Giving Voice to Children’s Experience in War

A few weeks ago Michelle posted a quote by Mother Theresa to open a discussion: "If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will." Regrettably, I did not participate in the discussion but it left me thinking long and hard about why my stomach lurches every time I read about genocide, mass violence and injustice in a newspaper or see pictures on the news.  Because the way I see it, if I can dig beyond the ‘hard facts' to imagine the individual(s) involved, the people most impacted by these events are very real.  Though they may not dress, speak, worship, eat or play exactly the way that I do, they are still the children who play practical jokes on each other, they are the teenagers who fall in love for the first time, the little boys who avoid their chores, the little girls who imitate their mothers and they are the families who know the grief of losing their home or livelihoods to forces beyond their control.

Memoirs are some of the best starting points for honing in on an understanding of ‘the one.'  One of my favorites is a book called They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky: The true story of three Lost Boys from Sudan by Benson Deng, Alephosion Deng and Benjamin Ajak (with Judy A. Bernstein).  In the 1980s, during the North-South civil war in Sudan, a group of approximately 27,000 boys --- many as young as five years old --- who had been orphaned or separated from their families by the violence that rained down on their villages by Sudanese government forces, migrated across the vast country to refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya.  The book is told from all three boys' perspectives and takes the reader from memories of their childhood in their villages, through the initial violence, their trek across the country and into refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya to their resettlement in the United States.

One of the reasons I admire the retelling of this horrifying experience is because I feel like war and conflict have largely been written from the perspectives of, and understood in terms dictated by, adults.  Though the book is written while the boys are in their early 20s, it recalls a great deal of the sentiments, mindsets and emotions they felt as children going through this ordeal.  Gut-wrenchingly insightful, I found myself repeatedly questioning and inwardly (ok, outwardly as well) raging against the adults who put children in these situations while still applauding these boys' bravery.  Forced to shift in and out of adult roles for the sake of survival they often recognized that war turned people against each other.  "It didn't matter if you were a child or an adult.  Nobody cared.  That's what war was doing to people. They only cared for themselves."  Yet again and again, they recounted acts of resourcefulness, creativity, humor and compassion- which allowed them to survive.

As I finished going through the book I flipped back to the opening pages.  Two simple statements perfectly sum up how I feel about genocide and wars that drag children into the conflict.  The first is the dedication that honors by name a young boy they met along the way:

"Dedicated to Monyde

and all of the children throughout time

who've been caught up in adult wars"

The second is an African proverb that heads the opening page:

"When two elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled."

The question is not whether children are capable of survival and resiliency after being thrust into these devastating situations --- I have read about it and witnessed it myself.  The question is more: Why should children be forced to pay for the sins of adults, forced to pick themselves up in the wake of conflicts started by "grown-ups" who did not give them a choice?

My strongest argument in favor of seeing genocide or mass violence or injustice through the lens of ‘the one' is that if you can find yourself in ‘the other' it makes it that much harder to look away, that much harder to ignore the news reports and the calls for action and that much harder to say "never again" and not feel a level of responsibility when it's clear that not enough is being done --- especially when those who have been sucked in did not choose to be there to begin with.

If you'd like to learn more about the book, check out www.theypouredfire.com.

[Photo of the book's authors: Benson, Alephonsion and Benjamin.]