Borders and Burdens and the Children of War
by Charles London
Justin was 14 years old when we met in a refugee camp in East Africa. His father was dead. His mother was dead. He was alone. He knew a thing or two about borders.
He knew that there were borders you could cross and borders you could not cross. There were borders you could see and borders you could not see. There were borders defined by law and borders created by custom, by ethnicity, by history, by gender, by age, by experience, by time. There were borders he dreamed of crossing when he grew up, and there were borders he was forced to cross against the best efforts of adults to protect him.There were borders no young person should ever have to cross.
In a world at war, there was no shortage of borders.
Right now, over 20 million children have crossed the legal borders between nations to become refugees, displaced by armed conflict, political upheaval, and natural disaster, to say nothing of the millions more who are displaced inside the borders of states, and are grappling with all those other borders that cannot be controlled by checkpoints””of adolescence and of identity, of memory and healing.
I have had the good fortune to work with some remarkable young survivors of armed conflict, who have been forced to flee their homes, and, as wars and crises continue in the Middle East, Central Asia, East Africa, and elsewhere, I feel compelled to reflect on what some of these children have taught me about what it means to seek refuge in a world in which it is too often denied to the most vulnerable among us.
Justin was born in Kigali, the capital city of Rwanda. He was a tall, gawky kid, a little knock-kneed, who liked to read when he had the chance. He did not have many friends. When Justin was a baby, his mother fled to the Congo to escape the genocide in Rwanda. His father didn’t make it out.
“We lived in Congo for a while, then the war there started. People were killed; people remained behind, desperate. That is where my mother was killed.”
Justin told me that he saw his mother killed; he was hiding and watched it happen.
“One day the soldiers came and they cut my mother. They killed my mother with the big knives they had. I tried not to look, but I heard the noises they made and she made. Not loud noises, but I remember them. I ran away, and while I was running, I hurt myself. I met a Banyamulenge man. I told the man my problems and cried to him. He was kind and he helped me get to Tanzania.”
The Banyamulenge are an ethnic group, the Congolese brethren of the Tutsis in Rwanda. The ethnic conflict that had chased Justin into the Congo in the first place had followed him to the border, and was, once more, forcing him across, to the refugee camp in Tanzania where we were sitting. At 14, he had crossed the borders of three nation-states, but the conflicts that plagued him had never had much use for borders. They were waiting for him.
“The family I lived with first, they abused me. They took my food and blankets and were very cruel. I do not know if it is because I am an orphan or because I am Tutsi. I do not know why. I was moved by the Red Cross and live here now. It is very bad. I cry every day when I get home from school. I think about my mother and no one comes to comfort me.” By this point his eyes were welled with tears. “I do not know how I will get over this. It would be better just to forget.”
Without any ties to his culture or his family, Justin felt adrift. He was lonely, he said, but he was beginning to feel better.
“I am learning to forget,” he explained.
When I tried to focus on those aspects of Justin’s life that he found positive, he didn’t hesitate to answer: “I went to a training for children about rights.”
Christian Outreach for Relief and Development, the organization that provided services for unaccompanied minors in this camp, had given some of the adolescents a training about children’s rights. As he spoke about his rights, showing me the drawings he made, on which he had written various empowering statements from the Declaration on the Rights of the Child, he became more animated and eager to talk. He didn’t look at the ground like he had for most of our conversation up to that point.
“I learned that children have the right to go to school.” He smiled and showed me his drawing of a boy walking toward a church. Written in Swahili above it was “The child has the right to do all kinds of work and go to school.”
“School will help me get a good job and become a professional. I would like to live in an urban area again. Here, the environment is very bad. Sometimes people don’t even use the toilets. And when you get sick, it is a long walk to the hospital and then, sometimes, you can’t get anyone to help you.”
Justin’s concerns about public health and cleanliness, his concerns about school resources, were pressing on him. He was aware that schooling was a way to secure his future, one of his rights, and that he was in danger of disease from the poor conditions in the camp. Though he understood the rights he — and all children — should have, he could do little to realize them. He felt helpless and had no one to whom he could turn.
He found himself smacked up against the border that the displaced inevitably encounter as they sit in refugee camps and detention centers and shantytowns all over the world. He found that he was at the mercy of forces much greater than himself; governments and armies and bureaucracies controlled his fate. A heavy burden of awareness for anyone, let alone a 14-year-old orphan.
“What would you tell someone your age who has never been in a refugee camp so that he could understand what it is like?” I asked him. He thought for a moment, choosing his words carefully.
“I would like to tell my name so that he could know me,” he answered. “I would tell him that living in the camp is very bad. I think about going home, but who will I go back to? Everyone is dead. If I talk to this boy who has never been in a refugee camp I would be happy. I want to find children with hope.”
And there it was, the element that made survival possible for Justin, the reason he was able, in spite of everything, to keep going.
He believed in hope. Hope took him right past the borders of the camp, past the borders of the state and past the borders of his age and his circumstances and let him imagine a future. Chased by ethnic violence for his entire life, Justin was still looking for hope.
Over and over I saw this among wars young survivors. The ones who survived were the ones who found a way, quite simply, to believe in something. Children can survive without comforts — they are amazingly adaptable. They can survive without safety, even, drawing on what resources they have to get by, but they cannot long survive without hope.
“I have suffered the same as the boys,” Patience told me. She was 17 years old when we met in the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Northern Kenya. She had been living there for over ten years, ever since the war in Southern Sudan sent her fleeing from her home as a little girl. Now she cared for a gaggle of younger children, little brothers and sisters and cousins. The relationships were never clear to me, though her responsibility for all of them was obvious. She often missed school because of their needs. They needed wood for the fire; they needed food; they needed their clothes cleaned and their scrapes looked after. Patience was the oldest and she had no adult to look after her.
She was tall, with powerful arms and strong shoulders from the years of cooking, cleaning, and carrying firewood — the hard labor to which so many women and girls in the poor world have been sentenced — but she had delicate features. Her hair was pulled back into cornrows, and she wore a flower printed dress.
She described herself as one of the “Lost Girls of Sudan.”
Seventeen years old, and she was savvy to the currency she held. The Lost Boys of Sudan are a famous group of adolescent boys, who traveled by the thousands on foot to Ethiopia and then from Ethiopia back to Sudan and then to Kenya, suffering bombings, starvation, and crocodile attacks. When the media got a hold of their story, diplomatic pressure mounted and they were resettled to the United States, Canada, and Australia in huge numbers. The Lost Boys had traded on their story — they turned their tragedy into power; they turned it into a narrative.
The asylum narrative is part biography, part myth, part plea, and part propaganda. It is how one person places herself, her terrible ordeals, in a larger context; how she makes the unreal real to those who can only imagine, and how she becomes more than an individual suffering but part of a movement, a refugee, and in adding her story to the larger story of a people, of the displaced, she is simultaneously unique and not alone. She has power. The Lost Boys understood this. Their narrative moved the vast bureaucracy of the U.S. government and gave them all, together and as individuals, a new life.
The story Patience told me next — the story I would hear again and again as the story of the Lost Girls — sounded not rehearsed, but performed. She already knew that part of living as a refugee was telling your story to foreigners, the price of admission to refuge. Asylum demands a story, even from the young.
“I don’t remember when we went to Ethiopia because I was very young,” she said. “I was with my father. My daddy just grabbed my hand and we ran.” She went to Panyido Refugee Camp, which soon came under bombardment from the Oromo Liberation Front in Ethiopia. The refugees were forced to flee again after the fall of dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam. The children and families found themselves back in Sudan, where the attacks by the government in Khartoum continued. Patience’s father decided they should head toward safety in Kenya.
“This is what I have seen,” she told me, welling with emotion. “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 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 the rebel leader and future vice president of Sudan, John Garang, the massive group of refugees came under attack yet 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 soon after they arrived. She did not know what happened to her mother or older brother. She never saw them again.
“Now, things for me are very bad. You see, unlike the Lost Boys, 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 was referring to the practice of dowry a family receives when a daughter marries, which, since the traditional age for a daughter to get married was 15, loomed over the heads of nearly all the young women on their own in the camp. Wealthy men offered between 20 to 100 cattle to a family in exchange for a girl of marrying age. Amidst the deprivations of life in Kakuma Camp, this offer was hard to resist, especially when the girl was foster child. The welfare of the bride became a much lower priority. Patience made it clear that if the girl resisted, she was beaten.
“The family may not tell the girl what is happening,” she 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.”
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. After one week in the camp 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 were 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 wished to cast off, submission, inevitably one day, once more, after they have worked their bodies to the bone, to the desert again.
Patience deserved better. She deserved options in her life. So did the other girls I met: Charity, Hope, Rebecca, Grace. 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 world in which they would remain when I got back in the big white Land Rover, like every other white visitor from abroad, and left.
“It is very bad,” Patience said, 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.”
And that was the lesson I took from Patience. She would survive. The deck was certainly stacked against her, as it is stacked against so many of the world’s children, especially the girls, who want so much, and face so many barriers. Justin and Patience, two orphans out of millions who clung, in spite of all the evidence around them, to hope.
There is no way to know for certain what sort of adults the children of war will become. Their actions probably suggest more about the moment in which they act; their inconsistencies the working arithmetic of building a life and of surviving. Over the years working with young people in refugee camps and war zones, they showed me parts of themselves, the parts they wanted to show. I saw other parts of some of them when they let their guard down during a game or a long walk, or when they thought no one was watching. Other parts of who they are I guessed at, based on their drawings, on what other children and other adults told me, based on what I’d learned about their history. But the borders are flimsy; the lines between who they are and who they want to be, the choices can make and the things they have to do are always shifting.
War’s children are not a lumpen mass, but a collection of little hopes and needs and impulses and desires lived out from day to day. They live their lives amidst the backdrop of terrible violence and deprivation, amidst constantly shifting loyalties and labels and dangers, but also amidst the backdrop of going to school, of who-can-juggle-the-soccer-ball-better, of sewing torn pants, of funny pratfalls, and of family and friends. Of play. The children are a collection of all the things that happen to them and the kinds of people they become is being decided every second.
Both Patience and Justin are adults now, and I do not know what became of them. There are new children and new wars.
The children of these wars, like those who came before them, will face the dangers that they must, carrying what riches they have along with them: their daydreams and ideas, their faith, their courage, their sense of play. They will also have burdens to carry, the burdens that grown-ups have placed on them: ethnicities and histories, violence and politics, hunger and poverty. The past, the present, and the future. They will carry all these things across borders into exile. Some will carry them back again. How long they must carry these things alone, and how far, is up to the rest of us.
Charles London is the author of One Day the Soldiers Came: Voices of Children in War and Far From Zion: In Search of a Global Jewish Community. His blog is www.farfromzion.com. Photos and drawings courtesy of the author.
