One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [108]
Despite Rebecca’s success in America, resettlement in a third country is not the solution for very many displaced children. A complex array of factors contributed to the massive resettlement program of the Sudanese youth, including pressure from religious groups, media attention and U.S. strategic interests in southern Sudan.
These factors do not exist for most displaced populations, and that aside, ethical considerations make third country resettlement problematic. Many southern Sudanese wondered aloud to me how their society would function with such vast numbers of their youth overseas. The hope is that the educated “lost children” will return and bring their skills and education back to Sudan with them when the violence ends. Many send money back to the refugee camps to support friends and family. Still others feel cut off from their people and find it difficult to adjust to a new and alien culture, suffering bouts of restlessness and depression.
Separating children from their culture and maybe even from family that may still be living is no one’s ideal way of protecting youth during war. Aid programs aim by and large to keep families together and to strengthen a family’s ability to care for itself. Often it is mothers who are the nexus of aid and assistance for their children and, when dealing with orphaned or separated children, much effort is made to find them foster parents within their communities. Rarely do affected populations think resettling children to third countries is a good solution, though sometimes, as in the case of the Lost Girls, more danger comes from their families and communities than from the war itself. That aside, however, the ideal for children of war is not exile but homecoming.
When I visited Kosovo and Bosnia, which I knew would be my final trip for this project, I brought along a book I should have read in college, Virgil’s Aeneid. The hero, dutiful Aeneas, escapes the burning city of Troy as it falls and sets off into exile, destined to reach a foreign shore that his progeny will call Rome.
On the night of the destruction of Troy, Aeneas races through the city, dodging marauding Greeks, crashing rubble, and flames—his account sounds oddly similar to the children’s accounts of fleeing their villages and towns. With tears in his eyes, he seeks his wife, his father, and his son, hoping to rescue them from the terror that will come at the hands of the city’s captors. He finds his father and his son, but his wife’s spirit appears and urges him to flee, tells him that she is already dead. He obeys and arrives at the shore to behold a woeful sight, one that I imagine every refugee entering a camp or escaping a conflict has seen at some point.
Aeneas speaks: Here I find, to my surprise, new comrades come together…joined for exile, a crowd of sorrow. Come from every side, with courage and with riches, they are ready for any lands across the seas…
When I look at this passage, I cannot help but think of the multitude of war’s children I have met, the littlest exiles, a tiny citizenry shuffling below the radar of history, and I think of the journeys on which they have embarked, the riches they carry with them, and the shores they strive to reach.
I think of Paul, exiled not just from his village, but from his childhood, pushed headfirst into adulthood as a soldier, longing to return to school. Paul who loves peace could, by now, be a soldier again. At eighteen years old, no one could stop him. I asked around in the region. No one knew what became of him, no one knew if he had the chance to go back to school. I like to picture him a mechanic in a peaceful city, grease on his hands and that same glowing smile