One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [27]
“I borrowed these clothes to come here and meet you,” he told me. “One day, when I was bathing, I came back to get my clothes and the shirt I have was ripped. All my other clothes were stolen.”
Michael sat very straight in his chair and smiled when he gave my hand a firm shake, like a businessman closing a deal. He was trying very hard to be like his father, who was a businessman. He used to travel with him, wheeling and dealing, he said in English: “Doing business.” If he had money, he told me, he would start buying and selling, traveling around carrying on the business for his dad, whom he still wants very much to make proud.
“I was in the back room when the rebels came,” he said. The rebels burst into his house, knowing his father was a businessman and would have money. The burst in through the front door armed with machetes and rifles. “That’s when I saw my mother and father killed, and all I could do was climb out the window.”
He scratched the back of his head and looked at the floor. I was about to speak, to help him move from this painful memory. He was fidgeting and quivering slightly at the lip. Then he sat up straight again and met my eyes dead on. He was pulling himself together, not wanting to stop the interview.
“It was chaos. I was running and everyone around me was running and when I got to the shore of the lake, I realized I had no money.”
Standing at the side of the lake, young Michael started crying. Around him the world had erupted into violence. Moments earlier he had seen his parents killed. He could not go further on his own. If he stayed where he was he would either be forced into the army or die. Maybe both, in that order.
“The man who had a boat saw me and took pity on me,” he said. “He said I could cross if I bailed the water out of the boat. So I got on and bailed water the whole time we crossed the lake. The boat was so crowded, and everyone was upset. When I first got to Kibrizi [the UN reception center] and saw the green plastic sheeting and all the people I didn’t know, all I thought of was my parents. A car took us to the camp, and now I live here. I have no clothes of my own and no money to do anything. I think about my father. I go to school. I play football, but there aren’t enough balls. I am a good striker. I win a lot of games.”
Michael did not seem to get along with others the way Keto did. Usually, when I finished talking to a child in a refugee camp, a crowd would gather around that boy or girl, a multitude of other kids and several adults as well, wanting to find out what happened, what the mzungu wanted to talk about, what he had to say. Information is a valuable commodity in a refugee camp. When I walked, I tended to have a tail of about ten children behind me. When I walked with Michael, no children followed. One or two would come up and ask him a question to which he gave a brief answer, and then the other kids would look at me and the translator for a moment and walk away. No crowds gathered to Michael when we were done speaking. He walked off alone.
Keto used his considerable skills at reading people and an amazing amount of energy to manage his emotional and physical survival. Helping the “old man” he lives with, I believe, provided him with some of the strength he needed to deal with stresses he experienced and continues to experience.
Alienated from his peers, Michael held on to the image of his father for support. He told me it made him sad to think of, but that it also gave him a goal. He held on to his past as a source of hope and enjoyed talking about the ways his father would trade and make deals, would drive around on the motorcycle he had, selling goods. Michael was not at all content with his situation. He didn’t go to school anymore, and he didn’t like living with the other boys his age. He wanted to get out into the adult world, not be regarded as a child anymore. I think he was frustrated with the assistance programs that treated him like a child, giving