As someone who listens to, reads, researches, and writes news, I can see how easily one can get bored of hearing about child soldiers. We think,"Of course it makes me sad, but there doesn't seem to be much I can do about it."
I was riding on the bus from NY to DC when I started talking to my seat mate. He was from Western Africa, I want to say Ghana, but it may have been Guinea. (I KNOW there's a big difference here, probably Ghana.) He told me how little boys that he used to shoo away with a wave would come to his house. "They would come down the hill to my door and ask for money. They were high. A whole row of them would be waiting at the top of the hill. If you didn't have money they would burn your house. "And he said, "They would decide whether or not you'd be on the inside or the outside." He also told me of the horrible game they played. They would see a pregnant woman on the street and one of the child soldiers would ask the other, "Is it a boy or a girl?" and they would make a bet. Then they would find out. Monsters, I thought. But if these stories horrified me, I can't imagine what it was like for his children who lived there and saw and heard everything that was happening around them. He brought his whole family to the U.S. except for his eldest son who is at university. He said it's been years and his younger boys still have bad dreams.
With this portrait of child soldiers in mind, it is hard to have compassion for them. It's difficult if not impossible to think of them as people. Still it's important to realize that they weren't born to be evil. Had the man, and I do have trouble writing this because it sounds horrible to even think, but had he been killed along with his wife, his own children no doubt would have been orphaned and they might have been taken in by one of these gangs just like the other boys.
This 2007 New York Times story
Taking the War Out of a Child Soldier showed me that child soldiers and what we do about them is as much our problem as it is developing nations. You may have heard of Ishmael Beah's book "A Long Way Gone," and if you haven't I'll give you a synopsis: orphaned, drugged, and forced to maime and murder others in Sierra Leone...then redemption. For those of you who doubt that anyone could ever be forced to something so brutal against their will, believe me it is true. I've read the stories. First, if you're an orphan and you have no money, you'll do anything for food. Second, and I know this is at least true in Uganda and the DRC, when children try to escape from these guerrilla armies, they are beaten, sometimes to death. So where do we come in? What does this have to do with us? with me? Elliot Kaye, might have asked that question, but fortunately for Salifou Yankene, he didn't. After Yankene, a child soldier from the Ivory Coast was smuggled into JFK's airport he was first arrested tossed around in different jails and ultimately released by immigration.
Salifou remembered standing on a dark street in lower Manhattan: “They say, ‘You free to go,' I say, ‘Go where?’ "
For him New York, with no family, no friends, and no place to live, was as frightening as the wilds of the Ivory Coast.
Even though he was concerned for his wife and two-year old son, Kaye took Salifou into his home and defended him in a court, in front of a judge who had rejected 83 percent of all asylum requests.
Salifou's life story is heartbreaking. His father and sister were killed, his brother lost one of his hands and even as he fled his country (at his mother's request), he worried about what kind of revenge the warlords would inflict on his family for letting him leave. This article does not give a definitive end to the story, but it's still inspires me, because it shows sometimes the problems we hear about happening overseas can find themselves in our living rooms. I don't know whether or not Kaye's wife, his parents, and neighbors thought he was crazy to bring an ex-child soldier into his home. I am sure he had doubts himself, but in spite of enormous danger to himself and his family he did it, because it seemed like the right thing to do.
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