refugee camp

for the past year, grassroot soccer has been funded by unhcr (united nations high commissioner for refugees), and we have set up our grs skillz programs in both mayukwayukwa and meheba refugee settlements in northern zambia. these camps have been around since the 1960's, so they are well established with houses and small markets. not what i expected for refugee camps. however, they do live very simplistic lives: electricity only from generators, for the most part only unhcr owns cars in the settlements (and that's only about 5 for each camp), small huts made from mud, trees, and straw for living, etc. also, since they have been established for a while and are the homes for thousands of refugees, they are much larger than i expected. meheba is the larger of the two and it takes close to an hour and a half to drive from one end of the camp to the other (on bumpy dirt roads though). but it was crazy because the different areas within the camp are like little communities amongst themselves; not everyone in the camp knows each other. not even close. also, there are refugees from many countries, such as the congo, angola, and solamlia, so many times the refugees gravitate to areas where lots of people from their home countries are located.

the other week i was lucky enough to make it up to meheba for a 5 day trip. it was about a 12 hour bus ride to the camp. sadly, it was the last trip grassroot soccer will be making to the refugee camps for a while. we lost our funding from unhcr because the zambian government is trying to get rid of the refugees and shut down the camps. as of now, all the refugees (for the most part) are registered and given permission to live in zambia. but, that is changing and the government is working to send everyone back to their countries, which is really sad. especially since many of the kids living in the camps were actually born there, and it is their home. it will be a slow process though; i'm not totally sure how it is all being played out, so we shall see.

it was very cool to get to see the camps. the first couple days were pretty chill because the schedule for our events got switched around. but it was nice to get to walk around and explore the camp. we got a lot of attention walking around the camps (mike, alice, and i all went), because white people are not common within the camp at all. people would come out of their houses to see us as we were on our walks, everyone said hello to us as we passed by, alice and i went for a run and had a group of kids running behind us, and so on. i thought it was bad in lusaka, but this was a new level. it probably didn't help that it was 3 of us together as well haha.

we had a lovely, old lady named clementine who helped get us get settled in and help cook meals with us. she was from the congo and a jehovah's witness, so her helping us was her work as the good samaritan as she liked to say. alice and i got called into the kitchen for each meal to help cook (as the boys watched tv and hung out. yes, we had tv. crazy. we don't even have tv in lusaka ha). but clementine said it was the woman's duty to be strong and cook to support the families. so we cooked. we cooked over a little coal fire outside using our headlamps as our source of light.

this is clementine cooking nshima on the porch

we also had to bathe, not shower, while we were in the camps. this involved boiling a big pot of water on the charcoal stove and taking a few buckets of the hot water into the washroom and bathe yourself from the buckets. no wasting water there.

we had a crazy thunderstorm one of the afternoons. downpour like i've never seen. things were flooded in about 5 minutes. then lightning struck a tree about 10 meters from the house we were staying in. it made the loudest noise ever and lit up the whole house. a few of the people were standing on the porch outside when it happened and all came sprinting back in haha.

the event we were hosting in meheba was a graduation for the kids who had graduated from our skillz program and an awards ceremony for the sports teams. we partner with another organization called breakthrough sports academy in the camps where we sponsor soccer and netball leagues for the youth. all in all it was a pretty easy event because there were no testing or tournaments involved. the kids got so excited for their certificates and awards, which is always fun to watch.

then shit got crazy. after the event, it was planned to feed at the participants from grs skillz program, the soccer and netball leagues, coaches, and special guests. all together this totaled somewhere around 1000 people. ridiculous to attempt to feed that many people if you ask me. and no, it wasn't just peanut butter and jelly sandwiches they wanted to serve, it was a hot cooked meal of nshima, fried chicken, and cabbage. granted events like this happen all the time in the us. buuut, we don't have the resources to do something like that here in zambia. let alone in the camps. so the system that was devised was to have about 7 women cook all the food in a classroom. yes a classroom. to do so, they had: 6 bags of coal the size of me, 6 bags of meali meal (the cornmeal to cook nshima) which each weight 50 lbs, 90 chickens (no joke), tubs full of heads of cabbage, and 10 pots big enough that i could fit in them. they started by building 5 coal fires directly on the classroom floor. obviously, being in a classroom with only a few windows, the room immediately heat up to a sauna. ridiculous. so these women started the cooking around 9 when the kids started to arrive. however, it obviously takes a long time to cook for 1000 people, so by the time the program was over around 12:30, they were no where close to being finished cooking. i got recruited to help cook while the others were doing all the closing stuff. luckily the kids were fine waiting knowing there was free food on the other end. i dont think the food actually started getting served until around 3:30. that's a long time to wait for food. then when we did finally start serving food, mass chaos broke out. there had been no system put in place about how the food was being distributed and no good way to make sure each person only got one serving. pure madness. we were serving from inside the classrooms through the windows while the coaches tried to organize the kids. buuut, it failed. after almost an hour of serving people non stop, finally some order was reached, and the kids were put into lines. then we continued with another hour of serving. this entire time i was in a squat position moving the plates from the cabbage station to the nshima station. then from the nshima station to the serving station. needless to say, by the end of it, my legs left like they were about to die, i was covered in sweat, and my shirt and hands were covered in dried, crusted nshima. but thankfully it was over.

it didn't slow down though. as soon as the feeding was finished, we quickly packed up and went back to our house for just enough time to grab our bags and sleeping bags. we had to catch our ride to the next town where we were getting the bus from the next morning. no shower. no time to change clothes. so all 8 of us crammed into the car for the 1.5 hr bus ride to the next time. when we finally arrived to the hotel i was so tired i just passed out on the bed in my full clothes and shoes. still no shower hah. got up at 5:30am the next morning to get on the 9 hour bus ride back to lusaka.

i'm really glad i was able to make it up to the camp before our funding ended. it was neat because it was nothing like i expected a refugee camp to be like. very naively, i expected it to be small, inside a closed area, where everyone lived in tents. but that wasn't the case at all. it was a whole mini village with lots of communities within it, and it was home for many of the people living there. not to say their lives weren't difficult there since many resources were scarce, and they had been forced to leave their homes in the native countries. but at least they had a place where they could start a new life.