responses to stressful and dangerous situations to a great degree. I hope only to document a few young lives that have been touched by war, to pay my respects to their survival and to applaud the often startling intelligence and resourcefulness of young people who do get through war and can flourish afterwards. I will try to highlight the factors I noticed that might make a young person more resilient in war, but these are by no means “scientific”observations. I hope to dispel the notion that young people are passive victims, vehicles for suffering, as they are presented in most news reports. Children are protagonists in wars, from Angola to Iraq, with their own needs and desires, and they cannot be ignored.
TWO
“Then He Lined Us Up”
Children Fleeing
I n his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , the eighteenth-century British historian Edward Gibbon describes the scene of Romans fleeing the city of Nisibis in A.D. 363 after it was handed over to the Persians: “The highways were crowded with a trembling multitude: the distinctions of rank, and sex, and age, were lost in the general calamity. Every one strove to bear away some fragment from the wreck of his fortunes….”
Gibbon could have been describing a photograph from the 1994 genocide in Rwanda or the 1998 campaigns of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo or the crisis in Darfur, Sudan. He could have been describing any number of forced mass migrations that have occurred all over the world in the last ten years, even the last five. The picture has not changed much since the fourth century.
Gibbon could have been describing the drawing that Keto, a fifteen-year-old Congolese orphan, made for me under a thatched roof in Lugufu Refugee Camp in Tanzania, where hehad lived for three years. As he drew, others came over to look at his drawing and he shooed them away so he could concentrate. I watched him gaze up at the roof while he drew, playing out the picture in his mind.
He labeled his picture, “The War in the Congo,” and in it he depicts his escape from the war zone (Figure 4). At the top of the page, in the mountains, a road begins. This road crisscrosses the page all the way to the bottom, taking a circuitous route past a helicopter that is dropping bombs on the fleeing civilians. The road opens out at the end of the page, wide and full of possibilities. Keto has made the road to that point as long as it could be on a piece of drawing paper, zigzagging from one side to the other. People bearing loads on their heads are rushing down towards a flag from which a boat is leaving, also packed full of people. Along the road, there is a dead stick figure, his head X-ed out in blue. A blue X also crosses his knee at a point where it bends off at a sharp angle. Next to the figure is the dropped load he was carrying; I wonder if Keto is depicting the actual wounds of a man he saw.
“She’s died by the side of the road,” Keto told me. “She was killed by the Mayi Mayi.” The figure had no gender markings—I assumed it was a man—nor any distinguishing features of any kind save the blue X’s, yet Keto seemed to be thinking of someone specific. In his mind, the wounds were the most distinguishing features of this woman, all he chose to depict, perhaps all that he remembered.
He seemed frustrated at our discussion of his drawing. I’d only known him for about an hour. Keto was the first boy I met in the refugee camp, the first Congolese child I was meeting in my life, the first person I’d interviewed about his experiences of war. I was nervous and did not want to frustrate him. I wanted him to like me. My mind raced. He was very quiet. He saidsomething quiet to the translator. I worried that he might be traumatized from his experiences, and I did not want to open up wounds in his mind and then leave him to suffer the consequences of them while I got back in the white UN jeep and drove away. I decided to change the subject, to talk to him about soccer, because
TWO
“Then He Lined Us Up”
Children Fleeing
I n his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , the eighteenth-century British historian Edward Gibbon describes the scene of Romans fleeing the city of Nisibis in A.D. 363 after it was handed over to the Persians: “The highways were crowded with a trembling multitude: the distinctions of rank, and sex, and age, were lost in the general calamity. Every one strove to bear away some fragment from the wreck of his fortunes….”
Gibbon could have been describing a photograph from the 1994 genocide in Rwanda or the 1998 campaigns of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo or the crisis in Darfur, Sudan. He could have been describing any number of forced mass migrations that have occurred all over the world in the last ten years, even the last five. The picture has not changed much since the fourth century.
Gibbon could have been describing the drawing that Keto, a fifteen-year-old Congolese orphan, made for me under a thatched roof in Lugufu Refugee Camp in Tanzania, where hehad lived for three years. As he drew, others came over to look at his drawing and he shooed them away so he could concentrate. I watched him gaze up at the roof while he drew, playing out the picture in his mind.
He labeled his picture, “The War in the Congo,” and in it he depicts his escape from the war zone (Figure 4). At the top of the page, in the mountains, a road begins. This road crisscrosses the page all the way to the bottom, taking a circuitous route past a helicopter that is dropping bombs on the fleeing civilians. The road opens out at the end of the page, wide and full of possibilities. Keto has made the road to that point as long as it could be on a piece of drawing paper, zigzagging from one side to the other. People bearing loads on their heads are rushing down towards a flag from which a boat is leaving, also packed full of people. Along the road, there is a dead stick figure, his head X-ed out in blue. A blue X also crosses his knee at a point where it bends off at a sharp angle. Next to the figure is the dropped load he was carrying; I wonder if Keto is depicting the actual wounds of a man he saw.
“She’s died by the side of the road,” Keto told me. “She was killed by the Mayi Mayi.” The figure had no gender markings—I assumed it was a man—nor any distinguishing features of any kind save the blue X’s, yet Keto seemed to be thinking of someone specific. In his mind, the wounds were the most distinguishing features of this woman, all he chose to depict, perhaps all that he remembered.
He seemed frustrated at our discussion of his drawing. I’d only known him for about an hour. Keto was the first boy I met in the refugee camp, the first Congolese child I was meeting in my life, the first person I’d interviewed about his experiences of war. I was nervous and did not want to frustrate him. I wanted him to like me. My mind raced. He was very quiet. He saidsomething quiet to the translator. I worried that he might be traumatized from his experiences, and I did not want to open up wounds in his mind and then leave him to suffer the consequences of them while I got back in the white UN jeep and drove away. I decided to change the subject, to talk to him about soccer, because
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