligent, though has trouble because she, like so many girls, misses a lot of school.

“I want to go all the time,” she said. “But others in the community don’t like it when their needs are not met. I have no parents. I must do everything to avoid quarrels, so I miss school. Everything in the house depends on girls. Boys don’t have to work at all, but if a girl resists the work, she will be beaten.”

Charity was savvy. She was the only young woman I met who described herself as a Lost Girl. She knew, I imagine, what that title would evoke in me: languishing in a refugee camp without her family to protect her, forgotten by the international community who took a great interest in her male relatives and friends, the Lost Boys of Sudan. She wielded the label “lost girls” like a brand name, shorthand for her suffering and the suffering of other girls. She hoped the words might have the same magic effect they did for the boys. The High Commissioner for Refugees prefers the more inclusive term vulnerable women to describe these and other girls in the camp in need of intervention. But Charity is quite aware that the term
vulner
able women
will not get the attention she and her compatriots need. Though living in a camp in the desert, she understands the imperatives of the media age.

“I tell the others,” Charity said. “I tell them that, no matter how hard it is to tell, they must tell their story. They must keep telling it and telling it and telling it. It is only through people knowing our story that they will understand what we have been through and will help us.”

Like so many children of war, she believed that telling her story would open doors for her if only the right people would hear it, would believe it. For the Albanian children in Kosovo, this was the Hague Tribunal for War Criminals and the international community who could grant independence to the province; in Lugufu camp it was the charities that provided resources and training, and in Kakuma, where everyone wanted resettlement, it was the media and the American INS, the gatekeepers to a new life over the ocean. The telling was never intended to be therapeutic; it was barter.

Charity told me the story of her journey, which was similar to (though not identical to) Rebecca’s. Fleeing to Ethiopia and then back to Sudan and then, after an ordeal of near-biblical proportions, to Kakuma.

I also heard this story from Patience, Hope, and Susan. Perhaps this tale had been adopted by those left behind in the hopes it would influence their outcome. This had to be true in some cases. I tried to verify the tales as best I could, but I was inclined to believe most of the girls. The stories sounded much like other stories I had been told by other refugee children around the world. The fear, the violence, the
sounds
of violence. They rang true. While some of the details may have changed over time in the camp, during the flood of interviews the Lost Boys gave which the girls must have heard, I believe
the narrative is a kind of collective memory of what each child went through, her individual story folded into the general story of Sudan’s Lost Children which, by the time they spoke to me, had become legend. As the UNHCR Protection Officer told me, “Everybody knows the story, knows what to say. Everybody [who got resettled]
is
a legend.”

This legend forms a large part of the way the young Sudanese girls see themselves. It is their history, like the Battle of Kosovo for the Serb children in Kosovo, it is the story that gives them a sense of identity and of purpose. The myth matters; the telling matters, though unlike the medieval battle in the Balkans, there is the hope in the telling of the Lost Girls’ story that it can change their future.

“I have suffered the same as the boys,” said Patience, seventeen years old. The Dinka tribe from southern Sudan are a terribly beautiful people. They are generally very tall, with broad shoulders and deep black skin. Supermodel Alek Wek comes from the Dinka tribe, as does NBA star Manute Bol. Patience fits in with this group; she’s tall, has powerful arms and shoulders but delicate features. Her hair is pulled back into cornrows, and she wears a flower printed dress.

“I don’t remember when we went to Ethiopia because I was very young. I was with my father. My daddy just grabbed my hand and we ran.” Patience was in Panyido Refugee Camp, which came under bombardment from the Oromo Liberation Front in Ethiopia. The refugees were forced to flee again, having lost support at the fall of Mengistu. The OLF thought of Sudanese as loyal to the former dictator who had given them protection, and therefore they expelled them. The children and families found themselves back in Sudan, where the attacks by the government in Khartoum continued. They decided to head toward safety in Kenya.

“This is what I have seen. There was a lot of starvation; there was no food. Many people died in the river Gilo. They drowned; they were dragged under by animals. My father was there and paid so we could use a boat to cross. Then we were attacked again at Pochalla, where the Red Cross gave us some food. My uncle died; my older brother was wounded. My mother fled with my older brother, and I remained with my father and the younger brothers. We fled to Bor.” In Bor, the birthplace of SPLA leader John Garang, the massive group of refugees came under attack again. Amnesty International estimates that, in what became knows as “The Bor Massacre,” 2,000 people lost their lives. Thousands more fled the killing. Patience and her family arrived in Kakuma in 1992. Her father died in the camp. She does not know what happened to her mother or older brother (Figure 15).

“Now, things for me are very bad. You see, many of the girls were taken in by foster parents, but they do not care for them. The interest is always wealth,” she said. She is referring to the practice of the dowry a family receives when a daughter marries, which, since the traditional age for a daughter to get married is fifteen, looms over the heads of young women on their own in the camp.

Wealthy men offer between 20 and 100 cattle to a family in exchange for a girl of marrying age. Amid the deprivations of life in the camp this offer is hard to resist, especially when the girl is a foster child. The welfare of the bride becomes a much lower priority. If the girl resists, she is beaten.

“The family may not tell the girl what is happening,” Patience explained. “They make an arrangement with the man and then send you to fetch some water. While you are there, the man will come and take you by force, whether you cry or not; that’s where your life ends.”

Young women who have no parents fear being forced into
marriage. In an ideal Sudanese marriage, the woman’s father and brothers would act as a line of defense against abuse. The bride could go to her father if she suffered physical abuse from her husband, who is supposed to take over the role of protector. Without parents, women like Patience and Charity had no options at all.

“If you want to go to school, your husband can say ‘No, fetch water now’ or ‘Wash the clothes,’ and you must. If you complain you will be beaten. You must do what you are told if you are a woman. You must keep quiet,” Patience said. Yet when asked about the dangers of rape and abduction for girls who have no parents in the camp, an officer from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the organization responsible for
protection
of the refugee population, responded that the threat to girls was lessened by marriage.

In preschool in Kakuma camp, the ratio of boys to girls enrolled is roughly one to one, according to figures provided by Lutheran World Federation. By secondary school, when girls are of marrying age, the ratio is seven boys to every girl. Girls at school often suffer harassment from the boys and from the male teachers, said the same official from UNHCR.

I met many outspoken young girls, caught between the traditional practices of their culture, in which women work to support the family in which they live, and the desires for education and independence they see women embracing around the world.

Many girls care for their younger siblings if the parents are not present or able to do so. While they would like to go to school, they feel obligated to protect their families. Patience,
who is sixteen and therefore marriageable, fears a forced marriage more than anything, not only because it would cut short her own plans (to become a doctor) and subject her to permanent servitude, it would leave her brothers with no one to care for them. Even while we spoke, one of the little boys came up to her crying, and she comforted him, calmed him down, and sent him off to play again. “Without me, they would have no future. No chance,” she said in perfect English.

Later that week, when I asked Charity about her future, what she wanted, she told me: “What you are aiming at is that you are not killed. Everything else….” She waved her hand as if she were clearing a table and said no more.

Charity has had to make a lot of compromises to protect herself. Besides missing school to placate her family, she married at seventeen years old, in the hope of defending herself against forced marriage to someone else, illustrating, much to my chagrin, the UNHCR protection officer’s point that girls might be safer in marriage, giving up whatever individual dreams they had for themselves.

“I did not want to,” she said. “I married too soon. There were allegations in my family, they tried to force me to marry someone I did not want to, one of the boys going to the United States. I married my true love instead, though he cannot pay the dowry and was chased away. I live with my family until he can pay. I am not feeling good.” She looked around the compound. We watched some women go by in bright sarongs, singing, carrying water on their heads. “I want to be free,” she told me as we watched the water-carriers walk by.

On a walk through the camp, Patience pointed out the house of a girl who had been forced to marry.

“We cannot visit her,” she told me. “We may cause trouble and she would be beaten.”

The phrase echoed in my ears. I heard it over and over again as the days progressed in this camp.
And she will be beaten.
Like a mantra.
And she will be beaten and she will be beaten and she will be beaten.
Anger washed over me, began to tear at me. After one week in the camp, one week hearing these stories I felt a helpless rage blurring my vision. Imagine the rage of these girls, these vivacious, intelligent young women,
who will be beaten.

In spite of their drive, in spite of their intelligence, their ambitions, all that they have to give, their lives in this place are a continuum of submission: submission to the war, to the desert, to the policies of governments and aid agencies, to their families, to the men who choose them, who take them as wives, submission to their culture, to traditions that many wish to cast off, submission, inevitably one day, once more, when they have worked their bodies to the bone, to the desert again. Patience deserved better. She deserved options in her life. So did Charity. So too did Rebecca. And how many others? How many I hadn’t met? I would never meet? The rage was dizzying and pointless. Against whom, against what was I raging? This was the world. This was the world these girls came from. This was the world to which they would return, the only world they knew.

“It is very bad,” Patience said, either reading my mind or reading the angry blank of my face. “Many girls do not survive this, you know?” She sighed and crossed her arms, squinting at the sun and then back at me. “It is too bad.” Her idiosyncratic English said it all. It was
too bad.

“Yes,” I said, unable to find a hopeful word.

She found it for me. Unknowingly—I assume—quoting Gloria Gaynor, she shook her head. “
I
will survive.”

I asked Patience if she has other friends in similar situations to her friend we could not visit, any that I might be able to speak with about their situations.

“Yes, I have many friends like this.” She went on to list the names of about five girls. I asked her if there was a way to arrange visits with any of them.

“These are not the girls who are here,” she told me. I thought I misunderstood her. Her English was not perfect, so I asked her to explain. “Abduction is a problem,” she said.

Abduction is a big problem facing Sudanese girls, the protection officer with UNHCR confirmed. Kenyan and Sudanese men, it is said, will arrange dowries with the girl’s family and, as Patience told me, the girl will know nothing about it.