One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [69]
“My parents died of disease…I was told, when I was young,” he said.
“Where did you live after that?” I asked in an overly official tone.
“With the others…” His voice, which had been lingering near silence since we started talking, faded completely at this point. He did not look at me or the translator, but he did not seem to actively avoid looking at us either. His eyes still drifted.
“Who are the others?”
“The others who worked in the mine with me.”
“You worked in the mines?”
“Yes.”
War was destroying traditional structures in the Congo. My translator explained to me that normally a child whose parents had died would be taken in by others and cared for, but this child had been working in the mines since he was very young. It seems no relatives could take him in or no relatives wanted to, perhaps because his parents had died of AIDS, perhaps because he had developmental problems, perhaps because the burden of one more mouth to feed was simply too much.
When talking about the mine, his attention came to us and he stopped drifting. He focused on me, and, while still having trouble communicating clearly, he was more animated and engaged with the game of questions and answers.
“I was paid 503 Zaire francs.” He smiled. This was barely a few cents when the country was still Zaire, at least five years before we met, when Lepaix must have been around nine or ten years old. Lepaix told me the mines were very dangerous, though it was good to have work to live and friendship with the other children his age working there.
He talked about the diamond mines more than anything else. He spoke of the hard work, the damp conditions. It worked like this: A boy, the smaller the better, is lowered on a rope to the bottom of a 100-foot hole. The boys need to be small so they can maneuver in the pit. They dig out clumps of dirt and throw the clumps into sacks, which other boys haul up and take to the river, to sort through, looking for diamonds. The boys spend all day at the bottom of the pit. If they have to relieve themselves down there, they do. The men who exploit them, the men who make all the money off these operations, have no interest in the welfare of these boys—young boys, hungry and alone are commonplace in the eastern Congo, their lives are cheap.
“At times, when digging, there would be accidents,” Lepaix said. “There would be a collapse, the dirt falling in, crushing. I have seen others killed this way. The mines were dangerous.”
He smiled a bit, for no clear reason. At the start of the interview, his cheeks were flushed, and his first instinct was to answer every question put to him with a simple, “I don’t know.” By the end of the conversation, he had grown somewhat more spontaneous with his statements, though still quiet.
I asked him where he would go if he could go anywhere in the world. He said he didn’t know. After suggesting a few generic places that he could visualize—the city, the ocean, another country, home, he still said simply, “It doesn’t matter.”
I asked him what he likes about living in the camp, what he liked about where he came from.
He told me that life in the camp, where he lives with a “kind old man” and goes to school, works, and plays soccer is the same as life in the Congo and in the mines. “There is no difference, though I had friends in Congo.”
He thought about home. Living in exile, he missed the only life he knows. When the war ends, he said he would go back and work in the mines again.
“Where will you live?”
“With my friends. The others. We will be together and take care of each other.”
He had been on his own for a long time. He had learned to go along,