One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [58]
Later that week, when I asked Charity about her future, what she wanted, she told me: “What you are aiming at is that you are not killed. Everything else….” She waved her hand as if she were clearing a table and said no more.
Charity has had to make a lot of compromises to protect herself. Besides missing school to placate her family, she married at seventeen years old, in the hope of defending herself against forced marriage to someone else, illustrating, much to my chagrin, the UNHCR protection officer’s point that girls might be safer in marriage, giving up whatever individual dreams they had for themselves.
“I did not want to,” she said. “I married too soon. There were allegations in my family, they tried to force me to marry someone I did not want to, one of the boys going to the United States. I married my true love instead, though he cannot pay the dowry and was chased away. I live with my family until he can pay. I am not feeling good.” She looked around the compound. We watched some women go by in bright sarongs, singing, carrying water on their heads. “I want to be free,” she told me as we watched the water-carriers walk by.
On a walk through the camp, Patience pointed out the house of a girl who had been forced to marry.
“We cannot visit her,” she told me. “We may cause trouble and she would be beaten.”
The phrase echoed in my ears. I heard it over and over again as the days progressed in this camp. And she will be beaten. Like a mantra. And she will be beaten and she will be beaten and she will be beaten. Anger washed over me, began to tear at me. After one week in the camp, one week hearing these stories I felt a helpless rage blurring my vision. Imagine the rage of these girls, these vivacious, intelligent young women, who will be beaten.
In spite of their drive, in spite of their intelligence, their ambitions, all that they have to give, their lives in this place are a continuum of submission: submission to the war, to the desert, to the policies of governments and aid agencies, to their families, to the men who choose them, who take them as wives, submission to their culture, to traditions that many wish to cast off, submission, inevitably one day, once more, when they have worked their bodies to the bone, to the desert again. Patience deserved better. She deserved options in her life. So did Charity. So too did Rebecca. And how many others? How many I hadn’t met? I would never meet? The rage was dizzying and pointless. Against whom, against what was I raging? This was the world. This was the world these girls came from. This was the world to which they would return, the only world they knew.
“It is very bad,” Patience said, either reading my mind or reading the angry blank of my face. “Many girls do not survive this, you know?” She sighed and crossed her arms, squinting at the sun and then back at me. “It is too bad.” Her idiosyncratic English said it all. It was too bad.
“Yes,” I said, unable to find a hopeful word.
She found it for me. Unknowingly—I assume—quoting Gloria Gaynor, she shook her head. “I will survive.”
I asked Patience if she has other friends in similar situations to her friend we could not visit, any that I might be able to speak with about their situations.
“Yes, I have many friends like this.” She went on to list the names of about five girls. I asked her if there was a way to arrange visits with any of them.
“These are not the girls who are here,” she told me. I thought I misunderstood her. Her English was not perfect, so I asked her to explain. “Abduction is a problem,” she said.
Abduction is a big problem facing Sudanese girls, the protection