One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [24]
Keto’s story sounded not rehearsed but performed, as if he already knew that part of living as a refugee was telling your story to foreigners, the price of admission to refuge.
The asylum narrative is part biography, part myth, part plea, and part propaganda. It is how one person places himself, his terrible ordeals, in a larger context; how he makes the unreal real to those who can only imagine, how he becomes more than an individual suffering, part of a movement, a refugee, and in adding his story to the larger story of a people, of the displaced, he is simultaneously unique and not alone.
“Ready?” my translator asked. “He wants to know if he can continue.”
“Um, yes,” I said, flipping the page in my notebook and dropping my pen. He waited for me with his chin resting on his hand—his default position it seemed—while I got ready again. Keto was clearly the one in control here. “What did you do after your uncle left?”
“We stayed with his girlfriend. My older brother didn’t like this woman, so he went back to the Congo, and when I was alone with her, she started hating me. That’s when Christian Outreach transferred me to this camp.”
In Congo, as in much of sub-Saharan Africa, AIDS is destroying many of the normal structures that ensure children are not abandoned. In the past, in Congolese society, when a child’s parents died, the community took the child in and provided for him. The fear of AIDS, combined with intense poverty, disrupted this practice. Many children who lose relatives to AIDS are discriminated against, harassed, and often turned away. Besides the emotional turmoil of losing a parent, they have to face the hardships of abandonment, prejudice, and fear. And because of the war, soldiers moving around the country, taking many women, raping or sleeping with prostitutes, AIDS is spreading: a new kind of weapon in wars that are aimed at destroying civilian life. Many children do not have Keto’s good fortune in finding someone to care for him. And many, like him, had to flee not just the fighting, but the stigma of the disease, often more devastating than the soldiers. Communities do not want the burden of an unclean child. A recent trend suggests many of these children in the eastern Congo are being accused of witchcraft and sent away. They often find themselves working as child laborers in mines, benefiting little from the adults who exploit them. They are outcasts, unwanted, unmissed, and their deaths are rarely noticed. Many such children have met their end in the bottom of abandoned diamond pits.
“In Lugufu, there was a man who knew me and knew that Mom had died. I stayed with him. He made sure I was studying, but I couldn’t afford the school fees for secondary school, so I had to go back to primary school. I started cutting grass and collecting it for people to build with so I could have money to pay for school, so I would be in school one month and out of school the next, working. Then they lowered the fees, so I could go back to school all the time. So that is my story of how I crossed. The journey was hard, but I don’t think I want to go back to Congo. I don’t know that I have anything to go back to.”
He doesn’t.
The Democratic Republic of Congo should be a wealthy nation. The ground is rich in gold, copper, diamonds, zinc, and coltan (a mineral used in cell phones). As is the case in many developing countries around the world, the presence of natural resources is, for most of its citizens, a curse. If the elites can draw their wealth directly from the ground, what need do they have of taxation? And without taxation, what need do they have of the people? Their mandate comes from control of the ground, control that can only be gained, can only be held by