One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [83]
“Header!” they would shout in English, convulsing with laughter. It was a real soccer ball and it stung.
I sat down on a bench in the shade when I got too tired to keep playing. One of the social workers grabbed Sakundi from the game and told him to go over and talk to me. He obeyed without objection and came trotting over from the dirt field. He never complained that his game had been interrupted, though I felt guilty that my presence had disrupted his play. He assured me that he didn’t mind as long as I promised to play more when we were done. He smirked a bit. He was a smartass, but a charming one. I accepted his offer, my cheeks stinging in anticipation.
Sakundi had been in the army for two years, and he looked it. His features were hard and his arms were muscular, though thin. He answered my questions as if they were orders being given. He talked without emotion about his time in the army and his life afterwards.
When he was twelve, his family sent him to the market. He saw a truck with soldiers around it talking to a group of young people.
“Anyone who wants to join the army can, because we want soldiers. Come join us,” they said. So at twelve years old, Sakundi joined them. He got in their truck and left for the military base.
“I didn’t tell my family because I never said good-bye.”
My pen hesitated on my pad, and I looked at him for a moment.
“Nobody forced me,” he said, anticipating my question.
At the military base they woke early in the morning to march and to learn how to fight. He saw older women that the soldiers used for prostitution, he said, but he had no interest in them. He was more interested in the fighting and the adventure. He wasn’t interested in girls yet. Despite the adult statements he made, he was still a little boy in the army. He didn’t have any friends, he said. “Only soldiers.” He was learning to use a gun and to follow orders, which he liked.
“Did you fight?” I asked.
“When we heard the Mayi Mayi, our enemy, in the bush, we’d shoot at them, they would shoot at us. We would try to kill them.” He acknowledged his experiences, made no effort to deny them, yet he did not want to dwell on them either. “I hated the Mayi Mayi because they lived in the forest,” he said.
“One day, I was just sitting at our camp, and the commander came and took my gun and said I was too young. They sent me here to be demobilized, but I don’t like it here. I want to leave.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Right now, I want to find my family or study. I would like to join the army again, but because I’m too young now, I can’t. One day I will again.”
Sakundi’s day may have come sooner than either of us thought. The day after we met, the eruption of Mount Nyiragongo ravaged the city. I had to evacuate and it was only from Kigali, Rwanda, that we could start making phone calls to see who was safe and who was not. Lava surrounded the center where Sakundi lived. We learned on the news that around half a million people had been displaced, most crossing the border into Rwanda just hours behind us.
When we got the priest who ran the center on the phone, he was with a few of the boys who stayed behind, digging a trench to protect the center from the lava flow. The other children had been sent with the general refugee exodus across the border to Rwanda and shelter was arranged for them there. I never got to ask about specific children, but in all the shifts back and forth, it would have been easy for Sakundi to slip away. If he wanted to, he could find an army willing to take him in, willing to send him back to the forest to fight his enemy.
I never found