Rector's Pondering ...

9 May 2010
Team Rector, Geoffrey Connor
Giving children a chance
I've just been reading a novel by the prize winning Irish author, Jane Mitchell, called Chalkline.  It is a moving story of  Kashmiri boy soldier which begins on an ordinary morning at a village school attended by 9 year old Rafiq in rural Kashmir.  The silence of the dawn prayers is shattered by gunfire as soldiers of the Kashmir Freedom Fighters raid the village in search of new recruits.  They enter the school and scrawl a chalk line across the schoolroom wall.  Any boy whose height reaches the line will be taken to fight.  Rafiq is tall of his age and his head is above the line, so he is taken. What follows is a life of brutality, torture and terrorism as he with other boys are robbed of their childhood and turned into fighting machines, learning acts of terrorism until they are indoctrinated into the cause of fanatical belief.  But his family never forgot him and as his life spirals into an abyss from which there seems no escape a chance meeting with his mother and sister brings new hope.  They barely recognise the violent teenager he has become and who is a stranger to person he was.  As he plans a final act of atrocity - a suicide bombing, his mother and sister reach out a hand of redemption and save him.

Though a novel it is based on true facts and the book bears the mark of Amnesty International.  They tell us that hundreds and thousands of children have been recruited and indoctrinated as child-soldiers across the world. including over 100,000 in Africa alone.  In the Middle East, child soldiers are reportedly used in Iran, Iraq, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian territories,  Child soldiers are common in Latin America and in parts of Eastern Europe.

These children are robbed of their childhood and subjected to extreme brutality.  Sometimes they are drugged before they are sent out to fight.  One child soldier said that when
they came to my village, they asked my older brother whether he was ready to join the militia.  He was just 17 and he said 'No'; they shot him in the head.  Then they asked me if I was ready to sign, so what could I do - I didn't want to die. 
He was just 13.

It is hard for us to understand all this and perhaps little we can do, though there are rehabilitation programmes and Amnesty International is at the cutting edge of working for the freedom of these children.  As we begin Christian Aid Week again we can do something to give some children in the third world a chance.  Not all child-soldiers are abducted.  Some go willingly because there is nothing else in their life.  Poverty, lack of access to education and lack of work sometimes drive children into the arms of those who promise food, shelter, money.  Just putting a little extra in our Red Envelopes this week may go a long way to helping children in the Third World to have a chance - a chance of a better life.  A life that Jesus longs to give them - through our giving in His name.

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