One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [59]
“She can be walking down the road and a man comes with his brothers and takes her, and there is nothing to do. She can kick and cry and they just laugh.” Sometimes the men will take the women out of the camp, back to Sudan or into Kenya.
A seventeen-year-old girl, call her Hope, arrived with her aunt in Kakuma in 1994. Her extended family cared for her because her parents had died, she said. She went to school and did the usual chores for the family: cooking, cleaning, fetching wood and water. But when the time came for her to go to secondary school, her aunt was not pleased. She wanted Hope to continue helping with the substantial amount of housework. School was for the boys. What business did a young woman have at school? For what purpose reading and math? How would this help the family? There were fees for school. The family was poor. Why did she want to punish her aunt by leaving her to do the chores?
Their relationship deteriorated.
Two years earlier, her aunt made an arrangement with a Sudanese man for twenty head of cattle in exchange for Hope. She resisted, and her aunt hired a man to abduct her and take her to the border. She was a poor woman, and it must have seemed a sound investment to hire this man. The girl was her property, valuable property and the fee was a small price to pay to have it returned. The cattle were well worth it. Getting this expensive schoolgirl out of her hair was worth it too. Hope escaped at the border with the help of a local Kenyan.
“A good man took pity on me,” Hope said, “and brought me back here. Now I live with another relative. I miss much school to do work for him, so that he does not force me to this [older Sudanese man].” She is, in short, at her relative’s mercy in the refugee camp.
“The problems we had in the Sudan, the raping, the killing, these things are still happening to girls in Kakuma, in the refugee camp,” explained Rebecca, hiding in Nairobi. For the young girls of Sudan, the war was only the beginning of their worries. They must still make hard survival choices, they are still in danger, perhaps more danger from members of their own community than from outside enemies.
I saw this over and over again: young people, especially girls, whose greatest worries came from their own community rather than an external enemy. The memories of war and violence did not plague them as much as the ongoing hardships of their lives in the camp, the prisons that their futures often became to them. The terror of the present rather than the traumas of the past.
“For myself, for the future,” said Claudia, a twenty-year-old mother whose child is the result of rape by a group of soldiers in the Sudan, soldiers she had to placate in order to reach the refugee camp. Otherwise, she would have died in the desert. One can see that she was a beautiful young woman, which can be quite dangerous, but the hard years had taken their toll on her. She looked much older than twenty. Her baby nestled in her arms as we spoke, sleeping.
“I don’t know what will happen. That can only be determined if I went to a good place, a safe place with my child and little brothers. How can I go back to Sudan? No one will care for me because I have a child and no husband. I make beaded jewelry to distract myself from what has happened to me, but I would like to go to school and I would like to be safe.”
She told me she suffered from nightmares, but she had no one she could talk to, no one who could comfort her. She often thinks it would be better to die than to be in her situation, she said. She thought about hanging herself, she told me, but then no one would care for her baby.
She had been thrown out by her foster family for having a child and had taken refuge with another family, but, she said, there are many boys who want to take her by force and she has no one who can help her. Sometimes, she is forced to sleep outside with her baby