Read Online One Day the Soldiers Came by Charles London - Free Book Online
Authors: Charles London
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horrors without the resources available to counsel the child, to work through a healing process. There is also the problem of disappointment when the interviewer with whom the child formed a connection and some degree of friendship leaves again, never to return.
“How sad I am that you do not think of me anymore,” Barika wrote me in a letter just days after I left the camp in Tanzania where I had met him.
He was an orphan, like Keto, and at twelve years old was struggling to make a difference in his community. He performed in a theatrical group that demonstrated lessons about AIDS and violence and other social concerns to youths throughout the camp. He is one of the most admirable young men I have ever met, and I had no intention of forgetting him. He would leap about as we spoke, acting out his story, miming machine gun fire, smiling like a sadistic soldier as he burnt the village down, and then whimpering like the little children—himself among them—who had fled across the lake to Tanzania. Barika did not have many friends, due both to the stigma surrounding orphans and the more mundane reasons that adolescent overachievers everywhere have few friends: he liked to study and to read and to think about difficult things. He reached out to adults looking for the friendship that his peers did not provide. When I camealong and took him seriously, listened and watched, asked questions and wrote down his answers as if he were the teacher and I the pupil, he felt, as he later told me, a sense of importance. His rage when I left—rage that continued in letters for over a year despite my best efforts to convince him I had not forgotten him—was understandable. All Barika knew was losing—his parents, his home, his friends. I was one more loss in a short life full of losses, and he did not want to forgive.
Anna Freud points out, from her research with children who survived the bombing of London during World War II, that children can generally cope with the day to day horrors of war—and even grow tired of them—“so long as it only threatens their lives, disturbs their material comfort” but when the war threatens to break up the family unit, it takes on far more serious significance. Psychological problems, Freud noted, were more prevalent in children who lost or were separated from their parents during the war than among those whose families survived intact. For those children the war was a chapter of their lives that could be closed for the most part. For orphans and separated youth, the war was the defining event in their young lives, the time when everything changed, when safety ended, when their place in the world was ripped from them, when they became alone. In her memoir, First They Killed My Father, Loung Ung writes about the multitude of horrors she suffered under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia as a little girl, but the theme pervading the entire book, from the first page to the last, is the loss of her family.
My leaving Barika after about a week of knowing each other cannot compare to the loss of his family, but it was, perhaps, a reminder of those other losses, a reinforcement that he was on his own.
I sent him a copy of The Little Prince in French and English so he could practice and so he could read a little about another kid on his own, having adventures. I sent the gift because he lovedto read. I sent the gift because he lived in a world filled with too little kindness. I sent the gift as a Band-Aid for the wound I had torn open, the kind of wound that never really heals.
I have tried to stay in touch with many of the children I have met, but the realities of war and displacement have made it difficult to keep track of the kids, to get messages to them or receive them again. Barika and I have stayed in touch a little, from time to time, though the distance and the vastly different worlds in which we live have limited our contact.
In that first meeting with Keto, I knew that the few hours we had together
“How sad I am that you do not think of me anymore,” Barika wrote me in a letter just days after I left the camp in Tanzania where I had met him.
He was an orphan, like Keto, and at twelve years old was struggling to make a difference in his community. He performed in a theatrical group that demonstrated lessons about AIDS and violence and other social concerns to youths throughout the camp. He is one of the most admirable young men I have ever met, and I had no intention of forgetting him. He would leap about as we spoke, acting out his story, miming machine gun fire, smiling like a sadistic soldier as he burnt the village down, and then whimpering like the little children—himself among them—who had fled across the lake to Tanzania. Barika did not have many friends, due both to the stigma surrounding orphans and the more mundane reasons that adolescent overachievers everywhere have few friends: he liked to study and to read and to think about difficult things. He reached out to adults looking for the friendship that his peers did not provide. When I camealong and took him seriously, listened and watched, asked questions and wrote down his answers as if he were the teacher and I the pupil, he felt, as he later told me, a sense of importance. His rage when I left—rage that continued in letters for over a year despite my best efforts to convince him I had not forgotten him—was understandable. All Barika knew was losing—his parents, his home, his friends. I was one more loss in a short life full of losses, and he did not want to forgive.
Anna Freud points out, from her research with children who survived the bombing of London during World War II, that children can generally cope with the day to day horrors of war—and even grow tired of them—“so long as it only threatens their lives, disturbs their material comfort” but when the war threatens to break up the family unit, it takes on far more serious significance. Psychological problems, Freud noted, were more prevalent in children who lost or were separated from their parents during the war than among those whose families survived intact. For those children the war was a chapter of their lives that could be closed for the most part. For orphans and separated youth, the war was the defining event in their young lives, the time when everything changed, when safety ended, when their place in the world was ripped from them, when they became alone. In her memoir, First They Killed My Father, Loung Ung writes about the multitude of horrors she suffered under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia as a little girl, but the theme pervading the entire book, from the first page to the last, is the loss of her family.
My leaving Barika after about a week of knowing each other cannot compare to the loss of his family, but it was, perhaps, a reminder of those other losses, a reinforcement that he was on his own.
I sent him a copy of The Little Prince in French and English so he could practice and so he could read a little about another kid on his own, having adventures. I sent the gift because he lovedto read. I sent the gift because he lived in a world filled with too little kindness. I sent the gift as a Band-Aid for the wound I had torn open, the kind of wound that never really heals.
I have tried to stay in touch with many of the children I have met, but the realities of war and displacement have made it difficult to keep track of the kids, to get messages to them or receive them again. Barika and I have stayed in touch a little, from time to time, though the distance and the vastly different worlds in which we live have limited our contact.
In that first meeting with Keto, I knew that the few hours we had together
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