Nduta Refugee Camp

Although being the office grammar editor comes in a close second, my favorite unofficial work responsibility so far is hosting guests who visit the KRP. I was pleasantly surprised to learn last Wednesday that two Americans had arrived in Kibondo and would be staying with me for several weeks. I would have been happy to host them regardless, but was even more excited to learn that they were also in their early twenties and that we have enough in common to get along really well. They were excited to learn that they wouldn’t be sleeping in a tent, would be able to shower, and wouldn’t have to survive for three weeks on power bars and iodinated water.

Aside from the obvious perks of having other people around to hang out with and not being the only foreigner living on the TCRS end of town, it’s also been a lot of fun taking them around town and discovering while doing so that I have actually managed to remember the names of most of the people I’ve met in the last three weeks. Their arrival coincided neatly with my camp entry permit arriving, so the three of us headed out to Nduta camp for the first time last week. Since then we’ve gone back two more times and had fairly different experiences during each visit. Some thoughts, observations, and illustrations:

July 24

Our first visit to the camp was really more of a tour than anything else. Neema and Janie (from the HIV/AIDS office at TCRS) took us around to see the residential blocks, schools, former markets, churches, youth centres, storage units, transit centre, food distribution area, reception centre, and the IRC clinic. Due to repatriation, there are only about 14,000 refugees (mostly Burundian with some Congolese and a few other nationalities) left in the camp (that’s down from 39,000 in January ’08 … which is down from close to 160,000 in the Kibondo camps in ’02). Furthermore, due to the government’s decision to halt any activities that might provide incentives for refugees to stay in the camp (i.e., secondary education, income generating activities, markets, youth centres, refugee employment opportunities, etc.), the refugees that are still in the camp are for the most part concentrated in the residential blocks. Since we were being driven from site to site, it felt a little bit like driving through a huge ghost town. Every once in awhile we would stop near a populated area where we would immediately get mobbed by crowds of children wanting to pose for our cameras. But more often than not, we were just walking around one empty compound after another or driving by piles and piles of rubble where small houses used to stand (for security reasons the camp administration can’t leave empty houses standing). Perhaps because we spent so much of that visit inside the car, I still found myself feeling a slightly disassociated from the experience – not quite as disassociated as I would feel if I were back in America and “experiencing” it via the New York Times or CNN but disassociated nonetheless.

July 25

For all that we didn’t move around at all during our second visit to the camp and for all that we spent the morning a guarded area that wasn’t open to the general public, this time around it finally started to feel real. We’d gone that morning with a specific goal in mind: to speak with some of the refugees who worked as teachers in the camp’s schools. (Or rather, the visiting Americans had gone with that specific goal in mind. I was just tagging along …). Since only one of the three teachers they met spoke English, I ended up earning my keep for the day by moonlighting as a translator. (And lest you look askance at schoolteachers not speaking English, bear in mind that French is the official non-African language in both Burundi and the DRC. So all three were fluent in French, Kirundi, and Kiswahili; one also spoke Spanish; and one spoke English. Not too shabby, huh?) Notwithstanding the small ego boost I got from discovering I’d actually retained enough Swahili to manage the translations, this was one of the most sobering experiences of my time here so far. First there was the discovery that teachers in the camps only earn 20,000 tsh a month – which is about 8 shillings an hour (in other words, about 7 cents an hour). Even more disquieting than that though were the various responses we received to questions about whether or not they had plans to repatriate, which all fell along the lines of quiet but firm statements not of “I won’t go back” or “I don’t want to go back,” but “I can’t go back.” Unfortunately, if the government has its way, most of them (especially the Burundians) will be going back … and soon.

July 30

We went out to the camp again this past Wednesday to observe a food distribution – again, another sobering experience. We were only there for a few hours … considerably less time than the people waiting to receive the week’s allotment of cornmeal, vegetable oil, and beans.