Two articles from the NYTimes...
May. 8th, 2005 01:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
One on Sri Lankan maids.
Sri Lankan Maids' High Price for Foreign Jobs
By AMY WALDMAN
KEGALLA, Sri Lanka - The teacher held up an electric cake mixer and told the class of wide-eyed women before her to clean it properly. If it smells, "Mama," as the aspiring maids were instructed to call their female employers, "will be angry and she will hammer and beat you."
"This is where you go wrong," the teacher continued. "That is how Mama beats you and burns you - when you do anything wrong."
Eighteen female hands took down every word, as if inscription could ward off ill fortune. Among the women, Rangalle Lalitha Irangame was struggling to keep up, haggard after a sleepless night in the hospital. Her 4-year-old daughter was sick with fever, a worrisome turn for any mother, but a cause for panic for one about to leave for years abroad.
After a year of thinking, 35-year-old Lalitha - who prefers that name - decided to trade her life as a Sri Lankan housewife for one as a Middle Eastern housemaid. After completing their 12-day training, she and her classmates would join a mass migration of women to the Persian Gulf's petro-lubricated economies, trading the fecundity and community of Sri Lankan villages for the aridity and high-walled homes of the Arab world.
Behind those walls the women risk exploitation so extreme that it sometimes approaches "slaverylike" conditions, according to a recent Human Rights Watch report on foreign workers in Saudi Arabia. But while attention has focused on the failure of countries like Saudi Arabia to prevent or prosecute abuses, the de facto complicity of the countries that send their women abroad has largely escaped scrutiny.
For developing countries, migration has become a safety valve, easing the pressure to employ the poor and generating more than $100 billion in remittances in 2003, according to a study by Devesh Kapur, an associate professor of government at Harvard.
More than a million Sri Lankans - roughly 1 in every 19 citizens - now work abroad, and nearly 600,000 are housemaids, according to government estimates. Migrant workers have become Sri Lanka's largest and most consistent earner of foreign exchange, out-doing all major agricultural crops.
In Saudi Arabia, the most common destination, they call Sri Lanka "the country of housemaids." In Sri Lanka they call the maids heroines.
Sri Lanka's government has become an assiduous marketer of its own people. With training programs like Lalitha's, it is helping to prepare what is by now a second generation of housemaids. It even provides a safe haven to shelter, hide and rehabilitate those women who return with broken bodies, lost minds or incipient children.
But it does little to publicize those abuses, protest against them or protect the women for fear of jeopardizing the hundreds of millions of dollars they send home each year.
The women's remittances have built homes, provided capital for businesses, and given the women themselves an enduring confidence. But those gains have come with incalculable hardships.
The women often leave indebted, work virtually indentured and have almost no legal redress against the sexual harassment, confinement or physical abuse they often suffer in the countries they adopt. With no absentee voting rights, they also have no political voice back home.
By one estimate, 15 to 20 percent of the 100,000 Sri Lankan women who leave each year for the gulf return prematurely, face abuse or nonpayment of salary, or get drawn into illicit people trafficking schemes or prostitution.
Many housemaids who run away from their employers are kept in limbo at Sri Lanka's embassies because no one wants to pay their way home. Last year, after their plight was publicized, the government airlifted home 529 maids who had been living for months, packed as tightly as in a slavehold, in the basement of the embassy in Kuwait.
Hundreds of housemaids have become pregnant, often after rapes, producing children who, until Sri Lanka's Constitution was recently amended, were stateless because their fathers were foreigners. More than 100 women come home dead each year, with most deaths labeled "natural" by the host governments, although Sri Lankan officials concede they are powerless to investigate.
Back home, the exodus has reconfigured family life. Women dispense maternal love through letters, cash and cassettes sent home. Divorce, children leaving school, husbands turning to alcohol, and child sexual abuse have become routine byproducts of the women's absence.
There are less tangible tolls as well. "That time will never come back," Roshan Prageeth Kumarasinghe, an 18-year-old neighbor of Lalitha's, said, choking back tears, of his mother's decade-long absence.
Ready to Sacrifice All
In Lalitha's class, nine of the women were mothers, all 40 and under, all prepared to give up everything for their children's future, including, for 2, 4 or 10 years, the company of the children themselves.
By the end of their 12-day course, they would learn how to dismantle a vacuum cleaner and say "toilet cleaner" in Arabic. They would learn, too, not to take the gold chain their employers would leave out as temptation. They would even be taught that in the Muslim countries they were destined for, they should conceal that they were Buddhist or Hindu.
Technically, they were women, all above 18. But in their shy smiles and the innocence of having come of age in a conservative culture, they were girls. Almost all of them, like Lalitha, had at least a 10th grade education, reflective of Sri Lanka's high literacy rates, but that had done nothing to improve their employment prospects.
Two of the girls had failed marriages, and saw going abroad as their only hope for supporting themselves and their children on their own. Three were hoping to secure a better marital match by earning a dowry larger than destitute parents could provide.
Four were newly married, hoping to escape from relatives' homes into their own. Three were the second generation of housemaids in their families - one even planned to take over her aging mother's job.
All were poor. In this hill country district, the poverty rate is 32 percent. Most men find only irregular work tapping rubber, earning at best $50 a month. Their only hope for climbing up, or avoiding slipping further down, is their wives.
The husband of one of Lalitha's classmates drove a rented motorized rickshaw, earning just enough to feed the family. Their house was literally sliding away, with no money to build a retaining wall or repay a bank loan that was well overdue.
His wife, S. M. R. Deepa Ranjanie, a bright-eyed 25-year-old poet, was determined to solve the family's financial crisis, but in leaving she also saw an escape. She had married at 16, had two sons, 9 and 4, then had seen the marriage sour. She was desperate to flee an abusive home.
Lalitha's husband, K. Weeratunghe, 41, worked when he could tapping rubber or felling trees. On some days the family had no money for milk. Their house was so meager that, to improve it, Lalitha decided to leave him behind - along with her daughter, Hiroshika Mihirani, 4, and son, Manoj Sandervan, 8.
With no electricity, the home had a perpetual gloom. The walls were cracking, the windows glassless. In class, the women pored over pictures of the gulf's glossy kitchens, but at home Lalitha cooked on a wood stove in a room made of palm fronds.
The training she and the others attended had in fact been started in part because rustic village women's unfamiliarity with electric appliances and Arabic was exposing them to the wrath of frustrated employers.
The course was conducted by the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment, a public corporation established by an act of Parliament in 1985 to both promote migration and protect migrants, two sometimes contradictory missions. It runs 22 training centers, including the one in Kegalla.
The traffic at the center was incessant. Mothers brought their daughters. Husbands brought their wives. Brothers brought sisters who had been left by their husbands. One woman came in to register with an 18-month-old baby still sucking at her breast, although she was too thin to give milk.
Many women had been recruited by a network of private agents, not always reputable, who trolled rural villages and town bus stands looking for new prospects. The agents earned commissions for each woman from both the foreign employment bureau and partner agents in the Middle East.
Lalitha's course Lalitha aimed to create competent maids, but also docile ones, who would serve out two-year contracts promising about $120 a month even if the pay almost never came. A maid's greatest asset, teachers taught, was "tolerance."
The reason for that message, analysts and officials say, is the competition from other poor nations, notably the Philippines, which together send hundreds of thousands of women abroad each year. Too many demands for housemaids' rights, the government fears, will simply prompt the gulf countries to seek housemaids elsewhere.
When it came to the prospect of abuse or sexual harassment, the teacher gave almost no allowance for the possibility that even good housemaids might be victimized, no acknowledgment that even a smelly cake mixer did not justify a beating.
The teacher, Kaluarachchi Chandra Malini, a 38-year-old former housemaid with erect posture and a brisk manner, taught the women how to turn on hot and cold water taps, how to run electrical appliances, how to navigate household hazards - the cleanser that could poison a child or the Clorox that could blind a maid.
More than that, she tried to prepare the women for the risks leaving their families entailed. Given the high incidence of fathers raping daughters with wives away, the housemaids were told not to entrust older girls to their fathers. An older lady was better, or even a home for girls.
Because Sri Lanka's divorce rate has climbed with the migration, the women should take the addresses of trustworthy neighbors to whom they could write asking whether husbands had fallen into drugs, drink or other women's arms. The trainees were warned not to send money to their husbands, lest they drink it away.
These pitfalls were already known to some of the women. One student, Disna, had as a girl seen her father drink away the money her mother had sent from abroad.
And Deepa's neighbor had just returned from Kuwait to find that while she had faithfully been sending money to her husband, he had not been faithful to her. Deepa, however, had studiously avoided going down the hill to learn this fact at first hand.
Silence About the Abuse
There seemed to be a national pact under way: with rare exceptions, the returning women did not reveal the worst of their experience, and the departing women did not ask. Sexual harassment and especially abuse were considered too shameful to discuss with husbands, relatives or neighbors.
But while the class steered from the worst, it was often literally in the room next door. One day a girl of delicate beauty, 21-year-old Niroshamie, came into the office, black tendrils curling around her face, X-rays in her hand.
The young scion of the Kuwait house where she worked had repeatedly tried to molest her, finally pushing her to the ground and breaking her wrist. She had to pay for the cast, work with it on for two months, then finance her own way home. She had returned to Sri Lanka with a wrist needing surgery and not a cent more than when she had left.
But the most gruesome cases were kept out of sight, quickly ushered from the airport upon arrival to the Sahana Piyasa, literally the Place of Relief, a shelter run by the foreign employment bureau.
The shelter gets two to three severe abuse cases a week, according to the officials who run it, and often many more. Some women are so badly injured they are carried off the plane on stretchers, or swathed entirely in bandages. Most cases never make the news, and they stay at the shelter until they heal enough not to shock waiting families.
Karunasena Hettiarachchi, who until recently was the chairman of the foreign employment bureau, said the government did what it could to protect women, but the very nature of the job made it difficult. In a house, as opposed to a factory, "there are no rules," he said. Sri Lanka's embassies had no power to investigate what went on behind private walls.
Agents, too, looked the other way, in part because no one wanted to cover the costs of a maid who did not serve out her contract.
Thangarasa Jeyanthi, 20 and emaciated, had arrived at the shelter from Lebanon one morning. She had a face as purple and puffy as a plum, eyes swollen shut, burn marks on her body and dried blood still around her ears.
The husband and wife she worked for had assaulted her daily, she said, speaking in the high, anguished voice of a little girl who cannot understand what she has done wrong. They had cut her with a knife, kicked and stomped on her, tied her hands with rope and denied her food.
Her employer's mother had rescued her, taking her to the police. They secured five months back salary for her, and took her to the airport, where strangers moved by her appearance collected $232 for her.
"I never expected to be returned to Sri Lanka," she said. "I always thought only my dead body would come back."
The abused women struggled to reconcile the message of their training - that good behavior would make for a good experience - with the reality of their employment.
"I did all of my housework properly," said Sudarma Manilariatne, 27, who arrived at Sahana Piyasa in January with swollen, bandaged legs, a gash on her forehead and a fractured hand. "I do not understand why they did this."
She had been beaten by her female employer, and was helped to escape the house by the employer's 16-year-old son, after receiving not a cent of salary. She wore a head scarf, which the shelter staff urged her to remove. The young woman refused and began to cry. For Sri Lankan women, long hair is a source of pride, its absence, a source of shame. Ms. Manilariatne's employer - her "mama" - had cut boy-short the hair that the maid's own mother had helped her take care of as a girl.
Fearful and Already in Debt
The training course was coming to an end. Ms. Malini, the teacher, was worried about Lalitha. She struggled with leaving her children for 12 days, Ms. Malini said. How could she go abroad? Lalitha, visibly upset over her sick child, physically ill herself on some days, insisted that little by little she was mentally preparing.
In class, the girls stared intently at photographs of airplane interiors while Ms. Malini provided last-minute tips. Do not wear black when you meet your employer lest you look too dark. Do not be frightened when you see only the eyes of the Saudi Arabian woman who meets you at the airport. Wear long sleeves and a wedding ring, even if unmarried.
Deepa's 9-year-old was crying in the mornings, knowing she was leaving. "We have to build a beautiful house," she told him, although the family's debts meant a new house was years away.
With the foreign employment bureau's registration fees to pay and new clothes to buy, she and the other women were borrowing money from anyone they could. Deepa had given the family's only valuable possessions as collateral. Her children would be without both their mother and the television they so loved, she said ruefully.
Deepa had failed the strict medical exam Saudi Arabia required of housemaids, and would go to the United Arab Emirates. Her fallibility was a leaky heart valve. She had had surgery once, and needed it again, but she was afraid even to take her medicine with her, lest her employers discover she was unwell.
To both save and escape her home, she would gamble with her life. "I was happier in the class," she said.
Dukkha, or suffering, is a word that colors the women's conversations and shadows their lives. When Lalitha went for the medical test every housemaid must pass before departing, her illness during class was explained: she was pregnant.
She faced a choice between a child she wanted and debts she could not pay. She did not believe in abortion, she said, but hers was a life with no room for error. She paid $27 to terminate the pregnancy, adding to the family debt and her own sadness.
Now Lalitha's agent seemed to be swindling her. He had promised a ticket, then not delivered it, then brought a visa that turned out to be fake.
As wrenching as it was to leave her children, shame was prodding her toward Saudi Arabia. She and her husband borrowed $398 from fellow villagers. The first repayment date had come and gone, and the lenders wanted her gone, too, and earning money.
She wanted to earn money, too, not least to keep paying for private classes for her 8-year-old son. "He is clever," she said of the boy. "I want him to climb up."
Lalitha had already taught her 4-year-old the alphabet, she said proudly. Her husband, who had finished only the eighth grade, noted that his wife was more educated than he.
Only her 8-year-old seemed to recognize the implications of his mother's departure. "Who will teach me when you go?" he asked.
And one on kidnapped 'soldiers'.
Charlotte, Grace, Janet and Caroline Come Home
By MELANIE THERNSTROM
The rebels have ruined northern Uganda. No one wanted to look out the car window on the three-hour journey northwest from Lira to Gulu near the Sudanese border. Charlotte Awino leaned her cheek on the glass and closed her eyes against the abandoned homesteads and fallow farmland that once provided most of the country's cassava, millet and beans. After 18 years of civil war, more than 1.5 million inhabitants have fled to plastic-sheeted internment camps, preferring to risk slow death by disease and malnutrition rather than to wake in their beds one night to discover the rebels have arrived. The rebels are the Lord's Resistance Army (L.R.A.), which massacres or mutilates villagers -- cutting off their noses, ears and genitals -- and kidnaps their children, turning them into killers who then become kidnappers themselves.
A soldier at a military checkpoint instructed us to drive quickly; just ahead, he said, is a sweep of land where the rebels sometimes cross. He crouched down, peering into the car, his AK-47 dangling against the door, his gaze resting with relish on Charlotte and the other young women clustered in the back seat, their arms entwined, their silky dresses crumpling against one another. The girls stiffened and looked at their laps as he talked.
''What does the U.P.D.F. know?'' Charlotte spat as we drove away, referring to the Ugandan Army.
''The rebels don't cross before dark,'' Grace Acan agreed.
The four girls know this land far better than any government soldier, because for eight years they were rebels themselves. Abducted from their convent school when they were 14, 15 and 16, they were brutalized, brainwashed and forced to be ''wives'' to rebel commanders. They crossed this road on foot many times, hiding from the Ugandan Army while their commanders scouted for villages to raid.
In July, Charlotte was the first of the friends to escape. Janet Akello followed in August, Grace in September and finally Caroline Anyango in November. The girls eventually returned to their hometown of Lira to live with their parents and to try to pick up the lives they lost. They are in their mid-20's now and burdened by children they were raped to bear; yet as they showed me around Lira or journeyed to Caroline's ancestral village, where Caroline's grandmother danced welcome around her, they often seemed like the schoolgirls they once were. They are pretty, polite, docile and devout, their personalities blending like their dresses, and it was hard to imagine that they were recently guerrilla girls, as some terrified villagers used to call them.
At unexpected junctures, however, their moods change and darkness surfaces: Charlotte's prim composure gives way to bitterness and contempt; Janet's impassiveness becomes depression; Grace's good spirits crumple; Caroline cries; and then -- the rift exposed -- they all fall into a pained silence.
In Lira, the girls had heard that some of their other friends were living in a rehabilitation center called World Vision, in Gulu, where the Ugandan government houses former rebels for a month. When I told the girls that I was planning to visit the center, they asked to come with me. Their parents were reluctant to permit the trip, worried less about the road's dangers than about the moral risks of letting their daughters reconnect with their past. Janet's parents were especially concerned about her ''husband,'' Charles Otim, who had been recently captured and was living at World Vision, too. (Charlotte's husband is still with the rebels, Caroline's is dead and Grace's is now a government informant.)
When I asked Janet whether she would like to see Otim, she twisted her body, touched her mouth and looked away. ''If I see him, I will greet him,'' she declared finally, leaving the matter to happenstance -- the force that dictated her life for so many years.
The light was waning by the time we reached World Vision. As a result of government military victories in the past two years, more than 10,000 rebels have been captured or have managed to escape the L.R.A. The former child soldiers, as they are called, have all been given amnesty, but reintegrating them into society remains a daunting problem.
A guard showed us into the office of Sam Kilaro, the center's outreach coordinator, an ambitious, upright young man in a starched white shirt who betrayed just a touch of pride in his authority.
''Grace Acan,'' he exclaimed, reaching out and clasping her hands.
''Sam!'' Grace flushed with pleasure, her customary demureness overcome. They attended elementary school together, Sam explained, and then they lost touch. As they chatted, he studied her approvingly: a lovely young woman, he seemed to be thinking, the kind of woman he might like to marry. ''What are you doing here, Grace?''
She hesitated. ''I went to St. Mary's school, you see--'' She broke off, holding her hands up defensively. ''I was taken by the rebels, you see; we all were,'' she said, appealing to her friends for fellowship.
He gaped at her. ''I'm sorry,'' he said. But his sorriness seemed tinged with horror, as if to say: I'm sorry you were a killer and a sex slave. I'm sorry you are not the innocent Christian virgin you were raised to be and I was raised to want. I'm sorry.
''I'm going back to school again soon,'' she said hastily. ''In just a few weeks. In Kampala.''
He seemed unable to recover his poise. ''Go in if you like,'' he said, turning away. Grace blinked at him. Like the others, she is accustomed to rejection. In Lira, villagers who were once jealous of the girls' modest prosperity now hiss rebels as they pass. Although northerners know that all but a few of the oldest commanders were themselves once abducted children, their pity for the rebels as victims is overlaid with hatred and fear of them as victimizers.
In the center's women and children's section, the new escapees were thin, with scarred skin and broken teeth. Many of the children playing in the dirt resembled one another; as it turned out, many were half-siblings since each of the commanders had many wives. The leader of the Lord's Resistance Army, Joseph Kony, is said to have 56 wives and more than 100 children: he aims, he professes, to repopulate his tribe, the Acholis.
The girls hugged their friends, exchanging shy smiles. The women admired Charlotte's rustling black dress and Grace's delicate sandals, revealing feet no longer cut by underbrush. None of them said much at the reunion: in captivity, they had not been allowed to talk to one another lest they conspire. But they all stood in the gold late-afternoon light reveling in the wonder of something they never expected: to meet together in freedom.
On Independence Day, Oct 9, 1996, the girls at St. Mary's, a prestigious boarding school run by Italian nuns, were awakened by the blaze of torchlight and the sounds of shattering glass as rebels broke into their dormitory. They recognized some of the rebels -- boys abducted just a month earlier from a school nearby -- who dragged them out from under their beds, tied them together with ropes and marched them off into the moonless night.
The next day, the deputy headmistress, Sister Rachele Fassera tracked the rebels into the bush and managed to persuade their commander to return 109 of the girls. He insisted on keeping 30, selecting them for desirable traits (strength, beauty, light skin). Charlotte, Grace, Caroline and Janet recall how they sobbed as they were left behind, how the rebels ordered them to be quiet, forced them to lie down and then trampled them with heavy boots.
If any of them tried to escape, they would be killed, the commander told them. Shortly after the abduction, a girl named Jennifer disappeared. When the rebels discovered Jennifer hiding in a hut, they ordered the other girls to beat her to death. The girls hit her lightly about the legs at first, but the rebels encircled them, yelling for them to hit Jennifer harder and beating them to make sure they did so. Afterward, the rebels left the body on the ground unburied and beat the girls who cried.
Killing was the crux of the abductees' initiation. According to rehabilitation-center counselors, all new recruits were forced to murder within the first week, not only to illustrate the peril of trying to leave but also to make escape psychologically difficult by destroying the new rebels' old selves and turning them into murderers. When Jennifer died, Charlotte said, the girls realized they could not help one another and passed into the numb solitary trance in which they endured the next eight years -- and from which they are still trying to awaken.
After a week's walking, they reached Kony's base camp in southern Sudan. (The Sudanese government harbored and armed the L.R.A. in retaliation for Uganda's support of the Sudanese rebels.) Raised by their traditional families to obey authority, particularly religious authority, the girls said they believed Kony's claim that he was ''the Messiah -- the true Jesus Christ,'' as Janet recalls. They described him as a ''tall, handsome'' man whom the rebels called father or Lakwena, the Acholi word for one who serves the holy spirit. Kony would chant for hours, at times waking them up in the middle of the night to lead them in prayers that interwove Christian, Muslim and tribal spiritual beliefs and superstitions. Lakwena was mercurial. One day, for example, he would direct everyone at camp to stand bare-chested in the rain for four minutes; on another, they could not have sex or cook with oil from the yao tree.
The girls came to believe that Kony was their protector in a cruel, strange world rather than the creator of that world. He prophesized in ways they still insist came true, like foretelling the outcome of a particular battle with the Ugandan Army, and he protected them, they told me, by executing girls and boys they believed were witches and wizards.
Kony prized the St. Mary's girls above the other abductees, keeping them closely guarded and telling them they would one day be his ministers when he took over the Ugandan government. In the meantime, however, he gave them as wives to commanders. When I asked the girls in what sense they were married -- whether there were ceremonies, for example -- Charlotte laughed mirthlessly. ''You're just distributed, like shoes,'' she said. The girls recalled how Kony told them what he would do if they refused their husbands sex: the punishment was 200 strokes and then a hot-iron branding of their foreheads and backs.
None of the girls knew at the time exactly what sex was, they said, only that the loss of their virginity would leave them as damaged -- culturally, spiritually and psychologically -- as those who had been mutilated in more visible ways. The commanders made a point of having sex with each wife during her fertile period. Charlotte, Janet and Grace each gave birth to two children.
Although they were starved, beaten and forced to do hard labor -- digging all day in the garden, walking long distances barefoot carrying heavy jugs of water on their heads -- their positions as commanders' wives meant that unlike the other children, they would not be forced to be fighters. At a rehabilitation center in Lira, the former child soldiers are asked questions like: Were you forced to kill your parents, your relatives or your neighbors? Were you forced to cut, burn or pluck out eyes? Again and again, the answers in the files are yes.
Charlotte told me that her husband had 21 other wives and had been with the rebels for 19 years. But when I asked her more about him, her expression became especially solemn and distant, and she refused to say anything other than that he was ''very rude, very cruel. He doesn't have mercy for people.''
Grace and Janet and Caroline said that their husbands favored them over their other wives and helped them to survive. ''I was given to an old man,'' Grace said. She laughed bashfully, as if speaking of a boy on whom she had a crush. ''I was given to a disabled man,'' Janet said, blushing, as she described Otim, a commander whose leg had been amputated years before and who fought using crutches. ''He was not rude; he was nice,'' Janet said.
Grace chimed in that her husband had ''taught me everything.'' He punished her often, she said, but she felt it was for her own good because ''he knows students are always lazy.'' When Caroline's husband died, she felt there was ''no one to take care of me'' and she had to work as a nurse in another commander's household.
According to human rights groups, the rebels abducted an estimated 20,000 children. Most were the offspring of peasants who, fearing revenge, obeyed the rebels' command that they not complain to the government. The rebels illustrated their injunctions of silence by literally sealing villagers' lips with stakes or padlocks and taunting them to ask President Yoweri Museveni to find the keys.
While Kony's professed aim has been to take over the government in the southern capital of Kampala and replace it with rule by the Ten Commandments, in fact the Lord's Resistance Army never crosses the Nile River that divides the desolate northern region from the rapidly developing south. Kony's insurgency afflicts primarily his own people, the Acholi and other northern tribes, whom he claims to be punishing for their sins, particularly the sin of not supporting him.
It is widely held among African policy experts, human rights groups and people in the north that during the late 1980's and 90's Museveni showed little resolve to win the war. In fact, many believe, Museveni found it politically advantageous to leave the troublesome northern region to self-destruct. The United Nations has called the situation in northern Uganda the most neglected human rights crisis in the world.
The abduction of the elite private-school girls, however, changed the political landscape. Sister Rachele, along with Charlotte's mother, Angelina Atyam, Caroline's father, Frank Olyet Ayo-Ogang, and other parents founded an effective lobbying group called the Concerned Parents Association, which made the most of the narrative power of the case, turning an obscure war into a terrible fairy tale -- a story of schoolgirls stolen in the night and compelled by a demon man's spell to roam in the wild and commit unspeakable acts. They appealed to the pope, who condemned the abductions, gaining attention from the international media.
The parents' group mounted a campaign to get the countries who gave aid to Uganda, including the United States, to put pressure on the Museveni government to end the war. In 2002, Uganda and Sudan signed a treaty to stop supporting each other's insurgents. The Ugandan Army was allowed to go into southern Sudan to attack the L.R.A., which was thus forced out into the northern Ugandan bush. Fighting intensified, as did abductions. The next year, Museveni put a new general, Aronda Nyakairima, in charge of the army to defeat the rebels. Now, Nyakairima told me, he estimates that the rebels only have 300 to 500 experienced fighters left. Late last year, the rebels began peace talks with the government.
Each battle provided an opportunity for rebels to escape. Nyakairima described to me how during a battle the Ugandan Army calls out to the wives and children to surrender -- and thousands have. But the girls' recollections are of the soldiers' attacks: of their classmate Jessica being wounded and then bayoneted, of Grace finding only her 4-year-old son's leg and a bit of shirt in a tree after an explosion.
Grace, Janet and Caroline all believed what Kony had told them repeatedly -- that their parents were dead and that if they tried to escape, Ugandan soldiers would rape and imprison them. Grace was so convinced of it that one day, when she was separated from other rebels after fleeing a battle, she hid for a week with her starving toddler before turning herself in to a villager.
Charlotte, however, had heard rumors of the Concerned Parents Association from the guards who watched over her, who had overheard news reports on the commanders' radio. And so she believed her mother was looking for her. ''I kept praying,'' Charlotte said: ''I don't belong here, I can't fit in. God, please, please, please.'' By talking continually to God, Charlotte kept from despairing and wholly losing herself. ''Some of my friends would say, 'There are bullets flying -- let us ask God to kill us,''' Charlotte told me. ''But I said, 'Let us tell Him that as long as we are alive, keep us so we can see our parents.'''
Then, one night, she had a dream in which a messenger of God told her she would escape the next day. Just walk away, the messenger said.
The next morning, as she marched through the bush, Charlotte turned and took a few steps off the trail. A guard looked directly at her, she said, but just as the dream had foretold, he did not register her presence. She carried her 2-year-old son, Miracle, on her back. (Her 6-year-old son, Ronald, had disappeared a month earlier during a battle. She later found out that he had wandered for three days before reaching a village, his pockets holding mangoes that must have helped him survive.)
Back in the camp, she was told by a girl who escaped after her, 50 rebel boys were selected to hunt her down and drag her back to be killed. But God arranged for the group to cross paths with the Ugandan Army instead, Charlotte told me, and she reached a town where a villager took her to the authorities, who called her mother.
Although the idea of her mother looking for her had sustained Charlotte all those years, the truth she learned when she arrived home was not so simple. Eight years earlier, according to Charlotte's mother, Angelina, the Concerned Parents Association had stirred up so much international anger against the L.R.A. that Angelina was able to arrange a meeting with the rebels. An intermediary set up a rendezvous in an abandoned house in Gulu with a man nicknamed Lagira, the commander who led the raid on St. Mary's. Lagira told Angelina that he would release Charlotte if Angelina, the spokeswoman of the group, would stop her activism. But Angelina refused to take her daughter unless all the girls were released.
The ancients distinguished between different kinds of love: personal attachment as opposed to caritas, love for mankind. But how many situations dramatize the difference so clearly? Angelina saw in the commander's offer a deep, emblematic choice. The former midwife and mother of six described to me how, in the seven months after Charlotte was abducted, she had become completely committed to the cause and realized she needed to sacrifice her love for her daughter for caritas. ''Charlotte is special in my life, but as the Concerned Parents Association we had become a family,'' she said in her deep, slow, sermonizing voice. ''For C.P.A., every child is our child. Me getting one child, it would feel very selfish. How would I walk the streets in joy while others are captive?''
As a practical matter, the refusal seems puzzling: if Angelina had said yes, and the commander came through on his offer, what was to stop her from taking Charlotte and then continuing her advocacy as before? The rebels could kill her, but they could have killed her anyway.
But when I asked her about this, Angelina dismissed these details, focusing instead on the symbolism of the gesture. And as a gesture, her renunciation was very powerful -- a mother-daughter Abraham-Isaac sacrifice story that she relayed on TV and radio and in letters and opinion articles she sent to newspapers around the globe. The year after Angelina refused the rebels' deal, she was invited to the White House by Hillary Rodham Clinton to receive an award. She showed me the first lady's letter and described their ''beautiful'' meeting. Her office wall is filled with plaques of other awards to her and the Concerned Parents Association- from Human Rights Watch, Kofi Annan at the U.N., Nelson Mandela and Bishop Tutu. She adopted the nickname Mama.
But when Charlotte's mother became everyone's mother, did Angelina's child become no one's child? Angelina denies that rejecting the rebels' deal affected her relationship with her daughter. ''There is no tension between my daughter and me,'' she said testily.
While I was in Lira, the two declined to meet with me together. One night, however, I took Charlotte and the other girls home late. They worried that they would be in trouble with their parents, who still treat them as the children they wish they were. ''Us girls are not supposed to be out after dark,'' Charlotte explained. When we arrived at Charlotte's house, Angelina invited me into the small front room and served Fantas and ginger ales in glass bottles. When she started on a speech about her calling, her daughter's face puckered. She sat, slouched and sullen, as she heard how the Concerned Parents Association gives ''voice to the voiceless'' and how ''the future generation is the future''; then she abruptly stomped out of the room. Her mother didn't appear to register her absence.
When I was alone with Charlotte, she spoke with a flat demeanor, duly answering questions with a dull detachment as if she had little hope of, or interest in, being understood. One night, she and I sat on the porch outside the Concerned Parents Association's office. I asked about the deal her mother turned down all those years ago.
''Yes, yes,'' she said. ''It wouldn't look good for me to be happy with my mother and be leaving my friends behind.'' But her soft voice, with its African-British accent, was hollow.
Charlotte and her friends are fortunate to have families who still want them and are willing to accept the children they bore in captivity -- children many grandparents consider the devil's spawn. Many former child soldiers have returned from the bush to find themselves homeless. They cannot go back to villages where people recall the night they returned with the rebels and massacred their relatives and neighbors -- and sometimes, even, their own parents.
Counselors at the rehabilitation centers regard these cases helplessly. ''How can you tell a boy to go back to grade school and learn arithmetic when he remembers killing his last headmaster?'' asked a counselor.
At World Vision in Gulu, Janet's husband, Charles Otim, 34, told me bitterly that the best option for returning male rebels is to join the Ugandan Army and prove they are no longer enemies of the state. But he is a cripple; he showed me the bullet holes in the metal crutches from the battle where he was shot in the pelvis and captured by the Ugandan Army.
While Otim was still with the L.R.A., he heard on the radio that Janet was free, he told me, and thought about leaving the rebels to join her. I must bring Janet to him, he commanded. I asked if he loved her. ''I have need of Janet'' -- for money and a place to live. As the father, he should have dominion over their children, he added.
Then Janet, who had been talking with some others, walked slowly toward us. She looked as dazed as if she were sleepwalking, drawn against her will to Otim's side -- the man who had controlled her every move for so long. She reached down to where he sat on the bench and touched his neck in a joyless half-hug. They began to speak in Acholi. Janet studied the ground as he spoke, his voice loud and threatening, hers faint and frightened. When I returned a while later to pick her up, she rose to leave. He ordered her to stay, and she froze, momentarily caught between us.
On the ride home, she was silent and withdrawn. She could say nothing of her own feelings, only that she had disobeyed her parents. One of the other girls proposed that when they leave Gulu, they forget that Janet saw him and never speak of it again.
''See, it's erased,'' Charlotte said as the edges of Gulu flattened into soft savannah.
Although the girls learned many things in captivity (how to give birth, forage for potato roots and beat someone to death without crying), they did not learn to think for themselves. Half a year after their escape, it is still difficult for them to say what they want in even the simplest sense. During our excursions around Lira, no one ever said she was hungry or thirsty or had to go to the bathroom -- until I did. When we did go to a restaurant, they all waited to hear what I was ordering, and when drinks came, they waited for me to take the first sip.
Even now, they spoke cautiously of Kony, as if uncertain whether he could still read their minds, as he told them he could. When I asked whether they thought he was true to the Ten Commandments, they were not sure. Then I asked whether they were certain that Kony's powers -- if he has them -- were benevolent.
They puzzled about this. ''We know he's serving a spirit,'' Grace said after a minute. ''We just don't know if it's a good or a bad spirit.''
''Now I'm feeling he has a bad spirit,'' Caroline declared suddenly. ''Before, when I was under his captivity, I thought he had a good spirit.''
''We became confused,'' Grace said. ''When there was a good spirit, he was so friendly and so merciful and so encouraging. When there was a bad spirit, he was very rude and very cruel and gave orders to kill.''
All the girls said they think that Kony, their commander-husbands and the other rebels should be forgiven in accordance with traditional Acholi jurisprudence, which polls of northerners show has significant support. Though peace negotiations began a few months ago, they have stalled over the issue of amnesty because Museveni has recently invited the International Criminal Court to investigate Kony and the high commanders. But Kony wants assurances that he can share the fate of his role model, Idi Amin, who enjoyed luxurious exile in Saudi Arabia.
Charlotte told me that if the rebel commanders are put in prison, ''they will think they are paying for it, so they won't feel it so much. I think someone who has done wrong, carries his shame.'' In the L.R.A., commanders did not ''develop consciences,'' she added. If they returned to see the internment camps, however, created by the war, where ''the suffering is very strong,'' they would ''see their mistakes and be sad.''
Behind the girls' desire for the rebels to be forgiven is their own longing for absolution. One day, as we sat around Grace's living room while her daughter, Mercy Beatrice, chased chickens, Caroline said, ''My future is black.''
''With God everything is possible,'' Grace insisted with bravado.
Although the girls attend church services often, participating in cleansing and healing rituals, and Janet -- who says she wants to be an evangelical preacher -- attends a daily noon service, they seem anxious about their spiritual status. Whether they can make a new life for themselves in difficult circumstances -- study with classmates almost a decade younger, raise children they didn't choose to have and perhaps even realize their shy hopes to remarry -- depends in part on whether they can reconcile themselves to their memories and believe their faith's promise of forgiveness and rebirth.
We were idly chatting when Janet blurted, ''I beat a 10-year old boy to death.'' The boy had been caught trying to escape, and Janet had been chosen to kill him because the commanders knew that she liked him. Janet is large -- both muscular and tall; the rebels praised her for her strength. ''There was blood coming out of his ears and nose,'' she said in a voice almost inaudible. She kept beating him with a big stick; he looked at her ''straight'' as he died.
''I ask God to forgive me,'' she whispered, burying her face in her hands.
A pall fell upon the room.
All the girls looked at me and someone -- Grace, I think -- said, ''What do you think?'' as if my opinion were very important. The girls kept staring, their eyes large and frightened, so I repeated what the counselors at the rehabilitation center in Gulu told me they tell the children: that nothing they did when they were rebels was their fault.
Then the moment was over, and they were light and gay again. Grace asked if I knew a certain hymn, and they sang it for me again and again until I caught each of the words:
Could the Lord ever leave you?
Could the Lord ever forget his love?
Though the mother forsakes her child,
He will not abandon you.
Even though as rebels they were forbidden from singing, ''We sang it,'' Grace said. ''We sang it in our minds, so we knew we were not abandoned.''
They seemed happy as they chattered about preparing to begin at the British boarding school in Kampala next month. But I could hear behind their words an impossible longing that the strict school, with its neat uniforms and fresh notebooks, would turn back the page to their former schoolgirl lives and that all the difficult polarities that followed -- injury and healing, childhood and parenthood, good spirits and bad spirits, guilt and innocence, punishment and forgiveness, pity and judgment -- would be not so much reconciled but, in Charlotte's word, ''erased.'' Then they asked questions about the United States (''Do you have a stove?'' and ''How many tribes are there in America?''), and we walked to the marketplace to buy pineapples.
Sri Lankan Maids' High Price for Foreign Jobs
By AMY WALDMAN
KEGALLA, Sri Lanka - The teacher held up an electric cake mixer and told the class of wide-eyed women before her to clean it properly. If it smells, "Mama," as the aspiring maids were instructed to call their female employers, "will be angry and she will hammer and beat you."
"This is where you go wrong," the teacher continued. "That is how Mama beats you and burns you - when you do anything wrong."
Eighteen female hands took down every word, as if inscription could ward off ill fortune. Among the women, Rangalle Lalitha Irangame was struggling to keep up, haggard after a sleepless night in the hospital. Her 4-year-old daughter was sick with fever, a worrisome turn for any mother, but a cause for panic for one about to leave for years abroad.
After a year of thinking, 35-year-old Lalitha - who prefers that name - decided to trade her life as a Sri Lankan housewife for one as a Middle Eastern housemaid. After completing their 12-day training, she and her classmates would join a mass migration of women to the Persian Gulf's petro-lubricated economies, trading the fecundity and community of Sri Lankan villages for the aridity and high-walled homes of the Arab world.
Behind those walls the women risk exploitation so extreme that it sometimes approaches "slaverylike" conditions, according to a recent Human Rights Watch report on foreign workers in Saudi Arabia. But while attention has focused on the failure of countries like Saudi Arabia to prevent or prosecute abuses, the de facto complicity of the countries that send their women abroad has largely escaped scrutiny.
For developing countries, migration has become a safety valve, easing the pressure to employ the poor and generating more than $100 billion in remittances in 2003, according to a study by Devesh Kapur, an associate professor of government at Harvard.
More than a million Sri Lankans - roughly 1 in every 19 citizens - now work abroad, and nearly 600,000 are housemaids, according to government estimates. Migrant workers have become Sri Lanka's largest and most consistent earner of foreign exchange, out-doing all major agricultural crops.
In Saudi Arabia, the most common destination, they call Sri Lanka "the country of housemaids." In Sri Lanka they call the maids heroines.
Sri Lanka's government has become an assiduous marketer of its own people. With training programs like Lalitha's, it is helping to prepare what is by now a second generation of housemaids. It even provides a safe haven to shelter, hide and rehabilitate those women who return with broken bodies, lost minds or incipient children.
But it does little to publicize those abuses, protest against them or protect the women for fear of jeopardizing the hundreds of millions of dollars they send home each year.
The women's remittances have built homes, provided capital for businesses, and given the women themselves an enduring confidence. But those gains have come with incalculable hardships.
The women often leave indebted, work virtually indentured and have almost no legal redress against the sexual harassment, confinement or physical abuse they often suffer in the countries they adopt. With no absentee voting rights, they also have no political voice back home.
By one estimate, 15 to 20 percent of the 100,000 Sri Lankan women who leave each year for the gulf return prematurely, face abuse or nonpayment of salary, or get drawn into illicit people trafficking schemes or prostitution.
Many housemaids who run away from their employers are kept in limbo at Sri Lanka's embassies because no one wants to pay their way home. Last year, after their plight was publicized, the government airlifted home 529 maids who had been living for months, packed as tightly as in a slavehold, in the basement of the embassy in Kuwait.
Hundreds of housemaids have become pregnant, often after rapes, producing children who, until Sri Lanka's Constitution was recently amended, were stateless because their fathers were foreigners. More than 100 women come home dead each year, with most deaths labeled "natural" by the host governments, although Sri Lankan officials concede they are powerless to investigate.
Back home, the exodus has reconfigured family life. Women dispense maternal love through letters, cash and cassettes sent home. Divorce, children leaving school, husbands turning to alcohol, and child sexual abuse have become routine byproducts of the women's absence.
There are less tangible tolls as well. "That time will never come back," Roshan Prageeth Kumarasinghe, an 18-year-old neighbor of Lalitha's, said, choking back tears, of his mother's decade-long absence.
Ready to Sacrifice All
In Lalitha's class, nine of the women were mothers, all 40 and under, all prepared to give up everything for their children's future, including, for 2, 4 or 10 years, the company of the children themselves.
By the end of their 12-day course, they would learn how to dismantle a vacuum cleaner and say "toilet cleaner" in Arabic. They would learn, too, not to take the gold chain their employers would leave out as temptation. They would even be taught that in the Muslim countries they were destined for, they should conceal that they were Buddhist or Hindu.
Technically, they were women, all above 18. But in their shy smiles and the innocence of having come of age in a conservative culture, they were girls. Almost all of them, like Lalitha, had at least a 10th grade education, reflective of Sri Lanka's high literacy rates, but that had done nothing to improve their employment prospects.
Two of the girls had failed marriages, and saw going abroad as their only hope for supporting themselves and their children on their own. Three were hoping to secure a better marital match by earning a dowry larger than destitute parents could provide.
Four were newly married, hoping to escape from relatives' homes into their own. Three were the second generation of housemaids in their families - one even planned to take over her aging mother's job.
All were poor. In this hill country district, the poverty rate is 32 percent. Most men find only irregular work tapping rubber, earning at best $50 a month. Their only hope for climbing up, or avoiding slipping further down, is their wives.
The husband of one of Lalitha's classmates drove a rented motorized rickshaw, earning just enough to feed the family. Their house was literally sliding away, with no money to build a retaining wall or repay a bank loan that was well overdue.
His wife, S. M. R. Deepa Ranjanie, a bright-eyed 25-year-old poet, was determined to solve the family's financial crisis, but in leaving she also saw an escape. She had married at 16, had two sons, 9 and 4, then had seen the marriage sour. She was desperate to flee an abusive home.
Lalitha's husband, K. Weeratunghe, 41, worked when he could tapping rubber or felling trees. On some days the family had no money for milk. Their house was so meager that, to improve it, Lalitha decided to leave him behind - along with her daughter, Hiroshika Mihirani, 4, and son, Manoj Sandervan, 8.
With no electricity, the home had a perpetual gloom. The walls were cracking, the windows glassless. In class, the women pored over pictures of the gulf's glossy kitchens, but at home Lalitha cooked on a wood stove in a room made of palm fronds.
The training she and the others attended had in fact been started in part because rustic village women's unfamiliarity with electric appliances and Arabic was exposing them to the wrath of frustrated employers.
The course was conducted by the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment, a public corporation established by an act of Parliament in 1985 to both promote migration and protect migrants, two sometimes contradictory missions. It runs 22 training centers, including the one in Kegalla.
The traffic at the center was incessant. Mothers brought their daughters. Husbands brought their wives. Brothers brought sisters who had been left by their husbands. One woman came in to register with an 18-month-old baby still sucking at her breast, although she was too thin to give milk.
Many women had been recruited by a network of private agents, not always reputable, who trolled rural villages and town bus stands looking for new prospects. The agents earned commissions for each woman from both the foreign employment bureau and partner agents in the Middle East.
Lalitha's course Lalitha aimed to create competent maids, but also docile ones, who would serve out two-year contracts promising about $120 a month even if the pay almost never came. A maid's greatest asset, teachers taught, was "tolerance."
The reason for that message, analysts and officials say, is the competition from other poor nations, notably the Philippines, which together send hundreds of thousands of women abroad each year. Too many demands for housemaids' rights, the government fears, will simply prompt the gulf countries to seek housemaids elsewhere.
When it came to the prospect of abuse or sexual harassment, the teacher gave almost no allowance for the possibility that even good housemaids might be victimized, no acknowledgment that even a smelly cake mixer did not justify a beating.
The teacher, Kaluarachchi Chandra Malini, a 38-year-old former housemaid with erect posture and a brisk manner, taught the women how to turn on hot and cold water taps, how to run electrical appliances, how to navigate household hazards - the cleanser that could poison a child or the Clorox that could blind a maid.
More than that, she tried to prepare the women for the risks leaving their families entailed. Given the high incidence of fathers raping daughters with wives away, the housemaids were told not to entrust older girls to their fathers. An older lady was better, or even a home for girls.
Because Sri Lanka's divorce rate has climbed with the migration, the women should take the addresses of trustworthy neighbors to whom they could write asking whether husbands had fallen into drugs, drink or other women's arms. The trainees were warned not to send money to their husbands, lest they drink it away.
These pitfalls were already known to some of the women. One student, Disna, had as a girl seen her father drink away the money her mother had sent from abroad.
And Deepa's neighbor had just returned from Kuwait to find that while she had faithfully been sending money to her husband, he had not been faithful to her. Deepa, however, had studiously avoided going down the hill to learn this fact at first hand.
Silence About the Abuse
There seemed to be a national pact under way: with rare exceptions, the returning women did not reveal the worst of their experience, and the departing women did not ask. Sexual harassment and especially abuse were considered too shameful to discuss with husbands, relatives or neighbors.
But while the class steered from the worst, it was often literally in the room next door. One day a girl of delicate beauty, 21-year-old Niroshamie, came into the office, black tendrils curling around her face, X-rays in her hand.
The young scion of the Kuwait house where she worked had repeatedly tried to molest her, finally pushing her to the ground and breaking her wrist. She had to pay for the cast, work with it on for two months, then finance her own way home. She had returned to Sri Lanka with a wrist needing surgery and not a cent more than when she had left.
But the most gruesome cases were kept out of sight, quickly ushered from the airport upon arrival to the Sahana Piyasa, literally the Place of Relief, a shelter run by the foreign employment bureau.
The shelter gets two to three severe abuse cases a week, according to the officials who run it, and often many more. Some women are so badly injured they are carried off the plane on stretchers, or swathed entirely in bandages. Most cases never make the news, and they stay at the shelter until they heal enough not to shock waiting families.
Karunasena Hettiarachchi, who until recently was the chairman of the foreign employment bureau, said the government did what it could to protect women, but the very nature of the job made it difficult. In a house, as opposed to a factory, "there are no rules," he said. Sri Lanka's embassies had no power to investigate what went on behind private walls.
Agents, too, looked the other way, in part because no one wanted to cover the costs of a maid who did not serve out her contract.
Thangarasa Jeyanthi, 20 and emaciated, had arrived at the shelter from Lebanon one morning. She had a face as purple and puffy as a plum, eyes swollen shut, burn marks on her body and dried blood still around her ears.
The husband and wife she worked for had assaulted her daily, she said, speaking in the high, anguished voice of a little girl who cannot understand what she has done wrong. They had cut her with a knife, kicked and stomped on her, tied her hands with rope and denied her food.
Her employer's mother had rescued her, taking her to the police. They secured five months back salary for her, and took her to the airport, where strangers moved by her appearance collected $232 for her.
"I never expected to be returned to Sri Lanka," she said. "I always thought only my dead body would come back."
The abused women struggled to reconcile the message of their training - that good behavior would make for a good experience - with the reality of their employment.
"I did all of my housework properly," said Sudarma Manilariatne, 27, who arrived at Sahana Piyasa in January with swollen, bandaged legs, a gash on her forehead and a fractured hand. "I do not understand why they did this."
She had been beaten by her female employer, and was helped to escape the house by the employer's 16-year-old son, after receiving not a cent of salary. She wore a head scarf, which the shelter staff urged her to remove. The young woman refused and began to cry. For Sri Lankan women, long hair is a source of pride, its absence, a source of shame. Ms. Manilariatne's employer - her "mama" - had cut boy-short the hair that the maid's own mother had helped her take care of as a girl.
Fearful and Already in Debt
The training course was coming to an end. Ms. Malini, the teacher, was worried about Lalitha. She struggled with leaving her children for 12 days, Ms. Malini said. How could she go abroad? Lalitha, visibly upset over her sick child, physically ill herself on some days, insisted that little by little she was mentally preparing.
In class, the girls stared intently at photographs of airplane interiors while Ms. Malini provided last-minute tips. Do not wear black when you meet your employer lest you look too dark. Do not be frightened when you see only the eyes of the Saudi Arabian woman who meets you at the airport. Wear long sleeves and a wedding ring, even if unmarried.
Deepa's 9-year-old was crying in the mornings, knowing she was leaving. "We have to build a beautiful house," she told him, although the family's debts meant a new house was years away.
With the foreign employment bureau's registration fees to pay and new clothes to buy, she and the other women were borrowing money from anyone they could. Deepa had given the family's only valuable possessions as collateral. Her children would be without both their mother and the television they so loved, she said ruefully.
Deepa had failed the strict medical exam Saudi Arabia required of housemaids, and would go to the United Arab Emirates. Her fallibility was a leaky heart valve. She had had surgery once, and needed it again, but she was afraid even to take her medicine with her, lest her employers discover she was unwell.
To both save and escape her home, she would gamble with her life. "I was happier in the class," she said.
Dukkha, or suffering, is a word that colors the women's conversations and shadows their lives. When Lalitha went for the medical test every housemaid must pass before departing, her illness during class was explained: she was pregnant.
She faced a choice between a child she wanted and debts she could not pay. She did not believe in abortion, she said, but hers was a life with no room for error. She paid $27 to terminate the pregnancy, adding to the family debt and her own sadness.
Now Lalitha's agent seemed to be swindling her. He had promised a ticket, then not delivered it, then brought a visa that turned out to be fake.
As wrenching as it was to leave her children, shame was prodding her toward Saudi Arabia. She and her husband borrowed $398 from fellow villagers. The first repayment date had come and gone, and the lenders wanted her gone, too, and earning money.
She wanted to earn money, too, not least to keep paying for private classes for her 8-year-old son. "He is clever," she said of the boy. "I want him to climb up."
Lalitha had already taught her 4-year-old the alphabet, she said proudly. Her husband, who had finished only the eighth grade, noted that his wife was more educated than he.
Only her 8-year-old seemed to recognize the implications of his mother's departure. "Who will teach me when you go?" he asked.
And one on kidnapped 'soldiers'.
Charlotte, Grace, Janet and Caroline Come Home
By MELANIE THERNSTROM
The rebels have ruined northern Uganda. No one wanted to look out the car window on the three-hour journey northwest from Lira to Gulu near the Sudanese border. Charlotte Awino leaned her cheek on the glass and closed her eyes against the abandoned homesteads and fallow farmland that once provided most of the country's cassava, millet and beans. After 18 years of civil war, more than 1.5 million inhabitants have fled to plastic-sheeted internment camps, preferring to risk slow death by disease and malnutrition rather than to wake in their beds one night to discover the rebels have arrived. The rebels are the Lord's Resistance Army (L.R.A.), which massacres or mutilates villagers -- cutting off their noses, ears and genitals -- and kidnaps their children, turning them into killers who then become kidnappers themselves.
A soldier at a military checkpoint instructed us to drive quickly; just ahead, he said, is a sweep of land where the rebels sometimes cross. He crouched down, peering into the car, his AK-47 dangling against the door, his gaze resting with relish on Charlotte and the other young women clustered in the back seat, their arms entwined, their silky dresses crumpling against one another. The girls stiffened and looked at their laps as he talked.
''What does the U.P.D.F. know?'' Charlotte spat as we drove away, referring to the Ugandan Army.
''The rebels don't cross before dark,'' Grace Acan agreed.
The four girls know this land far better than any government soldier, because for eight years they were rebels themselves. Abducted from their convent school when they were 14, 15 and 16, they were brutalized, brainwashed and forced to be ''wives'' to rebel commanders. They crossed this road on foot many times, hiding from the Ugandan Army while their commanders scouted for villages to raid.
In July, Charlotte was the first of the friends to escape. Janet Akello followed in August, Grace in September and finally Caroline Anyango in November. The girls eventually returned to their hometown of Lira to live with their parents and to try to pick up the lives they lost. They are in their mid-20's now and burdened by children they were raped to bear; yet as they showed me around Lira or journeyed to Caroline's ancestral village, where Caroline's grandmother danced welcome around her, they often seemed like the schoolgirls they once were. They are pretty, polite, docile and devout, their personalities blending like their dresses, and it was hard to imagine that they were recently guerrilla girls, as some terrified villagers used to call them.
At unexpected junctures, however, their moods change and darkness surfaces: Charlotte's prim composure gives way to bitterness and contempt; Janet's impassiveness becomes depression; Grace's good spirits crumple; Caroline cries; and then -- the rift exposed -- they all fall into a pained silence.
In Lira, the girls had heard that some of their other friends were living in a rehabilitation center called World Vision, in Gulu, where the Ugandan government houses former rebels for a month. When I told the girls that I was planning to visit the center, they asked to come with me. Their parents were reluctant to permit the trip, worried less about the road's dangers than about the moral risks of letting their daughters reconnect with their past. Janet's parents were especially concerned about her ''husband,'' Charles Otim, who had been recently captured and was living at World Vision, too. (Charlotte's husband is still with the rebels, Caroline's is dead and Grace's is now a government informant.)
When I asked Janet whether she would like to see Otim, she twisted her body, touched her mouth and looked away. ''If I see him, I will greet him,'' she declared finally, leaving the matter to happenstance -- the force that dictated her life for so many years.
The light was waning by the time we reached World Vision. As a result of government military victories in the past two years, more than 10,000 rebels have been captured or have managed to escape the L.R.A. The former child soldiers, as they are called, have all been given amnesty, but reintegrating them into society remains a daunting problem.
A guard showed us into the office of Sam Kilaro, the center's outreach coordinator, an ambitious, upright young man in a starched white shirt who betrayed just a touch of pride in his authority.
''Grace Acan,'' he exclaimed, reaching out and clasping her hands.
''Sam!'' Grace flushed with pleasure, her customary demureness overcome. They attended elementary school together, Sam explained, and then they lost touch. As they chatted, he studied her approvingly: a lovely young woman, he seemed to be thinking, the kind of woman he might like to marry. ''What are you doing here, Grace?''
She hesitated. ''I went to St. Mary's school, you see--'' She broke off, holding her hands up defensively. ''I was taken by the rebels, you see; we all were,'' she said, appealing to her friends for fellowship.
He gaped at her. ''I'm sorry,'' he said. But his sorriness seemed tinged with horror, as if to say: I'm sorry you were a killer and a sex slave. I'm sorry you are not the innocent Christian virgin you were raised to be and I was raised to want. I'm sorry.
''I'm going back to school again soon,'' she said hastily. ''In just a few weeks. In Kampala.''
He seemed unable to recover his poise. ''Go in if you like,'' he said, turning away. Grace blinked at him. Like the others, she is accustomed to rejection. In Lira, villagers who were once jealous of the girls' modest prosperity now hiss rebels as they pass. Although northerners know that all but a few of the oldest commanders were themselves once abducted children, their pity for the rebels as victims is overlaid with hatred and fear of them as victimizers.
In the center's women and children's section, the new escapees were thin, with scarred skin and broken teeth. Many of the children playing in the dirt resembled one another; as it turned out, many were half-siblings since each of the commanders had many wives. The leader of the Lord's Resistance Army, Joseph Kony, is said to have 56 wives and more than 100 children: he aims, he professes, to repopulate his tribe, the Acholis.
The girls hugged their friends, exchanging shy smiles. The women admired Charlotte's rustling black dress and Grace's delicate sandals, revealing feet no longer cut by underbrush. None of them said much at the reunion: in captivity, they had not been allowed to talk to one another lest they conspire. But they all stood in the gold late-afternoon light reveling in the wonder of something they never expected: to meet together in freedom.
On Independence Day, Oct 9, 1996, the girls at St. Mary's, a prestigious boarding school run by Italian nuns, were awakened by the blaze of torchlight and the sounds of shattering glass as rebels broke into their dormitory. They recognized some of the rebels -- boys abducted just a month earlier from a school nearby -- who dragged them out from under their beds, tied them together with ropes and marched them off into the moonless night.
The next day, the deputy headmistress, Sister Rachele Fassera tracked the rebels into the bush and managed to persuade their commander to return 109 of the girls. He insisted on keeping 30, selecting them for desirable traits (strength, beauty, light skin). Charlotte, Grace, Caroline and Janet recall how they sobbed as they were left behind, how the rebels ordered them to be quiet, forced them to lie down and then trampled them with heavy boots.
If any of them tried to escape, they would be killed, the commander told them. Shortly after the abduction, a girl named Jennifer disappeared. When the rebels discovered Jennifer hiding in a hut, they ordered the other girls to beat her to death. The girls hit her lightly about the legs at first, but the rebels encircled them, yelling for them to hit Jennifer harder and beating them to make sure they did so. Afterward, the rebels left the body on the ground unburied and beat the girls who cried.
Killing was the crux of the abductees' initiation. According to rehabilitation-center counselors, all new recruits were forced to murder within the first week, not only to illustrate the peril of trying to leave but also to make escape psychologically difficult by destroying the new rebels' old selves and turning them into murderers. When Jennifer died, Charlotte said, the girls realized they could not help one another and passed into the numb solitary trance in which they endured the next eight years -- and from which they are still trying to awaken.
After a week's walking, they reached Kony's base camp in southern Sudan. (The Sudanese government harbored and armed the L.R.A. in retaliation for Uganda's support of the Sudanese rebels.) Raised by their traditional families to obey authority, particularly religious authority, the girls said they believed Kony's claim that he was ''the Messiah -- the true Jesus Christ,'' as Janet recalls. They described him as a ''tall, handsome'' man whom the rebels called father or Lakwena, the Acholi word for one who serves the holy spirit. Kony would chant for hours, at times waking them up in the middle of the night to lead them in prayers that interwove Christian, Muslim and tribal spiritual beliefs and superstitions. Lakwena was mercurial. One day, for example, he would direct everyone at camp to stand bare-chested in the rain for four minutes; on another, they could not have sex or cook with oil from the yao tree.
The girls came to believe that Kony was their protector in a cruel, strange world rather than the creator of that world. He prophesized in ways they still insist came true, like foretelling the outcome of a particular battle with the Ugandan Army, and he protected them, they told me, by executing girls and boys they believed were witches and wizards.
Kony prized the St. Mary's girls above the other abductees, keeping them closely guarded and telling them they would one day be his ministers when he took over the Ugandan government. In the meantime, however, he gave them as wives to commanders. When I asked the girls in what sense they were married -- whether there were ceremonies, for example -- Charlotte laughed mirthlessly. ''You're just distributed, like shoes,'' she said. The girls recalled how Kony told them what he would do if they refused their husbands sex: the punishment was 200 strokes and then a hot-iron branding of their foreheads and backs.
None of the girls knew at the time exactly what sex was, they said, only that the loss of their virginity would leave them as damaged -- culturally, spiritually and psychologically -- as those who had been mutilated in more visible ways. The commanders made a point of having sex with each wife during her fertile period. Charlotte, Janet and Grace each gave birth to two children.
Although they were starved, beaten and forced to do hard labor -- digging all day in the garden, walking long distances barefoot carrying heavy jugs of water on their heads -- their positions as commanders' wives meant that unlike the other children, they would not be forced to be fighters. At a rehabilitation center in Lira, the former child soldiers are asked questions like: Were you forced to kill your parents, your relatives or your neighbors? Were you forced to cut, burn or pluck out eyes? Again and again, the answers in the files are yes.
Charlotte told me that her husband had 21 other wives and had been with the rebels for 19 years. But when I asked her more about him, her expression became especially solemn and distant, and she refused to say anything other than that he was ''very rude, very cruel. He doesn't have mercy for people.''
Grace and Janet and Caroline said that their husbands favored them over their other wives and helped them to survive. ''I was given to an old man,'' Grace said. She laughed bashfully, as if speaking of a boy on whom she had a crush. ''I was given to a disabled man,'' Janet said, blushing, as she described Otim, a commander whose leg had been amputated years before and who fought using crutches. ''He was not rude; he was nice,'' Janet said.
Grace chimed in that her husband had ''taught me everything.'' He punished her often, she said, but she felt it was for her own good because ''he knows students are always lazy.'' When Caroline's husband died, she felt there was ''no one to take care of me'' and she had to work as a nurse in another commander's household.
According to human rights groups, the rebels abducted an estimated 20,000 children. Most were the offspring of peasants who, fearing revenge, obeyed the rebels' command that they not complain to the government. The rebels illustrated their injunctions of silence by literally sealing villagers' lips with stakes or padlocks and taunting them to ask President Yoweri Museveni to find the keys.
While Kony's professed aim has been to take over the government in the southern capital of Kampala and replace it with rule by the Ten Commandments, in fact the Lord's Resistance Army never crosses the Nile River that divides the desolate northern region from the rapidly developing south. Kony's insurgency afflicts primarily his own people, the Acholi and other northern tribes, whom he claims to be punishing for their sins, particularly the sin of not supporting him.
It is widely held among African policy experts, human rights groups and people in the north that during the late 1980's and 90's Museveni showed little resolve to win the war. In fact, many believe, Museveni found it politically advantageous to leave the troublesome northern region to self-destruct. The United Nations has called the situation in northern Uganda the most neglected human rights crisis in the world.
The abduction of the elite private-school girls, however, changed the political landscape. Sister Rachele, along with Charlotte's mother, Angelina Atyam, Caroline's father, Frank Olyet Ayo-Ogang, and other parents founded an effective lobbying group called the Concerned Parents Association, which made the most of the narrative power of the case, turning an obscure war into a terrible fairy tale -- a story of schoolgirls stolen in the night and compelled by a demon man's spell to roam in the wild and commit unspeakable acts. They appealed to the pope, who condemned the abductions, gaining attention from the international media.
The parents' group mounted a campaign to get the countries who gave aid to Uganda, including the United States, to put pressure on the Museveni government to end the war. In 2002, Uganda and Sudan signed a treaty to stop supporting each other's insurgents. The Ugandan Army was allowed to go into southern Sudan to attack the L.R.A., which was thus forced out into the northern Ugandan bush. Fighting intensified, as did abductions. The next year, Museveni put a new general, Aronda Nyakairima, in charge of the army to defeat the rebels. Now, Nyakairima told me, he estimates that the rebels only have 300 to 500 experienced fighters left. Late last year, the rebels began peace talks with the government.
Each battle provided an opportunity for rebels to escape. Nyakairima described to me how during a battle the Ugandan Army calls out to the wives and children to surrender -- and thousands have. But the girls' recollections are of the soldiers' attacks: of their classmate Jessica being wounded and then bayoneted, of Grace finding only her 4-year-old son's leg and a bit of shirt in a tree after an explosion.
Grace, Janet and Caroline all believed what Kony had told them repeatedly -- that their parents were dead and that if they tried to escape, Ugandan soldiers would rape and imprison them. Grace was so convinced of it that one day, when she was separated from other rebels after fleeing a battle, she hid for a week with her starving toddler before turning herself in to a villager.
Charlotte, however, had heard rumors of the Concerned Parents Association from the guards who watched over her, who had overheard news reports on the commanders' radio. And so she believed her mother was looking for her. ''I kept praying,'' Charlotte said: ''I don't belong here, I can't fit in. God, please, please, please.'' By talking continually to God, Charlotte kept from despairing and wholly losing herself. ''Some of my friends would say, 'There are bullets flying -- let us ask God to kill us,''' Charlotte told me. ''But I said, 'Let us tell Him that as long as we are alive, keep us so we can see our parents.'''
Then, one night, she had a dream in which a messenger of God told her she would escape the next day. Just walk away, the messenger said.
The next morning, as she marched through the bush, Charlotte turned and took a few steps off the trail. A guard looked directly at her, she said, but just as the dream had foretold, he did not register her presence. She carried her 2-year-old son, Miracle, on her back. (Her 6-year-old son, Ronald, had disappeared a month earlier during a battle. She later found out that he had wandered for three days before reaching a village, his pockets holding mangoes that must have helped him survive.)
Back in the camp, she was told by a girl who escaped after her, 50 rebel boys were selected to hunt her down and drag her back to be killed. But God arranged for the group to cross paths with the Ugandan Army instead, Charlotte told me, and she reached a town where a villager took her to the authorities, who called her mother.
Although the idea of her mother looking for her had sustained Charlotte all those years, the truth she learned when she arrived home was not so simple. Eight years earlier, according to Charlotte's mother, Angelina, the Concerned Parents Association had stirred up so much international anger against the L.R.A. that Angelina was able to arrange a meeting with the rebels. An intermediary set up a rendezvous in an abandoned house in Gulu with a man nicknamed Lagira, the commander who led the raid on St. Mary's. Lagira told Angelina that he would release Charlotte if Angelina, the spokeswoman of the group, would stop her activism. But Angelina refused to take her daughter unless all the girls were released.
The ancients distinguished between different kinds of love: personal attachment as opposed to caritas, love for mankind. But how many situations dramatize the difference so clearly? Angelina saw in the commander's offer a deep, emblematic choice. The former midwife and mother of six described to me how, in the seven months after Charlotte was abducted, she had become completely committed to the cause and realized she needed to sacrifice her love for her daughter for caritas. ''Charlotte is special in my life, but as the Concerned Parents Association we had become a family,'' she said in her deep, slow, sermonizing voice. ''For C.P.A., every child is our child. Me getting one child, it would feel very selfish. How would I walk the streets in joy while others are captive?''
As a practical matter, the refusal seems puzzling: if Angelina had said yes, and the commander came through on his offer, what was to stop her from taking Charlotte and then continuing her advocacy as before? The rebels could kill her, but they could have killed her anyway.
But when I asked her about this, Angelina dismissed these details, focusing instead on the symbolism of the gesture. And as a gesture, her renunciation was very powerful -- a mother-daughter Abraham-Isaac sacrifice story that she relayed on TV and radio and in letters and opinion articles she sent to newspapers around the globe. The year after Angelina refused the rebels' deal, she was invited to the White House by Hillary Rodham Clinton to receive an award. She showed me the first lady's letter and described their ''beautiful'' meeting. Her office wall is filled with plaques of other awards to her and the Concerned Parents Association- from Human Rights Watch, Kofi Annan at the U.N., Nelson Mandela and Bishop Tutu. She adopted the nickname Mama.
But when Charlotte's mother became everyone's mother, did Angelina's child become no one's child? Angelina denies that rejecting the rebels' deal affected her relationship with her daughter. ''There is no tension between my daughter and me,'' she said testily.
While I was in Lira, the two declined to meet with me together. One night, however, I took Charlotte and the other girls home late. They worried that they would be in trouble with their parents, who still treat them as the children they wish they were. ''Us girls are not supposed to be out after dark,'' Charlotte explained. When we arrived at Charlotte's house, Angelina invited me into the small front room and served Fantas and ginger ales in glass bottles. When she started on a speech about her calling, her daughter's face puckered. She sat, slouched and sullen, as she heard how the Concerned Parents Association gives ''voice to the voiceless'' and how ''the future generation is the future''; then she abruptly stomped out of the room. Her mother didn't appear to register her absence.
When I was alone with Charlotte, she spoke with a flat demeanor, duly answering questions with a dull detachment as if she had little hope of, or interest in, being understood. One night, she and I sat on the porch outside the Concerned Parents Association's office. I asked about the deal her mother turned down all those years ago.
''Yes, yes,'' she said. ''It wouldn't look good for me to be happy with my mother and be leaving my friends behind.'' But her soft voice, with its African-British accent, was hollow.
Charlotte and her friends are fortunate to have families who still want them and are willing to accept the children they bore in captivity -- children many grandparents consider the devil's spawn. Many former child soldiers have returned from the bush to find themselves homeless. They cannot go back to villages where people recall the night they returned with the rebels and massacred their relatives and neighbors -- and sometimes, even, their own parents.
Counselors at the rehabilitation centers regard these cases helplessly. ''How can you tell a boy to go back to grade school and learn arithmetic when he remembers killing his last headmaster?'' asked a counselor.
At World Vision in Gulu, Janet's husband, Charles Otim, 34, told me bitterly that the best option for returning male rebels is to join the Ugandan Army and prove they are no longer enemies of the state. But he is a cripple; he showed me the bullet holes in the metal crutches from the battle where he was shot in the pelvis and captured by the Ugandan Army.
While Otim was still with the L.R.A., he heard on the radio that Janet was free, he told me, and thought about leaving the rebels to join her. I must bring Janet to him, he commanded. I asked if he loved her. ''I have need of Janet'' -- for money and a place to live. As the father, he should have dominion over their children, he added.
Then Janet, who had been talking with some others, walked slowly toward us. She looked as dazed as if she were sleepwalking, drawn against her will to Otim's side -- the man who had controlled her every move for so long. She reached down to where he sat on the bench and touched his neck in a joyless half-hug. They began to speak in Acholi. Janet studied the ground as he spoke, his voice loud and threatening, hers faint and frightened. When I returned a while later to pick her up, she rose to leave. He ordered her to stay, and she froze, momentarily caught between us.
On the ride home, she was silent and withdrawn. She could say nothing of her own feelings, only that she had disobeyed her parents. One of the other girls proposed that when they leave Gulu, they forget that Janet saw him and never speak of it again.
''See, it's erased,'' Charlotte said as the edges of Gulu flattened into soft savannah.
Although the girls learned many things in captivity (how to give birth, forage for potato roots and beat someone to death without crying), they did not learn to think for themselves. Half a year after their escape, it is still difficult for them to say what they want in even the simplest sense. During our excursions around Lira, no one ever said she was hungry or thirsty or had to go to the bathroom -- until I did. When we did go to a restaurant, they all waited to hear what I was ordering, and when drinks came, they waited for me to take the first sip.
Even now, they spoke cautiously of Kony, as if uncertain whether he could still read their minds, as he told them he could. When I asked whether they thought he was true to the Ten Commandments, they were not sure. Then I asked whether they were certain that Kony's powers -- if he has them -- were benevolent.
They puzzled about this. ''We know he's serving a spirit,'' Grace said after a minute. ''We just don't know if it's a good or a bad spirit.''
''Now I'm feeling he has a bad spirit,'' Caroline declared suddenly. ''Before, when I was under his captivity, I thought he had a good spirit.''
''We became confused,'' Grace said. ''When there was a good spirit, he was so friendly and so merciful and so encouraging. When there was a bad spirit, he was very rude and very cruel and gave orders to kill.''
All the girls said they think that Kony, their commander-husbands and the other rebels should be forgiven in accordance with traditional Acholi jurisprudence, which polls of northerners show has significant support. Though peace negotiations began a few months ago, they have stalled over the issue of amnesty because Museveni has recently invited the International Criminal Court to investigate Kony and the high commanders. But Kony wants assurances that he can share the fate of his role model, Idi Amin, who enjoyed luxurious exile in Saudi Arabia.
Charlotte told me that if the rebel commanders are put in prison, ''they will think they are paying for it, so they won't feel it so much. I think someone who has done wrong, carries his shame.'' In the L.R.A., commanders did not ''develop consciences,'' she added. If they returned to see the internment camps, however, created by the war, where ''the suffering is very strong,'' they would ''see their mistakes and be sad.''
Behind the girls' desire for the rebels to be forgiven is their own longing for absolution. One day, as we sat around Grace's living room while her daughter, Mercy Beatrice, chased chickens, Caroline said, ''My future is black.''
''With God everything is possible,'' Grace insisted with bravado.
Although the girls attend church services often, participating in cleansing and healing rituals, and Janet -- who says she wants to be an evangelical preacher -- attends a daily noon service, they seem anxious about their spiritual status. Whether they can make a new life for themselves in difficult circumstances -- study with classmates almost a decade younger, raise children they didn't choose to have and perhaps even realize their shy hopes to remarry -- depends in part on whether they can reconcile themselves to their memories and believe their faith's promise of forgiveness and rebirth.
We were idly chatting when Janet blurted, ''I beat a 10-year old boy to death.'' The boy had been caught trying to escape, and Janet had been chosen to kill him because the commanders knew that she liked him. Janet is large -- both muscular and tall; the rebels praised her for her strength. ''There was blood coming out of his ears and nose,'' she said in a voice almost inaudible. She kept beating him with a big stick; he looked at her ''straight'' as he died.
''I ask God to forgive me,'' she whispered, burying her face in her hands.
A pall fell upon the room.
All the girls looked at me and someone -- Grace, I think -- said, ''What do you think?'' as if my opinion were very important. The girls kept staring, their eyes large and frightened, so I repeated what the counselors at the rehabilitation center in Gulu told me they tell the children: that nothing they did when they were rebels was their fault.
Then the moment was over, and they were light and gay again. Grace asked if I knew a certain hymn, and they sang it for me again and again until I caught each of the words:
Could the Lord ever leave you?
Could the Lord ever forget his love?
Though the mother forsakes her child,
He will not abandon you.
Even though as rebels they were forbidden from singing, ''We sang it,'' Grace said. ''We sang it in our minds, so we knew we were not abandoned.''
They seemed happy as they chattered about preparing to begin at the British boarding school in Kampala next month. But I could hear behind their words an impossible longing that the strict school, with its neat uniforms and fresh notebooks, would turn back the page to their former schoolgirl lives and that all the difficult polarities that followed -- injury and healing, childhood and parenthood, good spirits and bad spirits, guilt and innocence, punishment and forgiveness, pity and judgment -- would be not so much reconciled but, in Charlotte's word, ''erased.'' Then they asked questions about the United States (''Do you have a stove?'' and ''How many tribes are there in America?''), and we walked to the marketplace to buy pineapples.
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Date: 2005-05-07 10:15 pm (UTC)no subject
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