One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [67]
“My job was calling out for passengers to fill a bus,” Robert said. “I don’t have this job anymore, because the man with the bus—the man who gave me the job—was arrested by the police and they sold his car. He crossed the border without permission, they say, so now I need a job again.” He picked up some crayons and drew a picture of himself begging, the sun shining overhead.
“Once the war is finished, the street children will be finished. We can all go home.” He showed me his last drawing, a colorful house where he used to sleep (Figures 17, 18). The other kids looked at it with smiles. They liked the kung fu fighting Bruce Lee in the picture, because “Nobody can mess with him,” they said. “He can fight all the bad guys.”
The lives of the boys on the street in Bukavu and the lives of boys in the refugee camp in Tanzania did not seem all that different to me.
Justin, the Rwandan boy who liked to talk about children’s rights, told me about his life in Lugufu camp:
“In the camp, it is suffering. When we sleep, we are four people under the same blanket. We are given a jerry can and one basin to bathe in. These are our possessions.”
I was told by an aid worker that Justin probably had his own blanket taken by the foster parent or foster siblings he lives with, as sometimes happens to children who live with a family that is not their own. “I’ve gone through a lot in the camp. There are good people in the camp. My neighbors are good. They give me food. But it is hard. When I sit and cry, no one comes to help me. When I fell sick, I got no attention. I had a fever, and I had to walk to the hospital. I carried a boy who was wounded. I used to be healthy, but now…the environment here is bad. Sometimes people don’t use the toilets.”
Keto described similar hardships:
“Because of war, we don’t have people to care for us. Our education is harmed. In the camp we don’t get everything we need, especially when compared with what elders receive. We don’t get enough clothes, enough soap. This can cause disease.”
Just like the boys on the street in the eastern Congo, the boys in the camp worried about cleanliness and also about “bad people,” who would judge them or try to hurt them.
With Keto, I met a group of boys his age who complained that other children made fun of them because they had no parents, that local children taunted them because they were refugees.
“Maybe the other children hate me inside, though they don’t say it,” said Abwe, who the other children told me was a good goalkeeper in soccer. They helped him with his drawing because he said he didn’t know what to draw. Keto helped him much of the time while I interviewed other children. Toward the end of our conversation, he said that “people don’t like us; they boo at us, say this is not our place. We don’t have anybody to take care of us, but people are always calling us in to eat with them in different places. I want stability. I have two neighbors who are not good people.”
I asked him how he knew they were not good people.
“I have a feeling they are not good people. They eat everything and don’t leave any food. They insult and abuse us.”
Abwe kept returning to the abuse he suffered as a refugee. Like many of the boys I knew to be living on their own, he talked about “we” and “us” when telling about his problems.
Samuel, two years younger than Keto, added, “You can see how shabby I am. I used to dress sharp. We are suffering. We left everything behind. In your country there is no war, but if there was war, you will also flee and lose everything that you have.”
Samuel was embarrassed because he had lice.
“Because of war,” Keto said, “we don