One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [54]
There is no easy life in a refugee camp. The total dependence on outside assistance for materials to build a home, food to eat, supplies to do anything at all, affects every member of the displaced society. There is psychological stress beyond what they survived in getting to the relative safety of the camp. Freedom of movement is limited due to legal constraints and safety issues; there are few activities and little work if you can’t get a job with the United Nations or one of the non-governmental organizations (NGOs), so men become listless and bored, sometimes depressed. I had been told by many women about their husbands who were productive and gentle men before arriving in the refugee camp but after time with nothing to do, these women would complain, their husbands became abusive toward them, towards their children. In many cultures, beating wives and children in order to discipline them is the norm, though there are socially accepted rules about what is appropriate and what is not. In southern Sudanese culture, you cannot beat a child with a stick any wider than a thumb, and then only on the thighs and buttocks. And if you beat your wife without good reason—whatever that might be—her family can protest and initiate a divorce, though this is rare.
But with the deprivations of war, these social rules break down. Women, working hard to feed the children, maintain the home, get the water, clean the clothes, and tend the livestock, all with scant resources, can quickly become exhausted, physically incapacitated, and depressed. With the collapse of the adult’s world, the burden to keep society going often falls to adolescents, mostly to the young women and girls. And children who do not have the support structure of their families, orphans and other unaccompanied minors, are the most vulnerable to material shortages, exploitation of labor, forced marriage, sexual exploitation, isolation. These children have to learn how to navigate the risks around them, have to make a variety of choices for their own protection, as adults and NGOs too often fail to meet their needs, to address their concerns.
In Kakuma, the “Lost Girls” represent the extreme of this isolation.
Rebecca Maluok Mayom, a Lost Girl, told me her story, which was repeated with some variations throughout my time in Kakuma by dozens of other girls. Rebecca was sixteen years old and came from a town in the southeast of Sudan near the White Nile. She was tall, her jaw set firmly. She looked very serious and very sad. Her eyes shone all the time, the glassy look of someone who strains herself trying not to see what’s happening to her, because the danger is constant and to look it in the eye at every second would drive a person mad. She is looking through her life, to some place else, some future bliss that is forever out of reach.
She was in Nairobi, where we met, hiding from a man who attacked her in the refugee camp, who wanted to take her with him, who had come after her. She chose the pseudonym, Rebecca Maluok Mayom, herself, “because it is a Christian name,” she said. Her story, the story of her journey, is a common one among the Sudanese in the camp, as well as among the Lost Boys who were resettled. I heard countless variations on it, though Rebecca’s was the first, on my first day in Kenya. I will let her tell it:
“I arrived in Kenya in 1994, when I was a little girl. The Khartoum government attacked my village, killing indiscriminately. They killed my parents, and I fled into the bush with my cousin. We did not know where to go, we only fled and spent several months in the bush with other children. There were caretakers there as well—adults,