Today, in violence-torn regions across the globe, 20 million children have been uprooted, orphaned, or injured by war, famine, and poverty. This is their story . . . and ours. In this powerful and unforgettable book-by turns painful, funny, terrifying, and triumphant-Charles London takes us into the world of refugee children, celebrating their unique skills for survival and reflection. Their remarkable stories and drawings chill the blood and touch the heart, offering an indelible, first hand portrait of the war that rages beyond the headlines.

Foreword
Author's Note
Maps
"Innocent in the Ways of the World": Childhood and War	p. 1
"Then He Lined Us Up": Children Fleeing	p. 39
"We Can't Stay Here": Migrants and Refugees in Hiding	p. 77
"I Am Getting Used to Living Here": Children in Camps, Shelters, and on the Streets	p. 111
"The Things I've Done": Children as Soldiers	p. 152
"Surviving the Peace": Coming of Age in Post-War Kosovo and Bosnia	p. 183
"God Has Something in Store": What Becomes of War's Children	p. 231
Reference List	p. 253
Further Resources and What You Can Do to Help	p. 259
Acknowledgments	p. 263
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.

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One Day the Soldiers Came
Voices of Children in War

Chapter One

"Innocent in the Ways of the World"

Childhood and War

It happened to Keto. He was sitting in school with his brother listening to the teacher recite their French lesson. Je m'appelle, tu t'appelle, il s'appelle. . . .

It happened to Michael. He was at home with his mother and father. He sat in the back room doing whatever it is that teenage boys do in back rooms, daydreaming, making plans, goofing off.

It happened to Nora on a sunny day. She was playing in the front of her house.

Patience and Charity were too young to remember what they were doing when it happened.

It happened to Nicholas, as it happened to the others. To his entire village, one day, it happened.

The soldiers came.

"It was a sunny day," Nora says, as if the weather were the most amazing thing. How could it happen on a sunny day?

"They put a knife on my neck," she says, the little blonde. Picture her at eight years old, smiling and playing in the yard on a sunny day. They put a knife to her neck. "They wanted to rob us and they saw my mother's wedding ring and they told her to give it to them," she says. But the ring was hard to get off. Her mother struggled with it. The soldiers laughed. "Hurry up or we'll just cut off your finger!" they shouted. Her hands shaking, she got the ring off and they let her daughter go.

They shot Nora's uncle, though.

"They shot him with a silencer and then wrapped him in a carpet so his body would burn more easily." It happened on a sunny day in the Balkans when she was eight years old. When she was playing outside.

Keto and his brother saw people running, cattle running, the entire village near Baraka in the eastern Congo on the move. They heard gunfire. The teacher told them to go home; it was time to flee. Keto ran, clutching his schoolbooks to his chest. Barely four feet tall, charging through hell.

"The Mayi Mayi were yelling ‘fire, fire,' commanding the village to be burned," Keto says. Flames tore at the thatched roofs of houses. People ducked low and tried not to catch the fury of the soldiers. They were looting the marketplace.

"When I went home, I didn't find my parents. My brother and I didn't know where my parents or grandparents were." They stood for a while in their empty home, calling for anyone they knew. With gunfire and flames around them, the two boys decided they must escape on their own. They made their way to the lake still clutching their schoolbooks to their chests. "They were our only possessions when we fled. I still have them." He nods, proud that he had held on to his books all these years, through such a long journey, after so many people have died.

Nicholas doesn't like to talk about what happened. He's thirteen years old, originally from Burma, though exiled in Thailand now. He has seen crucifixions, executions, abductions.

Michael has seen the damage a machete can do to human flesh, his mother's flesh, his father's flesh.

Patience, from southern Sudan, has been raped, repeatedly.

They all draw pictures. Whether they like to talk or not, they jump at the crayons and markers, remake their world on paper. Their visions are at turns dark and painful, others are hopeful, light-hearted, nostalgic. It depends on the child, depends on the day. They all draw. We draw together. It's one of two activities we do. We draw and we play soccer. It is with soccer that everything begins.

You cannot know the children of a world at war until you begin to play soccer. You can interview them, as many have done, as I have spent countless hours doing, and you can read reports and studies and you can watch them do all manner of things and you can hear and hear and hear about children in war from just about everyone: charities and warlords, generals and social workers, parents and doctors and politicians. Everyone likes to talk about them. Children are the canvas on which societies paint themselves; their hopes, their hates and fears, their nationalist fantasies, their impossible dreams. The rhetoric is everywhere. Save the Children and Islamic Jihad use images of children in terribly similar PR campaigns.

Who are these children, though? The ones we see on the news, all wide-eyed and suffering in refugee camps. The ones we see in magazines, dressed in camouflage, firing rifles taller than themselves. The ones overflowing in history, the anonymous displaced, disenfranchised, photographed but not named, talked about but not remembered? Who are they?

Play soccer with them and you'll know.

The Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, January 2002.

I'm in a center for demobilized child soldiers run by a nonprofit organization in the city of Bukavu. Built on the coast of Lake Kivu, the city rests like a blanket on the hills. Dilapidated colonial buildings command views of lake sunsets and jungle horizons. In the morning you can hear fishermen singing on the lake as the sun comes up. The smell of wood fires fills the air, cooking goat meat and ground cassava. The wilderness around the city is as stunning as it is dangerous. Stories of massacres and banditry trickle in from the outlying areas. When it is quiet, you might hear the mist crackle with gunfire. Children from all over the eastern Congo seek safety from the fighting and some kind of livelihood on the muddy and crumbling streets. Some estimates put the number of homeless children in the city at twenty thousand.

I play soccer in a grubby courtyard belonging to a local charity. It's not much of a playground, filled as it is with giant puddles, pits, and loose shrubs, fenced in on all sides from the street, but the children have each other and an ingenious ball made . . .

One Day the Soldiers Came
Voices of Children in War. Copyright © by Charles London. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Excerpted from One Day the Soldiers Came: Voices of Children in War by Charles London
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