When Norman Vella from the Xarabank team met China Keitetsi at the airport, he could never imagine that the sweet tiny lady in front of him had been a child soldier, armed to kill at the tender age of eight.

China Keitetsi lives in Denmark but she was born in Uganda. Her name immediately raises the question: “How come did they call you China?” was the first thing I asked her when I met her by coincidence at Malta International Airport. She smiled and simply said that China was not her real name. It was the name she was given by an army officer because of the shape of her eyes. In fact she does have an Asian look! Picking up the words ‘army officer’, I asked her if she is a soldier and once again she smiled back, saying that she was one, but that was a long time ago.

The ‘long time ago’ answer confused me. China is as old as I am. I wondered what ‘a long time ago’ could mean for a 33-year-old. I asked her another question but this time China had no smiles and no answer. She just kneeled down, opened her luggage and started looking for something. I wondered what she was looking for, if she was looking for anything at all. At one moment I even thought that my question had offended her. After some time, from among her clothes she fetched a book. She slowly closed her luggage, stood up and handed it to me. On the front cover there was her picture. The title of the book answered my question at once. It was called Child Soldier.

Some moments of silence followed. The conversation came back to life when China took the book back and opened it up to show me some photographs that were inside. She proudly showed me a photograph of herself with Nelson Mandela, then another one with Bill Clinton, and one with Whoopi Goldberg and Harrison Ford. China’s book has been translated into many languages and has had fair success in Germany, Holland, Belgium, the Czech Republic and South Africa.

Nowadays China is an international campaigner fighting against the enrolment of children as soldiers. She is always travelling around the globe addressing various conferences about the situation of children in third world countries. In Denmark she works in a kindergarten.

China started writing her story as a therapy recommended by doctors to help her cope with her grief. In an interview to be broadcast soon on Xarabank, she said that when she was writing she always had tears running down her cheeks and that with every word she wrote she relived every moment of her childhood and teenage years.

At the tender age of eight, China was enlisted into the Ugandan rebel movement of Yoweri Museveni, called ‘National Resistance Army’. She was given her first deadly weapon at the age of nine. She told me that the kids in the army where very happy when they were given the guns: “We felt big and powerful at once.” From that day onwards China had to take part in many deadly battles. When asked about the people she shot, she gives the same reply she always gives to her conscience: “It was the gun that killed them, not me.”

China’s early life in the army, like that of other girl soldiers, was also poisoned by systematic sexual abuse. “Our bodies were not only used to fight and to kill but we were also used by officers in their barracks. Saying ‘no’ was not an option at all.”

At the age of 13, China got pregnant. “When I was 13 years old I couldn’t count how many commanders had already used my body. I gave birth to my son when I was only 14.”

In 1995, China succeeded in escaping from Uganda. She was 18 years old and she was pregnant for the second time. “At the time I was pregnant with my daughter. I ran away after rejecting the sexual advances of a senior army officer. When I rejected him, he threatened me that he would accuse me of selling guns to the enemy. I would have been killed at once if I stayed there. I ran away immediately. I had no option but to leave my son behind me.”

After travelling on foot and by bus through Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe, China finally reached safety in South Africa. After spending four years on the streets, China was found and captured by officers of the Ugandan government, now led by Museveni. They were about to bring her back to Uganda when she once again escaped and got in touch with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees who relocated her to Denmark. There China started a new life and a new war.

According to United Nations estimates, today there are at least 300,000 soldiers younger than 18 fighting in conflicts and wars around the world. In the foreword to Child Soldier, China wrote, “I don’t want to hear or see any child going through the same long road I went through. Sometimes I feel as if I am six years old, and sometimes it’s as though I am 100 years old because of all I have seen.”

The full interview with China Keitetsi will be shown on Xarabank soon.