Travel Page (page 16)
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Earlier this year eight Australian students left Perth airport for a six week journey to an African refugee camp. Camp Kakuma is a refugee camp in north-west Kenya, created by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (the UNHCR) for refugees from central Eastern Africa. The Camp Sadako project was created by Sadako Ogata, the current High Commissioner of Refugees, and is conducted to introduce university students to the life of aid work and the UNHCR. The students return to their country of origin and promote the work of the United Nations and Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) and remind the world that refugees do not disappear off the face of the earth when the television does not show any vision of starving children and people.
The UNHCR's mandate from the United Nations is to provide protection for people fleeing persecution, war or famine. The UNHCR's provides infrastructure within the camp, food, water and shelter. The UNHCR tenders to (NGOs) to provide secondary care and services, such as education, health care and sanitation. The population of the camp was about 30 000, of whom 25 000 were war refugees from southern Sudan, 2000 were refugees from Ethiopia, and smaller numbers were Zaireans, Burundiese and Rwandans. The camp was separated into zones by racial background.
The camp was located in a semi-arid region, with temperatures during the
day of above 40
The refugees live in mud brick huts paid for by the Lutheran World
Federation (LWF); they are fed a basic ration of maize flour, kidney
beans, sugar, salt and some tea bags. The refugees have to collect
water twice daily, their water limit being about 10-14 litres a day.
When the wind blew, the call would go up around the camp, Kakuma Rain is
coming. Then the dust would come, and it would be so bad as to reduce
visibility to less than 30 metres.
The camp also had large social problems, some stemming from the
experiences of the refugees from their homes, but most were being
created within the camp. The camp was basically a small town. The
Ethiopian sector was full of shops that sold everything you could ever
want in a refugee camp, and there were also coffee houses and
restaurants. There were nineteen primary schools, two kindergartens, a
high school and a technical school that taught masonry and carpentry.
All it lacked was employment, only about 300 refugees were employed by
the aid agencies out of 30 000. This has created a strong dependency
among the refugees for handouts and services, and it has developed
resentment against the United Nations and the NGOs for not providing
enough. The refugees do look after their own matters within their own
communities. The Sudanese have their own court system, a supreme court
and a local court that mainly deals with divorce cases and minor
assaults. The Ethiopians have an elder council which dealt with these
issues.
Our Australian group consisted of students studying medicine, nursing,
anthropology, two studying law, an international relations student, an
indigenous studies student and myself, an agriculture student. Each of
us found areas within the camp that we worked in, most of us sticking to
our primary area of knowledge and then doing something in which we had
little experience.
I taught basic agriculture to a group of 35 refugees with some English
speaking ability. I established a curriculum that allowed for three
weeks within a classroom, explaining why they do things in the field,
and then one week in the field showing them how to prepare a garden for
vegetables, and how to plant. The camp does have a few gardens that
grow a variety of vegetables such as eggplant, tomatoes, pumpkin,
onions, chillies, okra and jute. They are located near water points,
and are watered with waste water from cooking and cleaning, and the
run-off from spillages from the water points.
There are many stories to tell about things that I saw. The Red Cross
hospital in Lokichokio, a town about 110 kilometres from Kakuma, close
to the border of southern Sudan, was full of boy soldiers from the war,
none of them over the age of twenty. They all wore blank expressions,
which was very eerie. A southern Sudanese boy named Archangel, an
orphan whose parents and family were killed by the government of Sudan,
fled to Kakuma to escape being killed by the government, or being
recruited by the southern Sudanese army (SPLA) and being killed in the
war.
Many issues about refugees were made apparent to us. The biggest issue
facing the UNHCR is the Right to Remain versus the Right to Asylum.
This issue concerns a person's human right to asylum versus their right
to remain in their own country under protection. The UNHCR is facing a
crisis of biblical proportions; there are some 20 million refugees in
the world currently, and the funding to care for and protect these
refugees is being reduced every year. Refugee camps create all sorts of
problems, and it seems that the refugees are not leaving the camps, as
they are better serviced within camps than in their own homelands. The
UNHCR cannot eject refugees back to their own homelands if refugees
request protection, so they are creating a refugee culture of dependency
and low self-esteem, and children that know of nothing else. This
situation is being tested with the Kurdish people in Iraq, who are being
protected by a peace keeping force within their own homeland. If this
did not occur, there would be millions of Kurdish refugees in the Middle
East, a situation that nobody wants. However, if the UNHCR supported
the right to remain for refugees, that would break a United Nations
Human Right which states that every person has the right to asylum. You
will hear more of this debate in the years to come.
Well, if I continue any longer, there will not be any space for Pelican,
and it can just be called Phil's trip to a refugee camp in Africa. If
you would like to hear more about my experience in Kenya, I am
presenting a seminar at the University of Western Australia on Sunday
26th March at 2pm. Many thanks go to the United Nations Student
Association for all the good times
Phil Kemp