One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [64]
For children who do not make it to a refugee camp where at least some measure of protection and stability is provided, these choices are all the more important.
Furaha was fifteen years old when we met in Bukavu, the war ravaged Congolese city on the lake. We met in a children’s shelter in one of the neighborhoods high above the city. Groups of children ran between the buildings carrying shovels, digging drainage ditches to keep the water from tearing apart the buildings, which were all in danger of toppling due to the heavy rains and the unstable ground.
Furaha and her four young brothers fled the fighting in their village outside Bukavu in April 2000. She is a tall girl with short hair and a severe expression. She speaks very quickly. When I ask a question she always looks down at the floor to listen, pauses, looks up at me again and rattles out her answer as if it had been waiting in her all the time.
“Furaha,” I ask, “how did you come to the city? What happened?”
“My father and mother were killed by the soldiers. We couldn’t stay because of the violence. After my parents died, we had no home, no place to stay. We came to the city on our own,
PHOTOGRAPHIC INSERTS
Figure 1. Miroslaw’s depiction of the Battle of Kosovo and the Death of Lazar. The 1389 battle still haunts the province of Kosovo.
Christof, a boy of mixed Croat-Serb parentage, suffered torment for his ethnicity in the years after the war in Bosnia.
All drawings and photographs courtesy of the author
Figures 2, 3. Images of school, soccer, and violence dominate the drawings of most former child soldiers.
A group of former child soldiers in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, some of them, including Paul and Xavier, had been there for months, unable to find relatives or a foster family willing to take them. Reintergration into civilian life is often the hardest part of recovery.
Figure 4. Keto’s depiction of his escape from the war in the Congo.
AIDS is destroying the fabric of society in much of sub-Saharan Africa. One boy’s drawing of “AIDS Man.”
Figure 5. Melanie drew images of different things she saw when she fled the Congo. The weapons remain ingrained in her mind.
Figure 6. Justin found comfort in the rhetoric of children’s rights. Here he states that children have the right to go to school and to work.
A group of Sudanese children living in Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, horsing around with the author in the summer of 2003.
Figure 7. Nicholas drew the attacks on his village, which continue to haunt him. In the picture, he hides behind a tree, a tiny witness to the carnage.
Figure 8. May longs to attend school, believing that school, and only school, is the key that will open the door to a brighter future.
An Albanian boy in the town of Zahaq. Zahaq, like many places in Kosovo, suffered from the campaigns of ethnic cleansing in the late nineties. Serb paramilitary units murdered the fathers of several children I met at this boy’s school.
Figure 9. Ostar’s father, in better times, before they fled the civil war in Burma.
Thinzanoo and Ostar pictured with the rest of their family in hiding in Bangkok. Shortly after our visit, they were forced to relocate, due to trouble with their neighbors. Very few Burmese migrants in Thailand were granted refugee status at the time of my visit. Without refugee status, this family was viewed with disdain as illegal immigrants.
Figures 10, 11. The dream world depicted by exiled children of Burma. They are all homesick for land in their pictures.
Figure 12. Flags and guns were linked in many of the drawings by exiled children from the Karen ethnic group in Burma. They are tied up in a sixty-year-old nationalist struggle.
Figure 13.
Aung Su, a Karen boy from Burma, lives in exile in a small town near the Thai-Burma border. His favorite hero, Spider-Man, cannnot protect him from