"Youth"

A Note on “Youth” from Tom Sleigh:

When I was covering a famine in East Africa, I met a young Somali boy in Dadaab Refugee Camp near the Somali border who told me how Al-Shabaab, a Somali fundamentalist militia, had forbidden him and his pals to listen to music, play cards, watch movies, and a lot of other things kids like to do. Then I recently read in the New York Times how Shabaab has now forbidden the use of plastic bags. As a Somali medical student observed: “I see it as a good decision, but they must ask themselves: Why do they also ban humanitarian workers from operating in Shabaab-controlled areas? I don’t know why sanitation, and the health of the environment, is important but not the health workers.” These are the kinds of contradictions that the refugee boy negotiates every day. So in this poem, I write about a similar contradiction in the life of war-zone children, in which daily mortar fire at tea time becomes synonymous with play time.