One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [31]
I liked Justin, though I’m not sure why. He was not as well-spoken as Keto, nor as eager to impress as Michael, nor as cheerful and buoyant as Melanie. He was charismatic, and I wanted him to feel his own worth. With his interest in children’s rights evident, we talked about my project of researching the lives of young people affected by war. He liked the idea of being an ambassador for young people in situations like his.
“What would you tell someone your age who has never been in a refugee camp so that he could understand what it is like?” I asked him. Justin thought for a moment, choosing his words carefully.
“I would like to tell my name so that he could know me,” he answered. “I would tell him that living in the camp is very bad. I think about going home, but who will I go back to? Everyone is dead. If I talk to this boy who has never been in a refugee camp I would be happy. I want to find children with hope.”
These journeys that children are forced to make are not confined to Africa. Right now, there are an estimated 20 million children uprooted from their homes around the world, living either as refugees, “migrants,” or internally displaced persons.
“There were many hardships on the journey [from Burma],” Siha said. He was sitting on the floor of the largest room in his little house in Thailand, in a city where many illegal Burmese migrants sought safety. He wore a soccer jersey and black running shorts and poked his tongue out in concentration as he drew his pictures, like eleven-year-olds I had met in other parts of the world. He lived with his aunt, his cousin, and his mother, though his mother was away for a few weeks at the time we met.
“We walked for two days, and it was raining the whole time, and then we rode horses, but my mother and aunt walked. And the river was flooded. We rode with buffalo and cows on a boat and it was very hard. I was afraid to leave home, but I was with my mother so it was okay. Everything was different here. The place to sleep and the place to live were different. We did not know where we would eat or what we would eat. In Burma, my grandmother would send me to the market for her and it was a very long way. I remember going there and walking far from home to buy different things. Here we did not know what things we would have.”
Siha is considered a migrant because, as a member of the Shan ethnic group, he is not eligible for refugee status in Thailand.
During his journey, Siha had the protection of his family, his mother taking care of things, making sure the children could ride horses instead of walking. As psychiatrists Joseph Westermeyer and Karen Wahmanholm observed in their work with refugee children, fleeing can seem like an adventure if children have a parent or parents insuring continuity and taking responsibility for their survival and well-being. Culturally, the differences in what constitutes childhood affect the way the young experience flight into exile, as do the differences in the wars being fought. In Congo, with the ravages of AIDS and the protracted intensity of the fighting, societal norms have broken down to such a degree that family structures become unraveled and few people have the resources, either emotional or material, to support children who are not their own. Additionally, it is not unusual for young boys to have responsibilities outside the home or for young girls to take care of their siblings. Unaccompanied minors are much more common in the Congo and in refugee camps in East Africa than in the Burmese communities in Thailand. This could also be due to the fact that on the journey out of Burma into Thailand there are several checkpoints controlled by one or another army, dense jungles filled with land mines and armed patrols, and young people on their own simply do not survive.
“It was hard to cross the border. There are robbers, Mon soldiers, Burmese soldiers, Karen soldiers, all wanting money. We had to pay many times at many checkpoints. It was dangerous,” said Nicholas, an eleven-year-old