One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [62]
Jeanine did not realize that there were well over a hundred unaccompanied minors living in the same camp who had experiences similar to hers. Though she felt it, she was not alone. Many other orphaned girls have faced similar problems, sometimes without anyone finding out about them.
Mathilde, who was thirteen, lived with other unaccompanied minors in another camp for Burundians. Firewood, it seemed, was the first thing on her mind. She drew me a picture of girls collecting wood. She mentioned wood in her answers to nearly every question about life in the camp. She was determined to talk about collecting wood, though she was not doing it out of a love for the task.
“I do not like collecting firewood,” she said while looking at the floor. “In Burundi, I stayed home to guard the house while my parents worked,” she said, puffed a little with pride. “I did not have to carry food or water or firewood.”
Her father died, she told me, of disease in Burundi. Then her mother took her to the Congo, where she died of disease as well. It could have been any number of diseases that killed her parents, but given the stigma attached to AIDS, it is possible that her mother moved after her husband’s death to avoid harassment within her community. This would explain why her daughter now lives outside the care of a foster family in the refugee camp. Often, children whose households have been devastated by AIDS, as Keto explained to me earlier, are shunned by the community out of fear and can find no one willing to care for them.
“On my own now, I am responsible for getting wood with the other girls in our house. Our neighbors,” she said, meaning the Tanzanians, “come and attack us while we gather wood. They come and beat us and kill us.” She would not elaborate any further. When asked if she had been attacked she simply said yes and fixed her gaze on her big toe. The male translator advised me not to push any further, and I could tell what he meant when he translated “beat us and kill us.” He nodded to me that I had understood correctly.
Though there has been a decline in sexual violence against women gathering firewood in Mathilde’s camp, young girls who are walking to remote areas are extremely vulnerable to attack, especially since they are considered “safe” targets for sexual violence because the risk of STDs and AIDS is lower. In the case of Mathilde, if she was attacked, she did not have any adult to inform in her life. I learned from a rape counselor later in the day that Mathilde had never spoken to anyone about being attacked, at least any adult.
By living with other children in a similar situation, Mathilde did not suffer from the social isolation that Jeanine felt. She went to school and wanted to be a teacher when she grew up, like many children I met. Teachers were some of the very few positive adult figures in their lives, which might explain why so many of the orphaned children wanted to be teachers. Additionally, school was a child-friendly zone in the camps, a place where they were free to be children, usually the only one, and attending was a privilege that not everyone had. In school they could play and learn and goof off. I think some of the children saw teaching as a way to stay in school all the time. Children saw that teachers got to go to school every day, unlike most of the children. They liked the stability that implied, stability that their own lives lacked. On a more practical note, teaching was one of the few jobs one could get in a refugee camp, one of the few adult employments any of them saw.
With the other children, Mathilde laughed and played with ease. She would like to improve camp security, “so there are no problems for girls,” she said.
Nicole, who was ten years old when I met her, had been a refugee in Tanzania since she was six. She came from the Congo and lived in Lugufu camp with her grandmother. She had been brought to me by the same aid worker who introduced me to Keto, Michael, and Melanie, though Nicole did not know them before that day. She was extremely quiet, shy with the other children