One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [55]
Mengistu Haile Mariam was the Marxist dictator ruling Ethiopia from 1977 to 1991, when a coup ousted him from power. He fled to Zimbabwe, where Robert Mugabe allowed him to stay, as a favor between despots. His downfall was the second act for the harrowing journey of the famous Lost Boys, which ended with their resettlement in the United States. The story of these boys has been told countless times: After being chased from Sudan by the armies from the north of the country, the children from the south marched through perilous terrain, under regular bombardment to Ethiopia, where they thought they were safe.
Ethiopia gave them sanctuary in refugee camps from which Mengistu could use the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), the main rebel movement in southern Sudan, to control the local Oromo population, which was not exactly friendly to his regime. When Mengistu fell, the Gambella camp was attacked by the Oromo Liberation Front, and the SPLA leaders in the Itang Camp, twenty-five kilometers away, decided to take the children back to Sudan rather than risk losing control of the aid packages coming to their charges. The caretakers of whom Rebecca spoke, were often SPLA officers benefiting from the food assistance provided for the children and preparing the boys to become soldiers. When they left Ethiopia, the boys’ numbers were estimated between 17,000 and 25,000. Fewer than 11,000 arrived in the Kenyan refugee camp to tell the story of their perils.
Even in Kakuma, the boys were monitored by the SPLA and were in danger from agents of the Khartoum government, and the international aid community decided it better to remove them from the camp, where they were likely to be turned into soldiers and returned to the war. Between the years 2000–2003, 3,276 boys were resettled from Kakuma camp to cities across the United States. In that same time, only 89 girls had the opportunity to resettle.
Rebecca’s cousin was one of those boys, and she longed to see him again. In Sudanese culture, it is neither safe nor socially acceptable for girls to live on their own, so while the boys settled among themselves in Kakuma, the girls were integrated into families, often before registering with UNHCR. Girls had traveled with the boys in smaller numbers, according the several sources in the camp, yet they were far less visible. There was almost no record of girls arriving with this wave of Lost Boys because they had already been taken into families, some of whom treated them as their own, many of whom treated them, according to a representative from the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, “as chattel.”
“I arrived in Kakuma camp after being chased from Sudan once more. Here I met my cousin again,” Rebecca said. She told me how he looked out for her because he was older, and while he was there she did not have as many problems as some of the other girls. “I was very disappointed when the boys left,” Rebecca said. “The boys told us we would come afterwards, but this is not our privilege. Perhaps it is a gender gap. Girls have no powers. We would like to join our brothers. I would like to join my cousin in America.” Rebecca sighed and picked at the fibers on her dress.
I finally met with Charity when she finished with school on yet another hot afternoon in Kakuma. It was a good day for her because she had been able to go to school. Her teacher told me she was a good student, intelligent, though has trouble because she, like so many girls, misses a lot of school.
“I want to go all the time,” she said. “But others in the community don’t like it when their needs are not met. I have no parents. I must do everything to