Children in Guinean village settle down to a meal of bulgur wheat.
Credit: IRIN |
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Under a straw roof that kept off the midday sun, 50 children ate bulgur wheat supplied by the UN World Food Programme (WFP). Further along the track that cut through the dense forest was the Lainé refugee camp, but these children were not refugees.
Like the other youngsters, six-year-old Mohamed lived with his parents in a village close to the camp. It had only 300 people, a far cry from the 25,000 Liberian refugees in Lainé in October 2004, but life in the village was difficult. Many of the villagers’ relatives had returned from Côte d’Ivoire.
The Ivorian border was only 60 km away and many Guinean migrants had crossed back into their home areas since an armed conflict between the government in Abidjan and rebels in the north erupted in September 2002. Despite a peace agreement, Côte d’Ivoire remained divided in two and many of the ‘returnees’ had remained in Guinea.
“There are many of us here, but my father keeps building new houses to provide more room for people,” Mohamed said in halting French.
“Life for parents here is very difficult,” confirmed Kourouma, the local village teacher. An old man with white hair and a walking-stick, he had come out of retirement “because we don’t have enough teachers in the country.”
Children were in school because it was the lean season: crops had been planted but there was nothing yet to harvest. WFP had intervened to help families through what is normally a time of shortages. When IRIN visited the area in October 2004, the UN agency was providing cereals, maize, peas, salt and oil to 78 pupils in Mohamed’s village. For parents, sending their children to school was the only sure way to make sure they were fed.
The main items on the menu were bulgur wheat with salt. Meat was rare because it was the parents themselves who had to take it to the school canteen. “You will never see meat here because people will be off selling their supplies at the camp or in the market,” said one of the school cooks.
According to hospital sources in Nzérékoré, the main town in the Forest Region, malnutrition levels among children were twice as high in local villages as in the refugee camps. Besides receiving food aid, the refugees also benefitted from free medical care free provided by international relief agencies.
The camp at Lainé was set up to welcome the last wave of refugees from Liberia. These were among tens of thousands of Liberians who fled into Guinea to escape a fresh upsurge in fighting between then President Charles Taylor and rebel forces between 1999 and 2003.
Many of the small houses along the wide, clean roads had small green plots, where refugees had planted maize or bananas. The local market stalls had about a variety of goods: fruit, vegetables, fish, clothes and shoes.
Classrooms at the local school, whose roof was made plastic sheeting donated by the UNHCR, were spacious. Alongside the school, local NGOs ran an advice centre, helping refugees who had experienced violence, women abused by their husbands, orphans and other lost children.
For their health needs, women went to a health centre run by the Swiss wing of Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF-Suisse). The entire healthcare programme was free. MSF staff made no distinction between refugees and Guinean villagers. If anyone made it to the camp they got the same treatment. “The village structures are not operating effectively,” explained an MSF representative. “So when a villager comes in for treatment, health is a right”.
When they first arrived in the camp, refugees were given free plots of land and were able to sell their surplus produce on the local market. But with population levels rising in both the camp and the nearby village, newcomers had to buy land and prices rose.
The Guinean government had already drawn attention to the heavy environmental costs of clearing forests to make way for refugee camps and plantations. Echoing the local authorities, Kourouma, the village teacher, complained about the damaging effects of overpopulation on the village environment.
“Our brothers came back from Côte d’Ivoire, so we had to make new houses and cut down more trees,” he explained. “The Liberians burn charcoal to sell, so they are also cutting down everything. There are no trees left now.”
According to humanitarian agencies some 30,000 refugees lived in the Laine camp between 2000 and 2002.
Kourouma said refugees and villagers had learned to tolerate each other. “We live with the camp and the refugees live with us,” he said, but he was not uncritical. “The refugees planted palm trees to get palm wine, which is not part of our habits,” complained the teacher, a practising Muslim who was proud never to have touched a drop of alcohol in his life.
Although the sale of alcohol was illegal in the camp, it was freely available. Time hung heavy on the refugees there. “We people have little to do and no money, so the obvious thing to do is hang out with friends,” explained Samuel, a young refugee.
He conceded, though, that life in the camps was certainly easier than life in the villages: “Yes, villagers suffer a lot. They have nothing, we have something, although my bed is a little hard”.
However, Samuel added pointedly: “At the end of the day, I’m a refugee and that’s a heavy burden to carry. It’s a difficult status to live with. We are not at home”.
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