Shaken 4/?
Title: Shaken 4/?
Pairing: SVU A/O
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Alex and Olivia are not my characters. I try to do them justice (no pun intended), though.
Spoilers: For this chapter... Fallacy
Summary: This story opens immediately after the ending of Fallacy, so it starts out intense. They help each other make sense of the world of SVU, and their roles in it. They inspire, and grapple with grey areas of their lives and jobs.
AN 1: Thank you to ncruuk for beta-ing this story 3 years ago, and to scatterthebones for critiquing the first few chapters recently with such depth. And, I care about your engagement as a reader, so your critique is welcome as you read :)
AN 2: I started working on this story 3 years ago, but then RL got incredibly busy and I wasn't able to write. I will try my best to finish posting it this summer! But beware... if August rolls around and it's not done, there will be huge time gaps between chapters.
Chapter 4-- this chapter/case interweaves info about the journey of "The Lost Boys of Sudan". I got to work with some of these amazing boys in 2001. I included resource links at the end of the chapter in case you're curious about them :)
“Hey…” Olivia leaned forward and put down the magazine she’d been reading. A nurse had found a folding chair for her and brought it into the room where the victim lay sleeping while the anesthesia worked its way out of her system. Olivia had been sitting with the unconscious woman for the past hour: reading, occasionally studying her and wondering what had happened to her, and dozing as her magazine fell into her lap and her body slid slightly down in the chair. A small movement from the woman had awoken Olivia and now she sat up and watched the person before her gradually open her eyes.
The woman looked around the room. “I’m Olivia. I’m with the police…” she said when the woman’s eyes turned toward hers.
“What happened?” Her morphine-slurred words thickened her accent.
“You were attacked,” Olivia said gently. “What’s your name?”
“Eve.” She groaned as she lifted her neck and looked down at her body. She saw bandages and the metal railing of the hospital bed, she heard the steady beeping of the heart monitor. Despite the mild morphine-induced euphoria, she knocked her head back against her pillow. Tears started streaming down her face. “How did they find me?”
“Who found you?”
“Soldiers from my country.”
“There was more than one?” Olivia was taken aback by the mention of soldiers and the history Eve obviously had with her attackers, and she looked around for a tissue to give her, but did not see a tissue box.
“Yes. There were two.”
“Where are you from?”
“I am from Sudan,” Eve answered, before falling back into a hazy sleep.
***
When Elliot ran Eve’s fingerprints at the station house they registered as a hit on the State Department’s database. Eve Bok, 20, refugee from Sudan. She moved to New York in 2000 with her now 23-year-old brother Isaac Bok.
Elliot drove over to 4 Washington Place. Isaac worked there as a janitor for the Physics Department at NYU, and he was mopping the hallway when Elliot saw him.
“Isaac.” Elliot took in the tall, lean young man who walked with a slight limp. He turned around when Elliot said his name.
“May I help you?” He asked as he leaned against his mop while the floor dried behind him underneath the fluorescent lights.
“Yes.” Elliot took a step closer and took out his badge. Then he took a breath because this part was always difficult. “I’m Detective Stabler with the NYPD. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but Eve’s in the hospital.”
“What?” Isaac’s eyes flashed and he dropped his mop so his hand could reach out for the wall to help steady him. “Why? Is she alright?”
“She’s going to make it, but she lost a lot of blood.” Elliot took another step towards the young man and put a hand on his shoulder to help stabilize him for the next bit of information. “She was raped and stabbed in Riverside Park early this morning. Some joggers found her. She’s at St. Luke’s hospital now.”
“I know who did this to her.” Isaac fell back onto the wall and slid down until he sat on the floor, his strong forearm now resting against his knee. He gritted his teeth as he brushed away his tears. His voice was caught in fury and sorrow. “It was soldiers from our country.”
***
When Elliot and Isaac arrived at the hospital Eve had just woken up again. When he saw his sister Isaac ran over to her bedside.
“They found us here.” Eve said, shaking.
“Shh… then we will move. They cannot stop us from building our lives.”
“I cannot keep going, Isaac! Look what they have done to me, again. It is too much.”
“Eve… ” He looked at her bandaged, weakened body, and shook his head because he did not know what to tell her and he could not absorb or lessen her physical pain, but he knew that they had come too far to give up.
“I’m tired. I am sick of this.”
“Remember that mother and father, and our ancestors, are here to help us conquer all obstacles. Even this, Eve. We have walked thousands of miles, and we have survived. Our spirits have survived. You cannot let them win now.”
Tears continued running down Eve’s face, and Isaac held onto her hand.
“Isaac, my name is Detective Benson.” Olivia hated to intrude as she unfolded another chair that the nurse had found for them. But she knew that however painful interviewing Eve might be, she could help them best by learning the truth. “We need to ask you both a few questions, so that we can find the man who did this.”
There was a quietness that allowed brother and sister to gather their thoughts.
“The northern Sudanese soldiers are pigs.” It seemed to Elliot, as he got out a pen and paper to record the interview, that Isaac would spit in the faces of these soldiers. “We thought we had left them behind forever when we left Sudan.”
“But they must have found us.”
“What soldiers would have found you?”
“Muslim soldiers from the Sudanese government.”
“Why are these soldiers looking for you?” Elliot had never truly had a reason to distrust the military and law enforcement of the United States and he could not imagine his allegiance to his country crumbling due to abuse.
“They could be looking for anyone from southern Sudan who escaped. They would not be looking for only me.”
Elliot and Olivia exchanged worried glances as they each silently wondered what the most effective ways to contact the Sudanese community would be.
“We come from a small village near Wau in southern Sudan,” Isaac began. “Our family were Christian farmers, like most families in the south. The people in northern Sudan are Muslim. They are Arab, with light skin and they control the government. In 1987 their army murdered everyone in our village and then torched it. I was in the fields taking care of the cattle. It was my job as a young boy. Eve had come with me that morning. We hid in the brush when we heard the shooting and saw the flames. A few days later, when we thought it was safe, we went back to our village but there were bodies everywhere and all of the food and huts were torched. The soldiers had killed a goat and thrown it down the well, and torched the crops, so we had nothing left, and so we began walking. They did this to many, many villages. Thousands of other boys came back and found their villages torched, with no one left alive. We all just started walking. We walked to Ethiopia but on the way soldiers would try to kidnap us. They’d rape and torture the few girls they caught and then sell them as slaves. They’d turn boys into soldiers or kill them.”
“Is that what happened to you?” Olivia looked at the bandages on Eve’s body that now carried her story through the marks and scars they were covering. She looked at brother and sister and placed her hand on Eve’s bedside.
“One night after we left Ethiopia and were walking to Kenya, while I was sleeping, they came and took me…”
“But I had found my mother’s necklace and kept it in my pocket all that time. It wasn’t much but it was made from gold. I traded it to get Eve back. They did not care, she was worth little to them, and they thought she was almost dead anyway. But we were near Kenya and took care of her until we got to Kakuma.”
“Kakuma?”
“The Kenyan refugee camp that was set up for us all.”
Olivia noticed the afternoon light coming through the window and landing on Eve’s bed sheet, and hand, and on Isaac’s face. She did not know what it was like to walk for thousands of miles and grow up in refugee camps, but she did know of resiliency. “Eve, I know it’s difficult to talk about what happened, but do you remember what the men who attacked you looked like?”
“Yes.”
“Could you describe them to a sketch artist?”
“Yes. They do not try to hide themselves.”
“Where did this happen?” Elliot asked. Munch and Finn hadn’t discovered any new evidence at the crime scene and Elliot wanted more places to search.
“They grabbed me as I was walking to work.” Isaac gripped her hand tighter and nodded for her to continue although her voice was shaking.
“In the park?”
“Yes. Near the 79th Street boat basin. There was no one there. I go that way some mornings. They grabbed me and took me to the woods where no one could hear.”
When Elliot heard there was a second crime scene he immediately pulled out his phone to call Cragen. “Where in the woods?”
“About a hundred yards from the boats. By a big rock.”
“Why did they bring you to the road?” Olivia could tell Eve was tired, and she smiled at her and added, “we’re almost done.”
“For some soldiers, it is a tradition,” Isaac said through his teeth, “to leave the people they kill by the side of the road as an example of what they would do to you.”
***
East Bay Restaurant
After the interview Olivia drove back to the station and got some fresh air as she walked over to meet Alex. Cheryl was still in a coma when Olivia and Alex went to visit her that evening. After Olivia had dropped Alex off the previous night, she had stayed up half the night researching the history of the transgendered in prison, mostly finding out things she already knew. Cheryl could go into protective custody, and spend twenty-three hours a day in isolation. Or, she could run the risk of being in the general population of a men’s prison. The prison does have a duty to protect her, and after talking with Morty at the hospital that evening they agreed that filing charges against the prison was the best way to help Cheryl, and the best way to potentially establish new case law.
“God, what a nightmare,” Alex said after she and Olivia had grabbed a booth at a nearby diner and she'd ordered a spinach pie. Olivia ordered a burger.
Sarah, Cheryl’s sister, had remained silent when she saw Alex, even though Olivia had told her Alex would be there. She refused to say a word to the attorney the entire visit, opting to take care of Cheryl or talk to Olivia and Morty instead.
Alex could barely stomach talking to Morty, but working with him would be the best shot at getting Cheryl justice so she bit her tongue and offered her help, which Morty accepted.
“So, if Cheryl wakes up are you thinking she should go into protective custody?” Olivia took a sip of water and sat back in her booth trying to envision twenty-three hours a day with no human contact. Her stomach suddenly growled and she also realized this was the first meal she’d eaten since breakfast.
“Yes. Of course, ultimately that decision would be up to Cheryl, but I would argue for visitation rights from her sister, attorneys, the media, transgender rights organizations… Plus, she’d receive access to all the resources and case law pertinent to her situation.”
“You want her to take up her own case.” Olivia looked at Alex with a grin as she caught onto the attorney’s logic and the waitress delivered their food.
“With the right guidance and help.” Alex made a declarative cut into her spinach pie using both her fork and her knife, and nodded at Olivia.
“And now you’re getting on board the media bandwagon?” Olivia remembered how Alex had scorned Morty’s media involvement during the trial and she raised her eyebrows as she shook ketchup onto her burger and fries.
“Now, yes. Berger was a self-serving, thoughtless snake to try and play Cheryl to the media during the trial. But it’s an entirely different situation now. I think media involvement could honestly help her.”
“Cheryl isn’t on trial for murdering Joe anymore.” Olivia paused to nod as Alex non-verbally asked her for a fry. “So you’re talking about another trial, and she’d be pressing charges against the prison.”
“Right. The prison is on trial for violating her right to protection from cruel and unusual punishment. I’d argue that placing her in a men’s prison failed to protect her. The medical community recognizes her as a woman. It’s time for the justice system grapple with that, and Cheryl’s case is a perfect example of the problem.”
“So there’s no problem with turning this over to the media.”
“Why not? She’s not on trial for Joe’s murder anymore. She wants fair treatment and the media has the ability to give this a lot of attention. It’s the only way I can see out of a bad situation.”
“Do you think a judge will take this up?”
“They’ll have too.”
“You doing this work pro bono?”
“Until I’m confident she’s getting proper support.”
Olivia smiled, and looked down at the green Formica table top as the waitress cleared off plates and took their orders for tea. “And how are you doing?” she asked.
“I think that Cheryl is getting the best possible representation.” Alex looked out the window into the night, at the streetlamp, and then at Olivia.
“She is,” Olivia agreed. “Actually, you’ll all be representing her and every other transgendered person entering the legal system from here on out.”
“Maybe. And... she’s in a coma.” Alex frowned as they both leaned back in their seats and wrapped their hands around warm tea mugs. Then she said, “I was glad you came to the hospital today.”
Olivia smiled and dunked her tea bag into hot water and both women soon smelled peppermint as her tea steeped. "Me, too," she replied. “It helps to talk over cases."
“Yes,” Alex nodded and looked up, meeting Olivia's gaze. “There aren't many people I can talk to about work."
"Tell me about it." Friends and family and lovers would sometimes ask Olivia how her day was, and they would often, with an apology, have to stop listening to her answer, and so she had learned to handle a lot on her own. So she understood what Alex meant.
"What's up with this new case?”
“Oh god.” Olivia shook her head and looked down at her hands. “These kids have been through hell.”
“The rape…”
“Actually, their whole life has been traumatic. They’re Sudanese, and there’s a civil war that’s been going on in Sudan for years. It left them orphaned. They were young kids when Muslim Sudanese soldiers came and torched their village and murdered their parents, and they had to walk thousands of miles, with thousands of other kids, to refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya.”
“It’s a religious war?”
“Partially. I haven’t read up on the details yet. They’ve seen more death and abuse than anyone should. Sudanese soldiers would rape the girls and take them as slaves, or kill them. And they’d kill the boys. Kids would die of starvation, or get eaten by alligators as they crossed rivers…”
“And this was all before they got here?” Alex’s eyes widened and she rested her chin in her hand.
“Yeah.” Olivia sighed. “And now we need to stop it from happening here.”
Resources Links
Short video on Lost Boys journey
NY Times article
Pairing: SVU A/O
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Alex and Olivia are not my characters. I try to do them justice (no pun intended), though.
Spoilers: For this chapter... Fallacy
Summary: This story opens immediately after the ending of Fallacy, so it starts out intense. They help each other make sense of the world of SVU, and their roles in it. They inspire, and grapple with grey areas of their lives and jobs.
AN 1: Thank you to ncruuk for beta-ing this story 3 years ago, and to scatterthebones for critiquing the first few chapters recently with such depth. And, I care about your engagement as a reader, so your critique is welcome as you read :)
AN 2: I started working on this story 3 years ago, but then RL got incredibly busy and I wasn't able to write. I will try my best to finish posting it this summer! But beware... if August rolls around and it's not done, there will be huge time gaps between chapters.
Chapter 4-- this chapter/case interweaves info about the journey of "The Lost Boys of Sudan". I got to work with some of these amazing boys in 2001. I included resource links at the end of the chapter in case you're curious about them :)
“Hey…” Olivia leaned forward and put down the magazine she’d been reading. A nurse had found a folding chair for her and brought it into the room where the victim lay sleeping while the anesthesia worked its way out of her system. Olivia had been sitting with the unconscious woman for the past hour: reading, occasionally studying her and wondering what had happened to her, and dozing as her magazine fell into her lap and her body slid slightly down in the chair. A small movement from the woman had awoken Olivia and now she sat up and watched the person before her gradually open her eyes.
The woman looked around the room. “I’m Olivia. I’m with the police…” she said when the woman’s eyes turned toward hers.
“What happened?” Her morphine-slurred words thickened her accent.
“You were attacked,” Olivia said gently. “What’s your name?”
“Eve.” She groaned as she lifted her neck and looked down at her body. She saw bandages and the metal railing of the hospital bed, she heard the steady beeping of the heart monitor. Despite the mild morphine-induced euphoria, she knocked her head back against her pillow. Tears started streaming down her face. “How did they find me?”
“Who found you?”
“Soldiers from my country.”
“There was more than one?” Olivia was taken aback by the mention of soldiers and the history Eve obviously had with her attackers, and she looked around for a tissue to give her, but did not see a tissue box.
“Yes. There were two.”
“Where are you from?”
“I am from Sudan,” Eve answered, before falling back into a hazy sleep.
***
When Elliot ran Eve’s fingerprints at the station house they registered as a hit on the State Department’s database. Eve Bok, 20, refugee from Sudan. She moved to New York in 2000 with her now 23-year-old brother Isaac Bok.
Elliot drove over to 4 Washington Place. Isaac worked there as a janitor for the Physics Department at NYU, and he was mopping the hallway when Elliot saw him.
“Isaac.” Elliot took in the tall, lean young man who walked with a slight limp. He turned around when Elliot said his name.
“May I help you?” He asked as he leaned against his mop while the floor dried behind him underneath the fluorescent lights.
“Yes.” Elliot took a step closer and took out his badge. Then he took a breath because this part was always difficult. “I’m Detective Stabler with the NYPD. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but Eve’s in the hospital.”
“What?” Isaac’s eyes flashed and he dropped his mop so his hand could reach out for the wall to help steady him. “Why? Is she alright?”
“She’s going to make it, but she lost a lot of blood.” Elliot took another step towards the young man and put a hand on his shoulder to help stabilize him for the next bit of information. “She was raped and stabbed in Riverside Park early this morning. Some joggers found her. She’s at St. Luke’s hospital now.”
“I know who did this to her.” Isaac fell back onto the wall and slid down until he sat on the floor, his strong forearm now resting against his knee. He gritted his teeth as he brushed away his tears. His voice was caught in fury and sorrow. “It was soldiers from our country.”
***
When Elliot and Isaac arrived at the hospital Eve had just woken up again. When he saw his sister Isaac ran over to her bedside.
“They found us here.” Eve said, shaking.
“Shh… then we will move. They cannot stop us from building our lives.”
“I cannot keep going, Isaac! Look what they have done to me, again. It is too much.”
“Eve… ” He looked at her bandaged, weakened body, and shook his head because he did not know what to tell her and he could not absorb or lessen her physical pain, but he knew that they had come too far to give up.
“I’m tired. I am sick of this.”
“Remember that mother and father, and our ancestors, are here to help us conquer all obstacles. Even this, Eve. We have walked thousands of miles, and we have survived. Our spirits have survived. You cannot let them win now.”
Tears continued running down Eve’s face, and Isaac held onto her hand.
“Isaac, my name is Detective Benson.” Olivia hated to intrude as she unfolded another chair that the nurse had found for them. But she knew that however painful interviewing Eve might be, she could help them best by learning the truth. “We need to ask you both a few questions, so that we can find the man who did this.”
There was a quietness that allowed brother and sister to gather their thoughts.
“The northern Sudanese soldiers are pigs.” It seemed to Elliot, as he got out a pen and paper to record the interview, that Isaac would spit in the faces of these soldiers. “We thought we had left them behind forever when we left Sudan.”
“But they must have found us.”
“What soldiers would have found you?”
“Muslim soldiers from the Sudanese government.”
“Why are these soldiers looking for you?” Elliot had never truly had a reason to distrust the military and law enforcement of the United States and he could not imagine his allegiance to his country crumbling due to abuse.
“They could be looking for anyone from southern Sudan who escaped. They would not be looking for only me.”
Elliot and Olivia exchanged worried glances as they each silently wondered what the most effective ways to contact the Sudanese community would be.
“We come from a small village near Wau in southern Sudan,” Isaac began. “Our family were Christian farmers, like most families in the south. The people in northern Sudan are Muslim. They are Arab, with light skin and they control the government. In 1987 their army murdered everyone in our village and then torched it. I was in the fields taking care of the cattle. It was my job as a young boy. Eve had come with me that morning. We hid in the brush when we heard the shooting and saw the flames. A few days later, when we thought it was safe, we went back to our village but there were bodies everywhere and all of the food and huts were torched. The soldiers had killed a goat and thrown it down the well, and torched the crops, so we had nothing left, and so we began walking. They did this to many, many villages. Thousands of other boys came back and found their villages torched, with no one left alive. We all just started walking. We walked to Ethiopia but on the way soldiers would try to kidnap us. They’d rape and torture the few girls they caught and then sell them as slaves. They’d turn boys into soldiers or kill them.”
“Is that what happened to you?” Olivia looked at the bandages on Eve’s body that now carried her story through the marks and scars they were covering. She looked at brother and sister and placed her hand on Eve’s bedside.
“One night after we left Ethiopia and were walking to Kenya, while I was sleeping, they came and took me…”
“But I had found my mother’s necklace and kept it in my pocket all that time. It wasn’t much but it was made from gold. I traded it to get Eve back. They did not care, she was worth little to them, and they thought she was almost dead anyway. But we were near Kenya and took care of her until we got to Kakuma.”
“Kakuma?”
“The Kenyan refugee camp that was set up for us all.”
Olivia noticed the afternoon light coming through the window and landing on Eve’s bed sheet, and hand, and on Isaac’s face. She did not know what it was like to walk for thousands of miles and grow up in refugee camps, but she did know of resiliency. “Eve, I know it’s difficult to talk about what happened, but do you remember what the men who attacked you looked like?”
“Yes.”
“Could you describe them to a sketch artist?”
“Yes. They do not try to hide themselves.”
“Where did this happen?” Elliot asked. Munch and Finn hadn’t discovered any new evidence at the crime scene and Elliot wanted more places to search.
“They grabbed me as I was walking to work.” Isaac gripped her hand tighter and nodded for her to continue although her voice was shaking.
“In the park?”
“Yes. Near the 79th Street boat basin. There was no one there. I go that way some mornings. They grabbed me and took me to the woods where no one could hear.”
When Elliot heard there was a second crime scene he immediately pulled out his phone to call Cragen. “Where in the woods?”
“About a hundred yards from the boats. By a big rock.”
“Why did they bring you to the road?” Olivia could tell Eve was tired, and she smiled at her and added, “we’re almost done.”
“For some soldiers, it is a tradition,” Isaac said through his teeth, “to leave the people they kill by the side of the road as an example of what they would do to you.”
***
East Bay Restaurant
After the interview Olivia drove back to the station and got some fresh air as she walked over to meet Alex. Cheryl was still in a coma when Olivia and Alex went to visit her that evening. After Olivia had dropped Alex off the previous night, she had stayed up half the night researching the history of the transgendered in prison, mostly finding out things she already knew. Cheryl could go into protective custody, and spend twenty-three hours a day in isolation. Or, she could run the risk of being in the general population of a men’s prison. The prison does have a duty to protect her, and after talking with Morty at the hospital that evening they agreed that filing charges against the prison was the best way to help Cheryl, and the best way to potentially establish new case law.
“God, what a nightmare,” Alex said after she and Olivia had grabbed a booth at a nearby diner and she'd ordered a spinach pie. Olivia ordered a burger.
Sarah, Cheryl’s sister, had remained silent when she saw Alex, even though Olivia had told her Alex would be there. She refused to say a word to the attorney the entire visit, opting to take care of Cheryl or talk to Olivia and Morty instead.
Alex could barely stomach talking to Morty, but working with him would be the best shot at getting Cheryl justice so she bit her tongue and offered her help, which Morty accepted.
“So, if Cheryl wakes up are you thinking she should go into protective custody?” Olivia took a sip of water and sat back in her booth trying to envision twenty-three hours a day with no human contact. Her stomach suddenly growled and she also realized this was the first meal she’d eaten since breakfast.
“Yes. Of course, ultimately that decision would be up to Cheryl, but I would argue for visitation rights from her sister, attorneys, the media, transgender rights organizations… Plus, she’d receive access to all the resources and case law pertinent to her situation.”
“You want her to take up her own case.” Olivia looked at Alex with a grin as she caught onto the attorney’s logic and the waitress delivered their food.
“With the right guidance and help.” Alex made a declarative cut into her spinach pie using both her fork and her knife, and nodded at Olivia.
“And now you’re getting on board the media bandwagon?” Olivia remembered how Alex had scorned Morty’s media involvement during the trial and she raised her eyebrows as she shook ketchup onto her burger and fries.
“Now, yes. Berger was a self-serving, thoughtless snake to try and play Cheryl to the media during the trial. But it’s an entirely different situation now. I think media involvement could honestly help her.”
“Cheryl isn’t on trial for murdering Joe anymore.” Olivia paused to nod as Alex non-verbally asked her for a fry. “So you’re talking about another trial, and she’d be pressing charges against the prison.”
“Right. The prison is on trial for violating her right to protection from cruel and unusual punishment. I’d argue that placing her in a men’s prison failed to protect her. The medical community recognizes her as a woman. It’s time for the justice system grapple with that, and Cheryl’s case is a perfect example of the problem.”
“So there’s no problem with turning this over to the media.”
“Why not? She’s not on trial for Joe’s murder anymore. She wants fair treatment and the media has the ability to give this a lot of attention. It’s the only way I can see out of a bad situation.”
“Do you think a judge will take this up?”
“They’ll have too.”
“You doing this work pro bono?”
“Until I’m confident she’s getting proper support.”
Olivia smiled, and looked down at the green Formica table top as the waitress cleared off plates and took their orders for tea. “And how are you doing?” she asked.
“I think that Cheryl is getting the best possible representation.” Alex looked out the window into the night, at the streetlamp, and then at Olivia.
“She is,” Olivia agreed. “Actually, you’ll all be representing her and every other transgendered person entering the legal system from here on out.”
“Maybe. And... she’s in a coma.” Alex frowned as they both leaned back in their seats and wrapped their hands around warm tea mugs. Then she said, “I was glad you came to the hospital today.”
Olivia smiled and dunked her tea bag into hot water and both women soon smelled peppermint as her tea steeped. "Me, too," she replied. “It helps to talk over cases."
“Yes,” Alex nodded and looked up, meeting Olivia's gaze. “There aren't many people I can talk to about work."
"Tell me about it." Friends and family and lovers would sometimes ask Olivia how her day was, and they would often, with an apology, have to stop listening to her answer, and so she had learned to handle a lot on her own. So she understood what Alex meant.
"What's up with this new case?”
“Oh god.” Olivia shook her head and looked down at her hands. “These kids have been through hell.”
“The rape…”
“Actually, their whole life has been traumatic. They’re Sudanese, and there’s a civil war that’s been going on in Sudan for years. It left them orphaned. They were young kids when Muslim Sudanese soldiers came and torched their village and murdered their parents, and they had to walk thousands of miles, with thousands of other kids, to refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya.”
“It’s a religious war?”
“Partially. I haven’t read up on the details yet. They’ve seen more death and abuse than anyone should. Sudanese soldiers would rape the girls and take them as slaves, or kill them. And they’d kill the boys. Kids would die of starvation, or get eaten by alligators as they crossed rivers…”
“And this was all before they got here?” Alex’s eyes widened and she rested her chin in her hand.
“Yeah.” Olivia sighed. “And now we need to stop it from happening here.”
Resources Links
Short video on Lost Boys journey
NY Times article