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Unit 5
Activity 1b: Some children are forced to become soldiers in countries at war.
Read the text below carefully.
The child soldier
I live in Rwanda. I was in secondary school when the ght
started. It was April 1994. Many children’s lives changed
after that.
We were playing football on the village playground when
soldiers appeared with guns. A group of people was leaving
the village and they told us to ee too. We could not inform our
parents where we were going and went to hide in a hospital.
There, some soldiers came and divided us into small groups.
We were frightened and started to cry but they did not care.
They wanted to train us to become soldiers. After training us
for three weeks, they took us to the eld to ght. They ordered us to ght around Kigali. I did
not want to do this and kept praying that one day somebody would save me.
On 25 June 1994, I was seriously wounded on a mineeld. They drove me to a hospital in
Byumba where I stayed for two months. They took me to a camp after my recovery. As I was
handicapped, the soldiers did not want me.
I was then sent to the SOS Children’s Village in Kigali. I had no news of my family. People told
me that the village had been completely burnt down and nobody had survived. As an SOS
child, I had a house, a family and food. It encouraged me to live a normal life again.
I wanted to continue my studies, so I went back to secondary school. At rst, I was ashamed
to tell my classmates that I was an orphan. I thought that they would laugh at me. Later, I
was surprised to discover that there were other children who were far worse off. They were
orphans too but they did not have money to go to school. It was the SOS Children organization
that paid my school fees. I was very lucky as I also had the care and love of my SOS mother
and brothers.
I will leave school next year and my dream is to go to university. I hope to get a good job to
support myself and the other SOS children.
(Adapted from: http://www.child-soldier.org/Rwanda)