One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [4]
Who are these children, though? The ones we see on the news, all wide-eyed and suffering in refugee camps. The ones we see in magazines, dressed in camouflage, firing rifles taller than themselves. The ones overflowing in history, the anonymous displaced, disenfranchised, photographed but not named, talked about but not remembered? Who are they?
Play soccer with them and you’ll know.
The Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, January 2002.
I’m in a center for demobilized child soldiers run by a nonprofit organization in the city of Bukavu. Built on the coast of Lake Kivu, the city rests like a blanket on the hills. Dilapidated colonial buildings command views of lake sunsets and jungle horizons. In the morning you can hear fishermen singing on the lake as the sun comes up. The smell of wood fires fills the air, cooking goat meat and ground cassava. The wilderness around the city is as stunning as it is dangerous. Stories of massacres and banditry trickle in from the outlying areas. When it is quiet, you might hear the mist crackle with gunfire. Children from all over the eastern Congo seek safety from the fighting and some kind of livelihood on the muddy and crumbling streets. Some estimates put the number of homeless children in the city at twenty thousand.
I play soccer in a grubby courtyard belonging to a local charity. It’s not much of a playground, filled as it is with giant puddles, pits, and loose shrubs, fenced in on all sides from the street, but the children have each other and an ingenious ball made of bundled plastic bags and string. That’s enough for them. The game is informal. To an outsider, it looks like a skirmish, all shuffling feet and half-playful shoulder shoves. There are rules, rituals, a code of behavior, but none I’ll be privy to. You could watch these children play for years and never see the current underneath, the history that creates this game, that’s passed it on through generations of kids just like these. They don’t need to learn the rules, they don’t exist in words. They’re in the blood. In the birth. There are no goal posts because there are no goals. Scoring is not the objective here, nor winning. The play is for the sake of play. Goals and points are finite, they imply a beginning and ending. This game has no beginning. It started long ago with other children and goes on in barrios and slums and ghettos and camps and shantytowns the world over. It will never end.
I’m no good at soccer, and the ball passes through my legs. I twist to stop it, putting my left foot behind my right as I step backwards, tripping myself into the mud. Pratfall. The children with whom I’m playing burst into laughter. The oldest among them is sixteen; the youngest is ten. All of them are trained killers.
The rebel group Rasemblement Congolaise pour la Democratie (RCD-Goma) controls this area, though it is often seized by paroxysms of violence from other factions or ethnic militias. The children have seen combat in a war widely known to be fought against civilians. I’m here to learn from them, to hear their stories, but we haven’t gotten that far. Now it’s time to play. Later, they’ll tell me about their killings, their wars gone by, their nightmares, and their hopes. But not yet.
They’ve fought in different armies and come from different parts of the country. Fate has thrown them into this center together, turned them into a group, labeled child soldiers or ex-combatants or in some documents “youth who participate in armed conflict.” The labels tell you little. In the language of humanitarian aid, there are many categories for children: Street Children, Internally Displaced Children, Child Soldiers, Child Heads of Household, Unaccompanied Minors, Children in Conflict with the Law, Children Affected by HIV, Children Accused of Sorcery. Categorization is a way of processing children for targeted