There are children here

In 1991 Alex Kotlowitz published a book about 2 kids growing up in the projects on the South Side of Chicago called, There Are No Children Here. I haven't read it yet- though I hear it's great- but I gather that the premise behind the title is that children who grow up in poverty forced to face very grown up issues like death and violence, are robbed of their childhoods. I've been thinking about this a lot lately as we walk each day through Kamenge.

If I said it at the beginning of each and every post I still don't think I could convey the full weight of the following statement: There are a lot of children here. In Burundi, in Bujumbura, in Kamenge, there are a lot of children of all ages. From babies tightly wrapped to their mother's backs (Someday I want to see how this is done. It seems like it would have to be a two person operation but I know the mothers can do it by themselves.), to toddlers teetering like drunken sailors, to all knees & elbows adolescents, there are a lot of children here.

When we go anywhere in Kamenge, children call out to us from all sides, from down the street, from blocks away, "Mzungu!" Often there's a chant, started by a few and picked up by others, "Mzungu bon BON! Mzungu bon BON!" You must be able to tell we're coming for half a mile. Santa Claus walking down Main Street in July would not get more joyful and excited attention than we do. And though their chant is a plea for candy, and though they'll also ask us for cake or cookies or sweets, they never seem disappointed when we say no. They seem happy enough just to shake our hands. Each child must have his or her hand shaken, must be told Jambo or Bonjour or Hello, a wave and a general greeting will not suffice.

Here's the thing. I could tell you all the awful parts about being a child in Kamenge. I could tell you that every other child has a runny nose and a cough. That most only have one article of clothing and it's filthy and coming apart at the seams. That I saw 2 sisters sharing a single pair of shoes, each with one shod foot. That I saw a four year old doing her own laundry in a tub in the front yard. That I saw an 8 year old with a baby strapped to her back and a huge bag of onions balanced on her head. I could tell you about mysterious conical protrusions from stomachs and white patches on scalps. I could tell you about scabs and scars and the smells of the gutter. But it's too hard to write that when I know I'll be back on Monday to see some more. Someday I'll try to describe that part, but not today. Instead I want to write about how these children still, still manage to snatch a childhood from the jaws of poverty.

With all the thousands of kids and all the nothing they have you'd think the sound of Kamenge would be an incessant wail of wants and needs. There is a constant soundtrack, but whenever I pause a moment from our work at the clinic what I hear is the sound of permanent recess. Children talking, children laughing, children shouting for other children to come and join them. Primary school doesn't start until kids are seven and it's summer anyway and their parents are working every moment which means the children are mostly left to their own devices. So here's what they do, when they aren't running after mzungus to ask for candy.

The other thing they always ask us for is our water bottles. A water bottle is an incredibly versatile item. They can be flattened and crumpled and bundled together to make a ball suitable for playing football (that's soccer for the American impaired). It can be filled with sand, tied with a string and hung from a tree as a kind of tether ball. It can be blown like a flute or beaten against anything like a drum. Today Jonathan taught me a game kids play which is like jacks but they use only stones and the left hand crooked like a croquet wicket. There were other kids who had scratched into the dirt a model of a football field with stones standing in for the goal posts and bottle caps for players. They also know how to make a ball out of scraps of fabric or plastic bag tied around some other hidden piece of refuse. There's a game which looks something like checkers, also played with bottle caps. And, proving that all children everywhere throughout all of time know a good game when they find it, there's always rolling a semi inflated much patched bicycle inner tube down the street by running along side and knocking it with a stick.

Two more pictures. As we were leaving today I saw two little girls with red ribbons clutched in their hands, those thin plastic ribbons you most often see tied to balloons. They did not have balloons but the other end of the ribbons hovered in the air beside them. They were each tied around the abdomen of a live dragonfly. I was somewhat taken aback and a little apalled but also intrigued by what a strange and delicate labor that must have been, to catch and tether a dragonfly.

Two days ago I saw a child (impossible to tell if it was a boy or girl, so many of them have the same close shaved hair and boys and girls shirts are worn interchangably by either) trying to fly a homemade kite. The kite itself was a piece of notebook paper, the tail a strip of something lighter and crinkly- could have been a piece of plastic bag or even toilent paper. But the thing that got me was the string. A piece of string long enough to fly a kite is hard to come by and is far more likely to be put to a useful purpose- like keeping the lines of a brick wall straight as you build it. So this child must have collected every little bit of string he or she could find (I imagine it taking a week, or at leat all day), 20 bits tied with 40 knots to make frayed and fringing string. It didn't get very high but the way this child was laughing on the run- and it didn't just drag on the ground this kite, it flew, however low- it seemed to be worth the effort.

I don't understand how they keep smiling, how they keep laughing and playing and making kites unless maybe they don't know, it's not supposed to be like this. Or that it is possible to become accustomed to that which no one ought ever be subjected. And I don't know if it's a blessing or a tragedy that in spite of poverty and deprivation, in spite of the worst that war can do, there are still children here.