One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [19]
The lesson I took from Paul was this: In wars, when the world of grown-ups fails them, some kids can create their own conditions for survival, can help others to survive, can show amazing courage and strength, can carry the burdens placed on them for quite a while. They are capable of this and deserve, in fact need, respect and encouragement for these capacities. But it is up to adults, who are far more culpable in the political realities of the world, in creating the environment from which children learn to act, not to allow children to carry these burdens for long. They do not all hold up under the strain like Paul.
This project is the result of research missions in East Africa, Thailand, and the Balkans. It is by no means a complete picture of the impact of war on children: I am no expert and my regional scope is limited. I worked with a translator most of the time, and in some cases this translator had his or her own agenda. I tried to render the children’s words as faithfully as possible and made every effort to work with translators who had the skill and the ability to render the sense of the children’s words without editing them. This was not always possible, and there were times I might have missed what a child was actually saying or actually meant. I can only ask that the reader trust what I convey, as I had to trust what I heard and saw.
I have changed the names of the children and other people involved in these conversations in the interest of their safety. I have also changed a few details to further mask identities where appropriate, and the order of a few events for narrative clarity, but nothing of substance has been altered in their comments or stories. The conversations I recount are told much as they occurred, though, by necessity, many of the meandering discussions off-topic have been edited out.
Follow-up with the same children over time was possible only in a few cases, and I realize it is nearly impossible to predict how a child will grow up based on a few interactions, conversations, and soccer games.
I am not trying to come up with a general theory of how young people experience and cope with war. Anything that is true for one child in one conflict may not be true for another. Differences in culture, political structure, age, gender, and the social status of the child affect responses to stressful and dangerous situations to a great degree. I hope only to document a few young lives that have been touched by war, to pay my respects to their survival and to applaud the often startling intelligence and resourcefulness of young people who do get through war and can flourish afterwards. I will try to highlight the factors I noticed that might make a young person more resilient in war, but these are by no means “scientific” observations. I hope to dispel the notion that young people are passive victims, vehicles for suffering, as they are presented in most news reports. Children are protagonists in wars, from Angola to Iraq, with their own needs and desires, and they cannot be ignored.
TWO
“Then He Lined Us Up”
Children Fleeing
In his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the eighteenth-century British historian Edward Gibbon describes the scene of Romans fleeing the city of Nisibis in A.D. 363 after it was handed over to the Persians: “The highways were crowded with a trembling multitude: the distinctions of rank, and sex, and age, were lost in the general calamity. Every one strove to bear away some fragment from the wreck of his fortunes….”
Gibbon could have been describing a photograph from the 1994 genocide in Rwanda or the 1998 campaigns of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo or the crisis in Darfur, Sudan.