One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [113]
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. It is the job of every adult, those who make wars and those who watch them unfold, to bend their mind to the task of giving hope, of creating a world where childhood can flourish, where play is possible.
Embarking on this project I was amazed to find such a great crowd of remarkable children, struggling with the quotidian and the extraordinary, each in their own way. They have different levels of control over their lives, and they are all, to some extent, at the mercy of the adult world, subject to the policy shifts of governments and the mood swings of their caretakers, even their own contradictory impulses, as all children are. But they take control where they can, playing and dreaming and observing the goings-on about them. They remember what is done to them and what they have the power to do to others, and they will wield that power in the future when the world of the adults is their world, for good or for ill, to create or to destroy. The capacity for either is in all of them. Eros and Thanatos, Love and Destruction, fighting it out inside every one of war’s children, the soldiers and the students and the soccer players.
After Justin, after Keto, after Christof and Nora and after Rebecca, after all of them are gone, whether they died still young or grew into adulthood, whether they were celebrated or feared, lost to the jungles, wandering from place to place, dispossessed, or brought inside to a warm bed or shot at or disemboweled or turned into killers or bandits or whores, whether they worked the land their parents worked or whiled away the evening hours kicking a soccer ball under an acacia tree humming an old song they heard when they were younger, whatever became of this one group of war’s children, there will be new children and new wars.
The children of these wars, like those who came before them, those of whom they have no knowledge, will bear their riches inside themselves as well. Like Justin and Keto and Christof and Nora and Rebecca and all the others, they will face the dangers that they must, bearing their daydreams and ideas, their faith, their sense of play along with them. They will bear them into exile. They will bear them back again. Occasionally, they will count among their riches a jump rope or a pastiche soccer ball, or a tattered French grammar book.
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. The children carry what the adults put down. They will carry these riches and these burdens across bomb-scorched deserts, through deadly jungles, and down bullet-pocked streets. They will carry them into adulthood, if they survive. Some will not survive.
One boy haunts me more than any others. The night after Mount Nyiragongo erupted in Goma, I found myself in Kigali, Rwanda. I left the hotel where I was staying just across the street from the famous Milles Collines to exchange some money and to get a bite to eat. I walked up the hill toward the center of town. The road was packed dirt, and wide, deep gutters ran along the side. Palm trees gave a canopy of shade all the way to the town center, and it was a very pleasant walk as there were few cars. It was eerily quiet for a capital city. As one young woman described it, Kigali was a city with more ghosts than people.
To get to the Indian restaurant that also worked as a grocery store and informal marketplace, I cut across an empty lot. As I crossed the lot, I saw a boy of about twelve years old. I had seen him before, several weeks earlier when we first came through Kigali. He had begged at the Indian restaurant, and the owner had chased him away with