Letters By Refugees

Shanaz, Afghanistan, 12 years old

www.refugeecamp.org/curriculum/task8/shanaz.htm

Shanaz is an Afghan girl who lives in Kamaz, a camp for displaced people near Mazar-i-Sharif in northern Afghanistan. Although her name means “princess,” she doesn’t feel a sense of royalty because life in the camp has been very hard for her and her family.

“Life in the camp is not much fun. Our house is very small – there is only one room for us all to eat, sleep and study in. There are seven of us: my parents, my big sister, Zarafshan (14), and my three younger sisters, Aziza (10), Shukria (6) and Nekbar (4). The five of us girls and my mother all sleep under the same cover while my father sleeps apart under a separate blanket. Our house in Kabul had much more room. There were two main rooms. A kitchen and a bathroom with a proper toilet. We had a garden and a well—it was much easier to have clean water there. Here, things are not so well arranged. We have to fetch water from a common tap and the toilets are also public. That's not much fun if you have to go out at the night to use them. It's very dark and there are no lights—I really hate it. Before, we had beautiful carpets, the very best quality. It's very important in our culture to have carpets because we use the floor a lot and hardly ever have tables or chairs. When we eat, we spread a cloth on the floor and sit around it cross-legged or on cushions. In Kamaz, we have no carpets. Not even one. There are only blankets and the plastic sheets provided by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which give some protection from the cold and the damp. Fortunately, we have a small stove, a bukari.

I' ve really had enough of living in this muddy camp. And I'm not the only one. We are all fed up with it. Sure, we're alive and we have a roof over our heads—but what will happen to us in the future? Nobody wants to spend their whole life on this bit of clayey ground. The situation is very difficult for my father. Like most of the people here, he has no regular work. He accepts any little job that comes up, no matter what it is as long as he earns a bit of money to buy food. Last week, he worked as a porter, today as a bricklayer and tomorrow? Well, we'll see. Uncertainty is the only thing that's certain here.”

A Letter from the Rwandan Ambassador to the United States

Theogene Rudasingwa has been ambassador to the United States from Rwanda since 1996. The first thirty years of his life were spent in refugee camps.

www.refugees.org/field/testimony/rwanda.htm

“Life in the refugee camp is something that you can only really experience in order to adequately describe it. Because in countries where the majority of people are poor, even in the case of Uganda, Tanzania or Burundi, the refugees are ultimately the most impoverished. In the beginning we didn't even have land where we could cultivate our own crop and feed ourselves. So many people, including my family, had to walk long distances into the neighborhoods where the indigenous local population lived. My mother, brother and sister had to work long hours in order to get food for the day. After working 12 hours, they gave you a bunch of bananas.

When I actually began going to school, it was not in a formal classroom, but under a tree. There were no classrooms then in the refugee camps. When I began learning how to write, it was not in an exercise book with a pen, but rather on our thighs using sharp pieces of wood or grass in order to leave some kind of imprints on our thighs.

I think it's very important for people to recognize that a refugee situation is not a God-given situation. It's something that comes as a result of our own inefficiencies, of our own inaction, of our bad actions. But, more importantly, one has to learn is that it can be changed, that it's within our reach to try and change this kind of situation once we've inherited it, once we've become its victims.“

Intuma, Liberia, 21 years old

www.refugeecamp.org/curriculum/task8/intuma.htm

Intuma sits at a table. She wears a strawberry red sweater with a silver pendant of a woman around her neck. “She’s a woman from the camps,” Intuma explains and then tells her story.

“We stayed in the camp for two years. It was hard. We cooked it on fires that we made outside our tents. There was a law that we couldn’t go into the bush, so we sold some of our food ration to buy firewood. We slept on the ground—on a tarp or wooden slats—because there were no beds. People were always getting sick. Water was a problem. There was only one hand pump for the camp and that was turned on only for a short period each day. People got impatient and started drinking water from other places and they got cholera. The clinics were crowded and sometimes you had to wait a whole day before you were seen to. Also there was a terrible bathroom system. The latrine was crowded and dirty, and you always had to wait.

When I first came here, I went to high school and now I am a freshman at the College of Staten Island. Because there are so many Liberians in Staten Island (an island that is part of New York City), I feel at home here. In the community where I live, there are a lot like me and the food is the same as back home. I do have trouble at school, though. It’s stressful. They expect you to be like all the other students. I have seen so many deaths, people killed around me, it sometimes comes back fresh to me and makes it hard for me to concentrate. At school, there are people who do not understand what it is like to have been through all of this. But I’m still trying.”

A Woman's Plight

www.refugeecamp.org/curriculum/task7/womans_plight.htm

How do you do? My name is Ashiro. I’d like you to to hear something about what life is like for us women and girls here.

I am 36 years old and the mother of five. We came here to escape the civil war and ethnic violence in our homeland, Somalia. When we crossed the border and came to the camp, we thought we had come to a safe place. Unfortunately, as women we face danger every day here when we go to the scrubland just outside the camp to gather the wood we need for our cooking fires.

You may imagine that because we are in Africa there are wild animals outside the camp waiting to pounce and devour us. But it is men, bandits who followed us from Somalia, who wait for us. They know that the women will leave camp to gather firewood and each day at least one woman is raped.

If we could stop going for the wood, we would gladly do so. A few lucky ones don’t have to go out because their husbands have enough money to buy their family’s wood in camp. Most of us, though, cannot afford this. Since cooking is a big part of our daily family responsibility, we go out to gather the wood we need. If we manage to gather extra wood, we can trade it for fruit, vegetables, and even some meat to supplement the flour and dry food the UNHCR gives us. This extra food is especially important for children and breast-feeding mothers. So, every day we put our daughters and ourselves in danger of rape. And every day, at least one woman or girl comes back to camp the victim of those bandits.

In some parts of the world, I understand there are places for women to go to report their rapes and to get help. Here, we have to help each other, so some of us women got together to see what we could do. If we know someone has been attacked, we encourage them to seek medical attention and to file a police report. Usually they are reluctant to talk about their rapes, but knowing that they have our support seems to help a little.

Rape is our most pressing and difficult concern, but some of our problems could be solved quite easily. We’d like the donors, already generous, to understand this. Many of us mothers never sleep well because we spend much of the night trying to keep the mosquitoes from biting our children. If we were given mosquito nets, we could sleep and have more of the energy we need for our work. When the rains are bad, there is no dry place to lie down. If we were given dry sleeping mats, we could rest. And finally, if we were given firewood or charcoal we could stay in camp and not be victims of the bandits.