One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [21]
I was not sure how to answer. This was a question I had been thinking about since I thought of this project, since I arrived in Africa for the first time a few days earlier. It was a question that would haunt me for the next three years as I returned to Africa to meet other children, as I met children who had become illegal migrants in Thailand to escape the junta in Myanmar, as I met orphans struggling to grow up and build their lives in the stunted economy and traumatized villages of post-war Kosovo. The implications of this question harass me as I write this now.
Anyone who does “field research” (I hate that term; implying pith helmets, Stanley and Livingstone) in communities that are less fortunate than one’s own—whether it be documentary work, social science research, humanitarian assessment, anthropological study, or journalism—has to deal with the moral and psychological tensions, as Robert Coles calls them, that this kind of work creates.
How do you arrive as an outsider among people who are struggling to survive, observe and interview them, take their lives as “material,” and leave? If you are successful, it will be in large part because of the quality of the material (the content of the lives researched) that you have gathered. Your career will advance or your reputation will be made. Yet what of the people you have observed or, to put it another way, exploited? How does telling their story help any of these children, and how can I sleep at night having taken their stories and left them in war zones, still hungry, still at risk?
There are no easy answers to these questions, and few resolutions to the tensions. I believe there is value in being heard, in sharing your experiences with others. There was a value for the youths and adolescents I met while doing this work: I communicated their concerns to those who might make changes, I helped to validate their thoughts and ideas, and they began to learn how to express themselves to those with different experiences and backgrounds. There is also the hope that their stories can be used for advocacy, to stimulate more or better assistance to them or children in the same situation as they are.
But there is also the worry that discussing what can often be painful and frightening memories will lead to harm, further traumatization, revisiting horrors without the resources available to counsel the child, to work through a healing process. There is also the problem of disappointment when the interviewer with whom the child formed a connection and some degree of friendship leaves again, never to return.
“How sad I am that you do not think of me anymore,” Barika wrote me in a letter just days after I left the camp in Tanzania where I had met him.
He was an orphan, like Keto, and at twelve years old was struggling to make a difference in his community. He performed in a theatrical group that demonstrated lessons about AIDS and violence and other social concerns to youths throughout the camp. He is one of the most admirable young men I have ever met, and I had no intention of forgetting him. He would leap about as we spoke, acting out his story, miming machine gun fire, smiling like a sadistic soldier as he burnt the village down, and then whimpering like the little children—himself among them—who had fled across the lake to Tanzania. Barika did not have many friends, due both to the stigma surrounding orphans and the more mundane reasons that adolescent overachievers everywhere have few friends: he liked to study and to read and to think about difficult things. He reached out to adults looking for the friendship that his peers did not provide. When I came along and took him seriously, listened and watched, asked questions and wrote down his answers as if he were the teacher and I the pupil, he felt, as he later told me, a sense of importance. His rage when I left—rage that continued in letters for over a year despite my best efforts to convince him I