Limits

Between the speeches, the dancing, the ululating, and the sunblock distribution, I completely forgot to mention the “testimonial” portion of Albinism Awareness Day. There was only one offered, but it was a doozy: a young man named Coco who’d made it all the way through graduate school in the Congo (DRC), only to be hunted down one night by armed, anti-albino vigilantes in his own neighborhood. He fled out of his parents’ back window and basically didn’t stop running for the next several years. He went out of the DRC, through Burundi, into Tanzania, futilely seeking protection from the police against those seeking to make some money off an albino corpse. Finally, a sympathetic Tanzanian cop directed him to the Dzaleka Refugee Camp in Malawi, just 45 minutes outside of Lilongwe.

And that is how, as guests of Coco, we got invited out to visit Dzaleka this morning. Boniface, who came with us, told us that “Dzaleka” means something equivalent to “limit”, or “barrier”; prior to its incarnation as a camp, the area was actually a political prison, reserved for those so-called troublemakers whose political activism the state judged to be beyond the limit. Now, of course, the name has a different implication, but still sort of fits: The refugees inside are both far beyond their native barriers while simultaneously limited in terms of movement within Malawi.

I’ve never been to a refugee camp of any kind before. As we rode out, I was steeling myself for a terribly depressing tent city, full of squalor and sickness and people who’d born the full cost of Africa’s many disastrous governments.

That last one, of course, is true. The camp has about 15,000 inhabitants now, with about 400 new refugees arriving each year. They come from the DRC, Somalia, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Burundi, and occasionally places as far Sudan. Our little bits of Chichewa were rather useless in a sea of non-Malawians; the lingua franca is a mix of English, Swahili, and French, with an occasional smattering of Amharic thrown in.

But my other fears turned out to be pretty damn far from the truth. The Dzaleka Refugee Camp is rather amazing. The UN and the Jesuit Refugee Services do a remarkable job of accruing resources, making the most of them, and then putting smart, dedicated people in charge. Simple tactics, but easier said than done.

And they do this at many levels; people come to the camp with a wide variety of backgrounds, physical capabilities, and education, and the Dzaleka coordinators seem to do an admirable job of catering to as many groups as they can. We saw, for example, a beautiful computer lab designed for those refugees seeking higher education credits, with at least 20 shiny PCs and a central projector that would’ve been at home in any US college campus building. And the computers actually worked! They hadn’t broken and then been abandoned for lack of technical know-how! There was an IT guy on hand to fix any issues and about a dozen young men and women working at the consoles, waiting for their Skyped-in lecture to start. And the whole building is powered with solar panels on the roof. Amazing.

And then, for those refugees less likely to pursue college coursework, the wider camp is a remarkable testament to some UN flunky’s love of organization. All the typical community institutions – churches, medical clinics, even rec halls – are located prominently in the camp and have the staff and at least the minimum amount of supplies necessary to do their jobs well. (Dr. Sethi’s already trying to figure out how to bring a derm clinic to the camp next year.)

And the community itself is much, much more than a thrown-together tent city. Upon arrival, every refugee is issued a designated plot, within walking distance of a standardized water pump and with a built-in connection to electricity. They’re free to build whatever kind of home suits the needs of their family, and are likewise free to grow whatever kind of crop they want on their allocated piece of farm land. The streets are wide enough to stay clear and the buildings, made of some sort of mud-concrete mixture, feel permanent. Chickens and lambs and goats putter around through back yards. The people look busy – no one is simply waiting for handouts. In truth, Dzaleka seemed like a much more pleasant place to live than many of the rural Malawian villages we’ve seen so far this month. It’s also the only place I’ve ever seen in East Africa where the homes actually have addresses – every door is marked with a letter and number combination which helps the camp coordinators find particular refugees in case of emergencies.

It also struck me, as I was walking around, how a camp like Dzaleka is a bit of an economist researcher’s dream. It’s a large, essentially captive population, with a steady stream of known inputs (rations of oil, rice, beans, etc.). What happens to this community? Classic Econ 101 stuff, it turns out. You get an amazing second-hand market – we walked by folks selling everything from Disney blankets to traditional Ghanian fabrics to shovel heads. A few businesses can exist targeting only a specific subpopulation in the camp – we saw an Ethiopian restaurant, for example – but most business survive by catering to the needs of all refugees, willing to sell to anyone with something worth trading for. You also get the development of an entertainment business: we poked out heads into a Dzaleka “movie theater”, a dark home with benches where patrons can pay 20 kwacha (about 8 cents) for the privilege of watching 4 hours of whatever DVD happens to be playing in the ancient TV at that time.

You also get the formation of new alliances. Our tour guide, a young man named Thierry from the DRC, actually met his wife in the refugee camp. He fled the Congo at age 25 for reasons he preferred not to say (though he does bear scars from bullet wounds on his right leg), traveling with his mother across the border in the back of a pick-up truck. A few months after arriving, he met a lovely woman also from the DRC – and the rest is history. They’re both learning English now, wondering whether the powers that be might see fit to relocate them to Australia, or the US, or Norway – countries that tend to accept the most camp refugees, apparently.

Because no matter what their training or education, or how useful they’d be in the “Warm Heart of Africa”, Dzaleka refugees are in no way eligible to become Malawi citizens. Likewise for babies born to refugee parents. They are resigned to wait – wait in the camp, wait to be returned home, wait to be sent on to a brand new life. Our guide Thierry told me he simply doesn’t think about it. As far as he can tell, he has no say in the matter. So in the meantime he’s simply living his life at camp, with his young wife, relaxing in the evenings by watching DRC music videos on the TV in their 2.5 room home. Not the terrible life I worried I would see, but a strange one nonetheless.

Hmm. That was a long post. Apparently my brain had a lot to get out. Apologies.

We’re on a bit of a lockdown for tomorrow’s protests – no going to the hospital, no venturing outside the house walls, and no wearing of red or blue (political party colors here). If my internet card holds out a little longer and there’s anything of interest to write, maybe I’ll do a little live blogging. So far, all is calm and all is bright.