One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [23]
I told him that I did not have any blankets to give, though he had not actually asked. Savvy Keto knew how to get me to volunteer what he wanted to know. This gift for people, for reading them, for getting adults to open up to him, was a gift that had served Keto well in the past, would serve him well in the future. Maybe it was this that kept him alive when the world around him fell to pieces.
We were eating granola bars while we talked, and I think he enjoyed that, perhaps saw it as fair barter for his story.
“I’d like to help other children,” he said. I think he sensed my nervousness and wanted to make me feel more at ease. It was his turn to smile, to reassure me that he would talk, that he liked talking to visitors. It was embarrassing to be comforted by a child, a victim of war. I was supposed to be the expert here, providing the comfort, the support. My nervousness leveled the playing field for him, gave him a role to play. Keto did not want to be patronized; he wanted respect. He got it. He has it still.
“It’s okay,” he said and settled back in his chair and started talking again. He told his story without interruptions, except to let the translator speak or to nod when I seemed to understand something on my own because he had used a French word that I knew. Both of us liked those few moments of direct connection as he spoke, but otherwise, he spoke without much emotion and without many pauses…. It amazed me at the time, though I grew used to it over the years, how so many children who had been through unspeakable horrors could talk about the most disturbing things with little emotion. These were the facts of their lives. These were their stories.
“I came from Baraka,” Keto said. He told his story, how he sat in school with his brother listening to the teacher recite the French lessons for the day: je m’appelle, tu t’appelle, il s’appelle….
“When I went home, I didn’t find my parents. My brother and I didn’t know where my parents or grandparents were.” They stood for a while in their empty home, calling for anyone they knew. With gunfire and flames around them, the two boys decided they must escape on their own. They made their way to the lake still clutching their schoolbooks to their chests. “They were our only possessions when we fled. I still have them after all these years.
“We went first to Fizi, a place near where I am from, and there we found crowds of people. There we found my father’s brother. He said we should leave the Congo, but he wasn’t prepared to flee. We were later told that that uncle, who did not come with us, had been burnt to death in his house.”
In Fizi, the boys found their mother again. “I don’t know what happened to my father—I have not seen him again—but my mother took us to Kibrizi, where refugees go when they get to Tanzania, and then we spent three years in the Nyaragusu refugee camp. Mom died in Nyaragusu. We heard lots of things…that mom died of AIDS, but I was young and didn’t understand. People were scared to care for us; they thought that I had AIDS, so we stayed with another uncle, but he left at the repatriation, went back to the Congo.”
“Excuse me,” I interrupted. I looked at the translator. “Did he say ‘repatriation’?”
“Yes, he did,” my translator told me. “Some children learn all the words used by the UN, especially the unaccompanied minors. This one speaks very well, is very smart.”
I turned back to Keto. I was amazed at the vocabulary that refugee life gave this kid. Words like “repatriation,” “transit center,” “food rationing,” and “distribution.” These terms are a reality for millions of the world’s children, and they learn them in order to survive. They are magic words, words that open doors. Conflict creates a new vocabulary, and the dependence these children have on international aid teaches them to speak its language. I was reminded of the sisters, six and nine years old, that Anna Freud mentions in her writings on the Hampstead Nurseries during World War II. Walking down