Free One Day the Soldiers Came by Charles London Page B

has never ended.
    The war in the Congo killed nearly 4 million people as a direct result of violence or, far more commonly, due to malnutrition and disease exacerbated by the conflict. The International Rescue Committee reported that between 1998 and 2004, around 1,200 people died every day because of the war. That death toll is equivalent to three 9/11 terrorist attacks per week.
    While young children are the most vulnerable—one infour die before reaching five years old—it is adolescents who are the most susceptible to forced recruitment as soldiers, sexual exploitation, and exploitation of their labor. In short, it is adolescents who are most at risk for violent deaths. With their parents often unable to support them, adolescents in armed conflict are more likely to be sent from home to find work in the cities or to take on the burden of supporting the family themselves. Not yet adults, they are no longer nurtured as children. They have neither the protection of the young nor the rights of the grown.
    Keto was happy to show me his self-confidence, his ability to manage for himself during the violence and instability in the Congo and the camp. He figured out how to pay his own school fees and aid in supporting the man who had taken him in. He is a central figure in the economic survival of his caretaker as well as himself. He does not have, nor does he seem to want, a passive role in his well-being. He would like assistance, but he knows how to bargain to get it: telling mzungu researchers his story, for example.
    I heard similar stories to Keto’s throughout my time in the Congolese camps in Tanzania.
    “One day the soldiers came,” Michael told me. Michael, who was fifteen, fled the Congo almost two years before I met him. He, like Keto, lived near Baraka in the area of Fizi, where he worked with his father running a table in the market. He was extremely well dressed for what I had envisioned an African refugee would look like, especially an orphan. He had on a clean blue Oxford shirt and long khaki pants. He also had sneakers that would be considered nice by any standard, not particularly coated in the thick red dust that covered prettymuch everything else, as if he had cleaned them moments before I arrived to meet him. He had indeed done so.
    He told me that he was suffering and that he lived on his own with boys his age who had also lost their parents, though he did not get along very well with them. He said they stole his clothes.
    “I borrowed these clothes to come here and meet you,” he told me. “One day, when I was bathing, I came back to get my clothes and the shirt I have was ripped. All my other clothes were stolen.”
    Michael sat very straight in his chair and smiled when he gave my hand a firm shake, like a businessman closing a deal. He was trying very hard to be like his father, who was a businessman. He used to travel with him, wheeling and dealing, he said in English: “Doing business.” If he had money, he told me, he would start buying and selling, traveling around carrying on the business for his dad, whom he still wants very much to make proud.
    “I was in the back room when the rebels came,” he said. The rebels burst into his house, knowing his father was a businessman and would have money. The burst in through the front door armed with machetes and rifles. “That’s when I saw my mother and father killed, and all I could do was climb out the window.”
    He scratched the back of his head and looked at the floor. I was about to speak, to help him move from this painful memory. He was fidgeting and quivering slightly at the lip. Then he sat up straight again and met my eyes dead on. He was pulling himself together, not wanting to stop the interview.
    “It was chaos. I was running and everyone around me was running and when I got to the shore of the lake, I realized I had no money.”
    Standing at the side of the lake, young Michael started crying. Around him the world had erupted into