One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [60]
According to an official from the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, “there is a substantial but as yet unquantified population of women living without shelter in the refugee camp.”
I spent one day at a center for young mothers and met many girls like Claudia. Most of their children were the results of rape, and several had children with men who later abandoned them. I met three other girls who had no regular shelter and were always at risk of attack by local tribesmen and by men who wanted to take advantage of them (either from their own community or one of the other nationalities in camp).
There are common features, regardless of geography it seemed, to life in a refugee camp. When I entered Lugufu camp in Tanzania, I saw a group of boys playing with a small wooden car they had made out of twigs and scraps of wood, though their car had what looked like part of a bicycle in it. Another group of boys played soccer with the ubiquitous trash and rag bundle that seemed to be the regulation ball for youth all over the country. A true World Cup Soccer Match, I imagine, would be played in the dust with an improvised ball. That’s how the world plays, at least the world in which play is the most precious thing, hard won and lost too easily.
There was red dust everywhere, covering the sides of the white UN jeep, in the folds of my clothes, in the cracks of everyone’s skin, in all our hair. Refugee camps are usually established on the worst piece of land a country can find, the places no one wants, at least no one of any importance to the government. Dust seems to be a universal feature. Refugee camps are the world’s waiting room, its repository for the unwanted, the disregarded, and the dispossessed. This is where people go when power fails them or when it bares its teeth.
This was true in Kakuma and it seemed true in Lugufu. Rugged, inhospitable land with inhospitable neighbors. Of course it is easy to judge the host countries, seeing the land on which they put the desperate people who come to them for safety. However, some of the poorest countries in the world host two-thirds of the world’s refugees. That they have anything to give is remarkable enough; that they give it is miraculous. The needy always outnumber the generous. It is true the world over, in Kakuma near the Sudan-Kenya border and Lugufu, near the Congo-Tanzania border, on the Thai-Burma border, and in the Balkans.
Another thing that was the same in any camp I visited were the problems faced by young women and girls, the threats, the forced submission, the shriveling of choices.
Jeanine was fifteen years old when we met. She came from Burundi, where her family worked a small plot of land. The war between the government and rebels forced her to flee. She wore a white dress with flowers on it. The white had faded to a reddish yellow with the dust. Her hair was braided. She looked like any number of girls I met, dressed up for her meeting with the mzungu, perhaps wearing her only dress. Jeanine is classified as a “street child” in the camp because she left her foster family and lived on her own without permanent residence.
She asked me very early in our conversation if I was married. As I had already had one young woman ask if I wanted a girlfriend and a marriage proposal from someone who wanted to come to the United States, I was hesitant to tell Jeanine I was single. I told her I was engaged, which was a lie.
“Oh,” she said. “You have no ring.”
Well, I thought, lie to one of these kids who have few advantages but their savvy, their ability to read people to get what they need, and of course you’d be caught out. I worried right off that I had negated any trust she and I might have built.
I told her she was very observant and that I was caught in my lie. I explained to her why I had lied, my (self-centered) worry that I would be put in uncomfortable positions by the truth, as I had been already.
She laughed at me and said she did not want to go to America. She wanted to go home, back to Burundi. The longing in her voice