One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [28]
“I escaped from the Congo. I know how to travel. I would like to travel and see the world,” he said. “Not stay here.”
Then there was Melanie, a girl I met the same day I met Michael. She had just been playing jump rope at the well when we met, and her red dress was splotched with dust. Her tiny hands fluttered like moths while we talked, always moving or picking at something.
She has few memories of her past from which to draw inspiration (at least that she told me about) and her future is highly uncertain. “They tell me I am thirteen, but I do not know,” she said. She lives with her teacher, the wife of a man who rescued her from the fighting in the Congo.
“I do not know where I come from. When we fled the fighting in Congo, I missed the truck with my mother on it. The Congolese soldiers put her on a truck. I do not know where she is now. She is Rwandan. I got lost and a man found me in the brush. He took me with him to Tanzania, but there were guns.”
“Guns?” I asked, looking at her drawing which was filled with weapons (Figure 5).
“I saw the guns when they came to kill the man I was with. All the things, guns and spears. They wanted to kill the man because he was a soldier. We hid for two days under a bridge that had a roadblock on it. Then he paid for me to take a boat into Tanzania. I was happy to get to Tanzania because of the war. When I arrived I felt safe. They told me not to speak Rwandan, because of the militia, even in the camp. My teacher taught me to speak Swahili, so now I do not speak Rwandan with anyone. It is safer for me. I feel safe now, in the camp, most of the time. My teacher says she will help me find my mother when the war is over and we go back to Congo. I will let my mother decide if I should stay with her or with my teacher.”
Melanie is not simply vulnerable because she is young or because she is a girl. Her ethnic status—Rwandan, as she said, meaning Tutsi—makes her more vulnerable. Her teacher’s warnings reveal that even the act of speaking could be dangerous for her. She must deny her own language in order to survive. Her safety, even outside the war zone, is linked directly to the political situation in the Congo. Young girls from different ethnic groups have very different experiences in the refugee camp, though only through spending time getting to know Melanie would someone realize how different her needs might be from other little girls, how different the threats against her.
The Rwandan government is the principal power backing the rebel government of the eastern Congo, the RCD. Their enemies, such as the Mayi Mayi, the interhamwe, and the recognized government in Kinshasa, have created a fear of the Rwandans, of Tutsis, that runs deep. Through their own human rights abuses, their actions without regard for Congolese civilians, and their exploitation of the Congo’s resources, Rwanda’s army and the RCD have helped in the creation of this fear.
“The war is caused by Rwandan soldiers,” said Robert, a young boy living in a shelter for street children in Bukavu in the eastern Congo, just across Lake Tanganyika from the refugee camps in Tanzania.
“The Rwandans kill people. They massacre. I’ve seen it myself, you know. I’ve seen someone sell a cow and everybody knows he sold the cow and the soldiers came and demanded money from him. If he didn’t give them money, they’d cut his throat. I could find a Rwandan who would cut a throat for $100. I could find him with you right now, if you want to.”
I declined the boy’s offer.
The fear of the Rwandans illustrated to me just how difficult it was for young people to form their own identities when the situation around them dictates so many terms. The young have an advantage over adults, because they can be more adaptable to new settings, but they have the added pressure of adapting to a new society at the same time as becoming socialized within the family, sometimes not their own families. It is hard enough for an adolescent to define him-or herself in peacetime, managing the expectations of family and society