Uganda has been treating us well, lots of friendly faces, good food (unbelievable pineapple), unthinkably beautiful scenery, and even on the side of being in camp, things have still seemed pretty positive. Although these refugees have been through unimaginable circumstances, those we have talked to seem pretty determined to make the most of their situations - a HIV positive widow volunteering as a community carer for others who are also infected, refugees working as translators for the NGOs here, and all manners of impressive things. All the staff here seem great too - they are very helpful, particularly with letting us interview them for our research - and letting us in on all the extra curricula activities going on at camp (a big cheer to stress management).
Kate and I were lucky enough, if that is the right word, to get to go to the reception centre the other day when staff from the Samaritans Purse were conducting a food drop there. The reception centre is the compound where asylum seekers are brought to wait before they have been granted official refugee status, a place where they wait on documentation to say that they are legally allowed to settle within Kyaka, or Uganda should they so wish, and documentation which allows them to receive refugee aid from different organisations. Those arriving here, as you might be able to imagine, are among some of the most desperate, having arrived with only the clothes on their backs and having lost family members and experienced violence along the way. Seeing this was genuinely a reality check that this sunny place where everyone helps refugees with food and education and land for farming, is actually not all that sunny at times. I am not saying that the camp we have experienced before this was an illusion, rather that it is easy to forget that there are people here who are suffering greatly and whose basic needs are not being met. Asylum seekers in the reception centre are stuck in a limbo like state; simultaneously belonging here and nowhere, and waiting for some top-down bureaucratic process to grant them permission to go on with their lives - or be repatriated and sent back to the turmoil they are fleeing from. And as if waiting for their refugee status to be approved or not wasn't causing them enough anxiety, the actual state of the reception centre is certainly exacerbating their distress.
The reception centre is essentially a compound with one huge tent inside, a plain rectangular cement building, and a block of long-drop toilets round the back. There is a concrete gazebo type construction in the middle where people can cook. Lots of people were milling about, many looking less than physically tip top, and children with clear skin infections. Summing up this whole experience is pretty impossible, but I am going to start by describing the cement building, which is certainly the best accommodation in the centre, but still not great at all. It is literally just a shell of a building; a set of four walls with a partition down the middle. It is very tall and does have some high up windows, which when complimented by electric lights that are constantly on, deliver a liveable amount of light (though still dark by all accounts). Inside there isn't much to see other than a collection of mattresses lining the walls, and bodies sprawled across them, with the odd suitcase or bag here or there that the asylum seekers managed to bring with them. Most people sitting inside were covering their faces with a scarf or jumper or whatever was to hand. Maybe this was because they wanted to sleep, be left alone, not seen. Or it could be because this little space they create for themselves between them and the cloth is the only privacy they are getting. There are men, women, children, all living in these rooms together, all of the time.
The situation for those living in the tent is much worse. There are no windows and no electricity, so when you go inside the only light coming in is from where joins in the sections of the tent aren't meeting properly, and from where the door has been rolled to let people in and out. There were four different sections in the tent, one for families, one for men, another for women and children, and a mixed area. Though the people you found in the tents varied a little, what was inside did not; people were just lying on the bare ground, sometimes on a sheet, sometimes not. And this wasn't the nice kind of soft hug-like grassy ground, it is bare mud-covered rock. And to make this worse, as we were told by a women living in the tent, there are bugs in the mud - potentially called jigglers - which eat at your skin, make you itch and give you rashes. Apparently the UNHCR do come and spray this ground to deter them, but this was clearly not being done frequently enough. In my rose tinted glasses approach to life I liked to think that it was potentially not all that bad in that they only had to sleep here (with a sheet between them and the bugs) and that during the day they go outside and avoid this discomfort a little, but no. The asylum seekers told us that they have nothing to do during the day other than lie there and wait for organisations to arrive with any relevance to them. And this is what they do all day every day.
I think this was what I found the most sobering about my whole experience yet; many of the people at the reception centre have been there since March, even longer perhaps. And all day long they sit in a dark tent while bugs eat at their bodies, and they wait until someone comes to them and says they are allowed to leave. Until someone comes and says they might be able to start their lives again. Or even worse, that someone comes and sends them back home to the place where they are going to be persecuted. And that is the moment when the rose tinted glasses come off and you realise that in these moments the lives people are leading fall very short of what could be classed as living. There are some very interesting blogs written about refugees, by refugees or otherwise. One that has stayed with me is when a refugee man said "I had the choice of dying quickly at home or here slowly, and I chose to die slowly". And the reception centre kinds of cemented this.
I don't like to leave something just being negative about it, but in all honestly all I wanted to do in that situation was just cry because it is so awful to have to accept that people are having to live like this. And just the thought that even this is better than the situation in wherever they had come from. But there was one thing that made me feel a little bit of hope about the reception centre, and that is a boy called Elijah who we met there. He is 14, from the Congo, and has been living at the centre with his father for 5 months. He came to Uganda seeking refugee after his mother and two other siblings were killed in the Congo, and his dad was beaten, rendering his leg to be permanently damaged. The father was a farmer by trade, but now can't even stand without support from a walking stick. But despite all of this Elijah seemed to be taking things pretty well and making the most of the situation. In the five months he had been living in the reception centre he had learnt English and started attending school in the local primary (refugees often get set back a few years due to lost school time or language barriers). We asked him what he would like to do with his life, to which he replied be a bone doctor. Kate gave him a quick-fire anatomical quiz and he was spot on with telling us about organs and the respiratory system in his newly learnt language.
Not many refugees get to go to secondary school (there is only one in Kyaka to accommodate the children from 27 villages), but his dad seemed pretty set that his son would be continuing his education. And it is this that makes me hopeful. Part of me remains sceptical about how this might work - the self-reliance system in Kyaka assumes refugees can farm to get money, money for tuition fees. Elijah's dad clearly wasn't going to be doing any farming soon, so the realist in me sees an issue here. But I don't doubt that he would make it work somehow after speaking with him. It does bring home the fact that there is so much wasted potential in Kyaka since people don't have many opportunities presented to them. But I am choosing to believe Elijah would get this opportunity. It would be heart-breaking to think otherwise, even though in reality I know that his progression to university and doctor-hood is relatively unlikely.
I can't help but think that there must be some way of improving this situation for them. I have a billion questions to ask those maintaining the centre (which by the way I saw no staff there other than the ones that we came with who aren't actually working in the centre, just bringing food), which is probably a genuine letter I am about to write to somebody. It is just genuinely a situation which isn't okay.

Robyn