One Day the Soldiers Came (18 page)

An Albanian boy in the town of Zahaq. Zahaq, like many places in Kosovo, suffered from the campaigns of ethnic cleansing in the late nineties. Serb paramilitary units murdered the fathers of several children I met at this boy’s school.

Figure 9. Ostar’s father, in better times, before they fled the civil war in Burma.

Thinzanoo and Ostar pictured with the rest of their family in hiding in Bangkok. Shortly after our visit, they were forced to relocate, due to trouble with their neighbors. Very few Burmese migrants in Thailand were granted refugee status at the time of my visit. Without refugee status, this family was viewed with disdain as illegal immigrants.

Figures 10, 11. The dream world depicted by exiled children of Burma. They are all homesick for land in their pictures.

Figure 12. Flags and guns were linked in many of the drawings by exiled children from the Karen ethnic group in Burma. They are tied up in a sixty-year-old nationalist struggle.

Figure 13.

Aung Su, a Karen boy from Burma, lives in exile in a small town near the Thai-Burma border. His favorite hero, Spider-Man, cannnot protect him from the harrassment he sometimes receives at the hands of Thai teenagers.

Figure 14. Aung Su’s full-color drawing of Spider-Man.

Figure 15. The harrowing journey of the Lost Girls of Sudan has become a modern-day epic in the oral history of those in Kakuma Refugee Camp.

This group of girls living in Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya came from southern Sudan, where the long war has robbed them of their parents. Unlike the famous “Lost Boys” these girls have little hope of resettlement in the United States, and many face forced marriage and a life of servitude, in spite of their ambitions to become doctors, nurses, and teachers.

Nicole, a shy girl living in Kakuma Refugee Camp, loves to play Monkey-in-the-Middle. Even though she is very young, she has witnessed a great deal of violence and has lost much of her family.

Figure 16. Nicole’s drawing of her favorite game, Monkey-in-the-Middle.