One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [56]
Charity was savvy. She was the only young woman I met who described herself as a Lost Girl. She knew, I imagine, what that title would evoke in me: languishing in a refugee camp without her family to protect her, forgotten by the international community who took a great interest in her male relatives and friends, the Lost Boys of Sudan. She wielded the label “lost girls” like a brand name, shorthand for her suffering and the suffering of other girls. She hoped the words might have the same magic effect they did for the boys. The High Commissioner for Refugees prefers the more inclusive term vulnerable women to describe these and other girls in the camp in need of intervention. But Charity is quite aware that the term vulnerable women will not get the attention she and her compatriots need. Though living in a camp in the desert, she understands the imperatives of the media age.
“I tell the others,” Charity said. “I tell them that, no matter how hard it is to tell, they must tell their story. They must keep telling it and telling it and telling it. It is only through people knowing our story that they will understand what we have been through and will help us.”
Like so many children of war, she believed that telling her story would open doors for her if only the right people would hear it, would believe it. For the Albanian children in Kosovo, this was the Hague Tribunal for War Criminals and the international community who could grant independence to the province; in Lugufu camp it was the charities that provided resources and training, and in Kakuma, where everyone wanted resettlement, it was the media and the American INS, the gatekeepers to a new life over the ocean. The telling was never intended to be therapeutic; it was barter.
Charity told me the story of her journey, which was similar to (though not identical to) Rebecca’s. Fleeing to Ethiopia and then back to Sudan and then, after an ordeal of near-biblical proportions, to Kakuma.
I also heard this story from Patience, Hope, and Susan. Perhaps this tale had been adopted by those left behind in the hopes it would influence their outcome. This had to be true in some cases. I tried to verify the tales as best I could, but I was inclined to believe most of the girls. The stories sounded much like other stories I had been told by other refugee children around the world. The fear, the violence, the sounds of violence. They rang true. While some of the details may have changed over time in the camp, during the flood of interviews the Lost Boys gave which the girls must have heard, I believe the narrative is a kind of collective memory of what each child went through, her individual story folded into the general story of Sudan’s Lost Children which, by the time they spoke to me, had become legend. As the UNHCR Protection Officer told me, “Everybody knows the story, knows what to say. Everybody [who got resettled] is a legend.”
This legend forms a large part of the way the young Sudanese girls see themselves. It is their history, like the Battle of Kosovo for the Serb children in Kosovo, it is the story that gives them a sense of identity and of purpose. The myth matters; the telling matters, though unlike the medieval battle in the Balkans, there is the hope in the telling of the Lost Girls’ story that it can change their future.
“I have suffered the same as the boys,” said Patience, seventeen years old. The Dinka tribe from southern Sudan are a terribly beautiful people. They are generally very tall, with broad shoulders and deep black skin. Supermodel Alek Wek comes from the Dinka tribe, as does NBA star Manute Bol. Patience fits in with this group; she’s tall, has powerful arms and shoulders but delicate features. Her hair is pulled back into cornrows, and she wears a flower printed dress.
“I don’t remember when we went to Ethiopia because I was very young. I was with my father. My daddy just grabbed my