ART IS {HOPE}- Child Soldiers Southeast Asia
I’m nearly done four years of studying journalism. In four years I’ve learnt how to tell peoples’ stories. But I’ve also learnt that it’s no good telling peoples’ stories, if you don’t first care about people. I want to use language to capture peoples’ lives and share their heart.
I’ve heard the stories of children torn from their families. But I’ve never been to Southeast Asia, and I can’t begin to understand the plight of child soldiers there.
I recently read a book by Charles Williams. His take on loving people really stuck out to me. He wrote what Christ said first. “I’ll think of what comes to you, and imagine it, and know it, and be afraid of it. And then, you see, you won’t.” I think there’s something to this act of substitution; this idea of carrying another’s burden. And no one has a heavier burden than the six year old closing his eyes and pressing the trigger.
It has to be more than giving money, or even just giving. We need to start taking. We need to start taking, in any way we can, the burdens of these kids. These children who shouldn’t be carrying this load all themselves. Because they can’t.
Carrying their burden means feeling their struggle. I don’t think any change will come by writing a cheque and forgetting about them. Approaching this from an artistic perspective means dipping into the sorrows that are sometimes too deep to find, and understanding what it means to be where they are.
We can know the statistics about how many kids are forced into warfare, but if we don’t hear the real stories then our hearts won’t move.
I’ve decided to focus on child soldier in Southeast Asia, because it’s an area that’s often overlooked, and has a huge number of kids forced into war.