One Day the Soldiers Came (16 page)

“She can be walking down the road and a man comes with his brothers and takes her, and there is nothing to do. She can kick and cry and they just laugh.” Sometimes the men will take the women out of the camp, back to Sudan or into Kenya.

A seventeen-year-old girl, call her Hope, arrived with her aunt in Kakuma in 1994. Her extended family cared for her because her parents had died, she said. She went to school and did the usual chores for the family: cooking, cleaning, fetching wood and water. But when the time came for her to go to secondary school, her aunt was not pleased. She wanted Hope to continue helping with the substantial amount of housework. School was for the boys. What business did a young woman have at school? For what purpose reading and math? How would this help the family? There were fees for school. The family was poor. Why did she want to punish her aunt by leaving her to do the chores?

Their relationship deteriorated.

Two years earlier, her aunt made an arrangement with a Sudanese man for twenty head of cattle in exchange for Hope. She resisted, and her aunt hired a man to abduct her and take her to the border. She was a poor woman, and it must have seemed a sound investment to hire this man. The girl was her property,
valuable property and the fee was a small price to pay to have it returned. The cattle were well worth it. Getting this expensive
schoolgirl
out of her hair was worth it too. Hope escaped at the border with the help of a local Kenyan.

“A good man took pity on me,” Hope said, “and brought me back here. Now I live with another relative. I miss much school to do work for him, so that he does not force me to this [older Sudanese man].” She is, in short, at her relative’s mercy in the refugee camp.

“The problems we had in the Sudan, the raping, the killing, these things are still happening to girls in Kakuma, in the refugee camp,” explained Rebecca, hiding in Nairobi. For the young girls of Sudan, the war was only the beginning of their worries. They must still make hard survival choices, they are still in danger, perhaps more danger from members of their own community than from outside enemies.

I saw this over and over again: young people, especially girls, whose greatest worries came from their own community rather than an external enemy. The memories of war and violence did not plague them as much as the ongoing hardships of their lives in the camp, the prisons that their futures often became to them. The terror of the present rather than the traumas of the past.

“For myself, for the future,” said Claudia, a twenty-year-old mother whose child is the result of rape by a group of soldiers in the Sudan, soldiers she had to placate in order to reach the refugee camp. Otherwise, she would have died in the desert. One can see that she was a beautiful young woman, which can be quite dangerous, but the hard years had taken their toll on her. She looked much older than twenty. Her baby nestled in her arms as we spoke, sleeping.

“I don’t know what will happen. That can only be deter
mined if I went to a good place, a safe place with my child and little brothers. How can I go back to Sudan? No one will care for me because I have a child and no husband. I make beaded jewelry to distract myself from what has happened to me, but I would like to go to school and I would like to be safe.”

She told me she suffered from nightmares, but she had no one she could talk to, no one who could comfort her. She often thinks it would be better to die than to be in her situation, she said. She thought about hanging herself, she told me, but then no one would care for her baby.

She had been thrown out by her foster family for having a child and had taken refuge with another family, but, she said, there are many boys who want to take her by force and she has no one who can help her. Sometimes, she is forced to sleep outside with her baby with nothing but a small blanket to cover them.

According to an official from the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, “there is a substantial but as yet unquantified population of women living without shelter in the refugee camp.”

I spent one day at a center for young mothers and met many girls like Claudia. Most of their children were the results of rape, and several had children with men who later abandoned them. I met three other girls who had no regular shelter and were always at risk of attack by local tribesmen and by men who wanted to take advantage of them (either from their own community or one of the other nationalities in camp).

There are common features, regardless of geography it seemed, to life in a refugee camp. When I entered Lugufu camp in Tanzania, I saw a group of boys playing with a small wooden car they had made out of twigs and scraps of wood, though their car had what looked like part of a bicycle in it. Another group of boys played soccer with the ubiquitous trash and rag
bundle that seemed to be the regulation ball for youth all over the country. A true World Cup Soccer Match, I imagine, would be played in the dust with an improvised ball. That’s how the world plays, at least the world in which play is the most precious thing, hard won and lost too easily.

There was red dust everywhere, covering the sides of the white UN jeep, in the folds of my clothes, in the cracks of everyone’s skin, in all our hair. Refugee camps are usually established on the worst piece of land a country can find, the places no one wants, at least no one of any importance to the government. Dust seems to be a universal feature. Refugee camps are the world’s waiting room, its repository for the unwanted, the disregarded, and the dispossessed. This is where people go when power fails them or when it bares its teeth.

This was true in Kakuma and it seemed true in Lugufu. Rugged, inhospitable land with inhospitable neighbors. Of course it is easy to judge the host countries, seeing the land on which they put the desperate people who come to them for safety. However, some of the poorest countries in the world host two-thirds of the world’s refugees. That they have anything to give is remarkable enough; that they give it is miraculous. The needy always outnumber the generous. It is true the world over, in Kakuma near the Sudan-Kenya border and Lugufu, near the Congo-Tanzania border, on the Thai-Burma border, and in the Balkans.

Another thing that was the same in any camp I visited were the problems faced by young women and girls, the threats, the forced submission, the shriveling of choices.

Jeanine was fifteen years old when we met. She came from Burundi, where her family worked a small plot of land. The war between the government and rebels forced her to flee. She wore a white dress with flowers on it. The white had faded to a reddish yellow with the dust. Her hair was braided. She looked
like any number of girls I met, dressed up for her meeting with the
mzungu
, perhaps wearing her only dress. Jeanine is classified as a “street child” in the camp because she left her foster family and lived on her own without permanent residence.

She asked me very early in our conversation if I was married. As I had already had one young woman ask if I wanted a girlfriend and a marriage proposal from someone who wanted to come to the United States, I was hesitant to tell Jeanine I was single. I told her I was engaged, which was a lie.

“Oh,” she said. “You have no ring.”

Well, I thought, lie to one of these kids who have few advantages but their savvy, their ability to read people to get what they need, and of course you’d be caught out. I worried right off that I had negated any trust she and I might have built.

I told her she was very observant and that I was caught in my lie. I explained to her why I had lied, my (self-centered) worry that I would be put in uncomfortable positions by the truth, as I had been already.

She laughed at me and said she did not want to go to America. She wanted to go home, back to Burundi. The longing in her voice was clear when she spoke about her homeland, an ache for the land that made me think of the Joad family in
The Grapes of Wrath
. She wanted her own bit of soil, rich black soil to run through her fingers. Her soil; her family’s soil.

“We had land and many types of food. It was good land to farm. We would do some farming and some trading, growing many things,” she said. “We were happy. During the war, there was much fighting and I hid in the bush. When the fighting around my home stopped, I left the bush to find my parents. I found that they were dead. I saw their bodies, and I went to Tanzania with strangers. The strangers would not care for me. I met a woman who was kind and she brought me here to safety.”

“Were you afraid when you arrived?”

“When I arrived, there were rumors of a bad spirit in the camp, and outside the camp there were blood suckers and animals that kill people. I was afraid then. I’m not afraid anymore. I have gotten used to living here.”

“Do you feel safe here?”

“Living in the camp is too difficult. It is hard to build a home. It is hard to get enough food, and we always eat the same yellow peas. It is hard to get enough supplies, women’s supplies.”

Safety and supplies are one and the same for girls. If girls do not have access to sanitary napkins, then once a month they must stay out of school until their period is over. If their clothes are torn, it is impossible to go to school, as they could be seen as goading men on. Falling outside of accepted norms can be an invitation to violence against them. Non-food items are essential to the well-being, education, and safety of school age girls and are often in short supply.

“Some people go into the Tanzanian villages [to get supplies] but it is dangerous to go without permission. Sometimes you are beaten and sometimes you are not. They may rob you and leave you with nothing. You cannot go alone, and I have no one to go with me.”

“Does your foster family help you?”

“They mistreat me. I have left their home.”

“Your foster parents mistreated you?”

“No, there is a brother and sister. They mock me for being an orphan. They insult me so I do not stay there anymore.”

“Do you know other children who have lost their parents, in school maybe?”

“No, I do not go to school. I stopped going because the other children tormented me about my past. About being an orphan.” She sat with her dress tucked between her knees and looked over her shoulder out the window. “I want to learn to read and
write. I would go back to school if they would not torment me. One day, when there is peace, I want to go back to Burundi and take my inheritance for my family. For now, I am getting used to living here.”

Jeanine felt very alone with her problems. In Burundian culture, women cannot inherit property, and somewhere in her mind, she must have known that. The land would go to her uncles or brothers, if she had any. I didn’t want to remind her that her plans were nearly impossible, because her regard for the future seemed to be a source of strength for her and perhaps she would grow up to challenge societal norms, to get her own piece of earth. She had already chosen to leave her foster family and live on the streets rather than endure their taunts. I got the sense from one of the social workers in the camp that she was a troubled girl, who made a lot of trouble for the agencies that tried to help her (specifically for this one social worker), though towards me she was polite. I think her troublemaking was not too different from many adolescents who act out to get attention, but in this case the attention she sought was to help her survive, to help her get a better break and put an end to her abuse. I had arrived in a UNHCR land cruiser, though I had only hitched a ride. I assume that seeing my mode of transport influenced Jeanine’s behavior towards me. She figured I had influence and put on her best behavior. She was not at all oblivious to power relationships in the camp, knowing that a white UN officer would have some pull over the social workers to whom she had been rude.

Jeanine did not realize that there were well over a hundred unaccompanied minors living in the same camp who had experiences similar to hers. Though she felt it, she was not alone. Many other orphaned girls have faced similar problems, sometimes without anyone finding out about them.

Mathilde, who was thirteen, lived with other unaccom
panied minors in another camp for Burundians. Firewood, it seemed, was the first thing on her mind. She drew me a picture of girls collecting wood. She mentioned wood in her answers to nearly every question about life in the camp. She was determined to talk about collecting wood, though she was not doing it out of a love for the task.

“I do not like collecting firewood,” she said while looking at the floor. “In Burundi, I stayed home to guard the house while my parents worked,” she said, puffed a little with pride. “I did not have to carry food or water or firewood.”

Her father died, she told me, of disease in Burundi. Then her mother took her to the Congo, where she died of disease as well. It could have been any number of diseases that killed her parents, but given the stigma attached to AIDS, it is possible that her mother moved after her husband’s death to avoid harassment within her community. This would explain why her daughter now lives outside the care of a foster family in the refugee camp. Often, children whose households have been devastated by AIDS, as Keto explained to me earlier, are shunned by the community out of fear and can find no one willing to care for them.

“On my own now, I am responsible for getting wood with the other girls in our house. Our neighbors,” she said, meaning the Tanzanians, “come and attack us while we gather wood. They come and beat us and kill us.” She would not elaborate any further. When asked if she had been attacked she simply said yes and fixed her gaze on her big toe. The male translator advised me not to push any further, and I could tell what he meant when he translated “beat us and kill us.” He nodded to me that I had understood correctly.

Though there has been a decline in sexual violence against women gathering firewood in Mathilde’s camp, young girls who
are walking to remote areas are extremely vulnerable to attack, especially since they are considered “safe” targets for sexual violence because the risk of STDs and AIDS is lower. In the case of Mathilde, if she was attacked, she did not have any adult to inform in her life. I learned from a rape counselor later in the day that Mathilde had never spoken to anyone about being attacked, at least any adult.