One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [51]
His animosity towards Burma, towards going back at all—he wanted to be an English soldier—is itself a statement of his political loyalties. He wants to fight. He does not want to fight for them, neither the government that took his uncle nor the rebels who scared him and his mother on their journey. Spider-Man is a lone hero, which seemed to be another part of the fantasy Aung Su liked to entertain. The Thai gangs, which are known to harass the Burmese migrants, were Aung Su’s main concern. He had put Burma behind him, adjusted to the new environment, and adjusted his concerns to the problems in the new environment. The Myanmar army and the regime, for him, were a distant abstraction.
Children, however, are not an abstraction to the regime. Their education program acknowledges the role children can play in the future of their country, as dissidents or as loyal cadres. The army employs an estimated thirty thousand child soldiers, the highest number of any one army in the world. The junta has an acute awareness of children’s capabilities.
The young are just as capable of dissent as their parents, as Kin Wa and Win showed me, and are just as dangerous to the military government. Aung Su, even though he didn’t seem very concerned about the situation in Burma, had forged aspects of his personality in reaction to the conflict. Even though he wanted to be English, he could not escape his identity, and the policies of both Burma and Thailand will not let him or his peers define themselves any other way.
Sum Chai, a friend of Aung Su’s, lived his whole life in Thailand. His parents used to be plantation workers in Burma but now they worked in Bangkok.
“I’m worried for my parents’ safety in Bangkok,” he said. “There are a lot of drug addicts in the city. I live with my aunt now. I worked on the construction sites with my father in Bangkok, carrying bricks. We made enough money to get by, I think. My mother would not let me stay with her because there is no school for Burmese children in Bangkok. I want to go to school and be a doctor in Thailand.”
“Why not in Burma?”
“I’ve never been to Burma. I’ve never seen a hospital in Burma. I want to stay in Thailand. There is more to see. My parents want to go back to Burma, when it is safe, but I like it here. I can speak Thai and Mon and Burmese. I would also like to study English.”
Sum Chai echoed a lot of the Burmese children. As far as national policy is concerned, he is Burmese. He lives with other Burmese. His family is Burmese. But he has grown up in Thailand. This is his home. He was not angry at Burma or at Thailand. Unlike his peers, he said he’s never been afraid of the police. (I don’t imagine he would have admitted being afraid of anything, not in front of his buddy Aung Su.) His predicament is simply that he has no nation. He is unable to hold property or receive a certificate of higher education. He will grow up trapped between the policies of a military regime and the policies of his country of refuge.
Together, they will deny him safety, schooling, employment, culture, language, and history. He is defined by all of these outside forces and labeled by them. He likes soccer and wants to learn English so he can study computers. His friends want to go to good schools and walk home unafraid, to become doctors and teachers, to work for democracy, to travel, to be superheroes.
When we spoke in the muddy schoolyard out of sight from the prying eyes of the police on the road, he was ten years old and already knew none of them could do any of these things.
FOUR
“I Am Getting Used to Living Here”
Children in Camps, Shelters, and on the Streets
It was nine a.m. in Kakuma Refugee Camp and Charity was not in school.
On the way into the camp near the Kenyan border with Sudan, there were six boys squatting in the dust around a rough wooden toy, a handmade car. They fiddled with the pieces of it, hewn branches and scraps, trying to make them fit together so it would roll correctly. Up the road from where they played, men unloaded trucks. Each of these trucks