SLJ Talks to Charles London about His New Book on Children in War Zones

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Joan Oleck -- School Library Journal, 10/3/2007

Charles London calls librarianship, especially at the YA level, "the best job in the world." But London, 27, an MLS candidate at Pratt Institute in New York and a New York Public Library trainee, has taken a leave from those pursuits to promote One Day the Soldiers Came (HarperPerennial). The book, which comes out this month, is a harrowing look at child soldiers and other young survivors of recent conflicts in Kosovo, Myanmar, Sudan, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. London interviewed these young victims while working with Refugees International and devoted his book to telling their stories. On the eve of yet another departure, back to Myanmar and India, to research his second book, London spoke with SLJ about the tragic pairing of children and war.

How did you end up in war zones talking to kids?

I had been an intern at Rolling Stone and realized I really didn't actually have any interest in Britney Spears. It was two in the morning and I was watching TV and saw one of those "Save the Children" ads, and it made me very angry seeing all these wide-eyed children suffering, and you knew nothing about them. I started realizing the news was the same way: Every time you saw children in war situations or a refugee camp, you got no sense of the context or the conflict that they were in. I'd heard about this aid organization, Refugees International… and they didn't have anyone focusing solely on children at the time. And they said, "Hey, why don't you go on some missions with us?" They sent me off between my junior and senior year in college, the summer of 2001.

You were 21, and you went, just like that?

I had no training in this stuff; I was studying philosophy at Columbia. I found myself rather suddenly standing in a refugee camp in Tanzania in a reception center where Congolese refugees go when they cross Lake Tanganyika. I was standing there thinking, "Here I am." I was chatting with these kids and kicking a soccer ball around—only it wasn't a soccer ball, it was a bundle of plastic tied with string. And we're kicking it around, and in broken French and English, they're telling me about themselves. It hit me, "Wow, I need to do everything I can to learn about these kids and how they see the world." So I just started writing. Five years later, I had a book.

You write about kids being turned into killers, girls being raped, and kids accused of witchcraft because they had H.I.V. How did you sustain yourself?

I had my moments where I would be overwhelmed by the absolute horror of the world. I remember I was in a refugee camp for Sudanese refugees near the Kenyan-Sudan border. I spent the morning listening to young girl after young girl describe how they had been raped. I was enraged with humanity…. There was a nun, Sister Christine, and she said, "Don't you get it? We're on sacred ground here. Each one of these girls has survived and in most cases has hope and faith that things will get better. That's a miracle."

How did librarianship enter the picture?

I didn't have a master's degree and was burned out from the aid world. And I thought, "I love books." So I went and worked for a talent agency and was miserable. But I was working with books. I realized I missed working with youth; I missed service, trying to make people's lives better in some way. I feel like going to library school for my generation of bookish geeks is like going back to the land.

So now you've worked with teens in some of the world's most hellish places—and in an NYPL branch in Harlem!

It sounds crazy, but teens are teens. Teens in a refugee camp have different backgrounds and cultural experiences. But ultimately they're goofy and they contradict themselves; and they can be graceful and eloquent and stupid and irritating—like kids anywhere. It's what makes them wonderful. As a librarian, I had more of an agenda than I did as a researcher. With the kids around the world, I would play soccer and do drawings and talk to them and get their stories. As a librarian, I wanted to put a book in their hands and get them to love it.

What resources can you suggest for educators here who want to teach kids about the plight of young refugees?

In Baltimore, they're just opening the Peace Study Center, opened by a librarian, Cindy Woodruff, that educators can use. They're going to have an entire collection devoted to these sorts of things. There are also lots of books, [such as former child soldier's] Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone (Farrar, 2007).