Reflections on sunday: The travails of refugee life

Of course, I’ve heard many allegations that, in recounting my experiences, I’m peddling fibs. But, for the information of anyone interested, my accounts can be corroborated by any of my contemporaries who lived in similar conditions. Of course, only a few of us have survived to tell the tale. And it was not a case of exceptional courage. No, it was only through a combination of God’s mercy, luck, foolhardiness and sheer stupidity that the few of us are still here today. In fact, for some of us it was a case of being ‘vertically challenged’: we were saved by being brief in our ‘height expression’. Anyway, when I say we used tree shades as our classrooms, no one should think it’s a lie because even today it’s happening in refugee camps. But that didn’t constitute any danger. If anything, that to us was a form of recreation. We’d be celebrating the many instances that we’d survived by a hair’s breadth. If going through daytime without incident was pure luck, surviving night-time was a miracle. You see, refugees of the time were treated like hardcore criminals. Where today a refugee is offered rations of food and sheeting for shelter, in our time a lorry offloaded us into never-before inhabited forests and left us to the mercy of the elements and the beasts. The hot sun, the torrential rains and the now-cold-now-hot winds worked in concert with elephant, buffalo, hippo, crocodile, lion, leopard, hyena, warthog, snake, mosquito and sundry other predators to render your life a second-by-second survival game. Consider the Oruchinga refugee camp in Nshungerezi, southern Uganda, in 1961. When we were dumped in that savannah forest, it was in the evening after a day-long bumpy journey in a rickety lorry. Everybody’s whole body, young and old, was sore as we were knocked against one another and the people on the sides kept knocking their bodies against the lorry’s hind wooden bodywork. Hungry as we were, the ten-or-so lorry-fulls of us were too tired to look for food, even if it was unlikely that there was any anywhere in the vicinity. We swallowed our saliva and huddled together to see the night through. Did we? “Wheya!” as the Banyankole of Uganda used to say. In the lull when everybody was beginning to doze off, the night was shattered by the scream of “Ukuguru kwanjye weh!” Strong men immediately jumped up to rescue a young man at the flanks of the group but it was too late: his leg was gone, grabbed by a sneaky hyena. Immediately, a committee of elders got together to figure out how to keep the whole group secure. It was decided that young men keep guard in turns, with sentries posted around the group, helped by burning fires to scare off animals. Meanwhile, a medical assistant attended to the wounded man, mostly using herbs identified by a burning torch to douse the wound and stop the bleeding. In the morning, whatever food was available was put together by the women and fed to the whole combo of us. After that, the men set off to gather grass and twigs to set up a settlement camp. By mid-morning, the whole ridge was dotted with what looked like grass-thatched anthills, which were going to serve as our habitation for the following two years. In the afternoon, amid a racket of cries from hungry children, some men who’d gone hunting for food thankfully arrived with maize-flour, to ululations from the mothers. They distributed the small rations to every head of the ‘household’, making sure that everyone got a share. Unbeknown to us, though, that maize flour was going to be our death. Having been used to millet flour only, the mothers thought maize flour was prepared in the same way. So, they mixed the flour with water and heated for a short while, after which they served the porridge. By 11 o’clock at night, cholera had hit everyone and they were making moaning noises in the different surrounding bushes. By mid-morning, more than three quarters lay dead. The few of us who survived only learnt later that the water and maize flour were supposed to be thoroughly boiled before consumption as porridge. Even then, those amongst us who were tall (different species from yours truly!) had another problem to contend with. Our mounds of houses being too small, they could not accommodate our brothers/sisters entirely. This meant that in their sleep, our brothers/sisters could sometimes unknowingly stretch their legs, which in turn meant that the feet could go through the grass-thatched walls. Imagine what that meant for a prowling predator! Many brothers/sisters were carried away as a beast’s supper. On a lighter note, however, these mounds of houses presented an interesting problem. You see, you could not tell one from the other, especially at night. It so transpired then that one spouse would go outside to answer the call of nature and, on returning, go to a wrong matrimonial ‘house’. It was not uncommon to find a number of spouses thus gone astray. No wonder then that later some kids found it difficult to identify their true parents! E-mail: ingina2@yahoo.co.uk Blog: https://ingina.wordpress.com