If you give a refugee a fish, they will eat for a day. If you give a refugee an opportunity to fish,

Greetings from the refugee camps,

For the last two weeks, I have been travelling around Uganda all the way to Lake Albert and down south to the oldest refugee settlement in Africa. It has been such an eyeopening experience so I want to share some of that with you.

Firstly, I must say that driving around Uganda is so beautiful. I usually like to listen to music in a car and just drift off with my own thoughts but I was firmly sitting upright looking out of the windows the whole way. The roads in Uganda are in awful condition: they are filled with potholes and the lunatic drivers don’t help the issue. As if needed, there are more speedbumps in a square kilometre than in the whole of Finland.  If you are looking to travel around Uganda with a car, be prepared for traffic jams and the journey taking much longer than anticipated.

It is very interesting to arrive in refugee settlements here,  they aren’t actually camps with tents or fences but mostly clay huts and houses than blend into the local villages. They don’t have clearly defined borders and inside you can find plenty of businesses and shops and some of the refugees carry on with their lives there. Yet, it isn’t the same as their home: there are several ethnic and cultural groups, dozens of languages and tens of NGOs. The people who used to have professions and possessions now don’t. You can buy your water from an engineer and teach a 40-year-old how to read and write because they want to support their children’s schooling.

There are things that all refugees share: stories of home, anticipation for the future, hope for something better. Also, they all just want to be heard. We went to the refugee reception centre at Lake Albert to interview people who had arrived there within 2019 to get an idea of the reason behind the massive influx of refugees this year. As soon as we arrived, tens of children surrounded us and wanted to touch us and play with us. The whole centre seemed to wake up with a hope that we would bring change and news for them. As we sat down waiting for our first interviewee in a place that was meant to be quiet and private, the word got around about us and we were surrounded by a heat wall formed of dozens of people who were leaning in to listen to us. Most of them were eager to get to sit in our interviewee seat and just simply be heard. We conducted the interviews in five different languages, received sad stories about split families and lost loved ones, about the fear that drove them off their homelands and their hopes and dreams for the future. Many of them were happy to go and settle in Uganda. Some wanted to stay behind to ensure that they would be reunited with their families before settling. A few dreamed of going somewhere far away.

When I tell people what I do for a living, a lot of them say that it would be too tough for themselves emotionally and that they always feel like they should just take their clothes off and give them to those in need. I felt that way as well: we had a 20-year-old mother with a baby telling us how the child has diarrhoea from the food and lack of sanity but how she is only offered malaria medication for that and all I was thinking about were the medications that I had in our office. As the interviews continued, I heard that most of the refugees were experiencing similar issues and that the pill I had would not have helped all of them but maybe even caused a trifle as it wouldn’t have been enough for everyone. While I fully support donating things such as clothes and money, I have really learned this year how the most valuable thing you can give to someone is time. There are hundreds of thousands of refugees around the globe currently and it isn’t possible to donate all of them shoes or medication by yourself. What is possible is to create policies that ensure their resettlement, support and gives them a fair chance for a livelihood. What would be even better is to ensure development and stability by establishing positive peace so that people would not have to flee their homes. However, that seems like another issue entirely for now considering that in the future we will have more environmental refugees than those who are fleeing from conflicts.

I am very grateful for the experience that I have gained, for the perspective that I have received and I feel hopeful that there is plenty that we can do for others and that there is a will for people to develop and to work together.

Later, more details about my excursions and further travelling around central Africa. I hope you have a lovely week and feel free to ask me anything.

Mira

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