From Harm to Home

This evening, two IRC colleagues (who also happen to be Princeton in Africa fellows) and I went to an exhibition opening at Amnesty International called I Define Me. The exhibit shows portrait photographs of Somali refugees holding or doing something that exemplifies who they are as individuals. It's an effort to challenge the label of 'refugee' and affords the subjects an opportunity to present themselves on their own terms. It got me thinking about the people IRC serves. Five months into the fellowship, and I feel like I have a better idea of the beneficiaries in our programs than when I started. I certainly know percentages, population increases, male and female breakdowns, the numbers enrolled in nutrition and HIV programs, etc. But sometimes I sit at my desk trying to comprehend what it means that a camp that was expanded in January 2014 to hold 120,000 people now is home to over 178,000 or that over 4,500 children were born in one year in one of the camps. For so many, these camps aren't just a place of refuge, they become home. People are born, live, and die in these camps, real people with likes and dislikes and strengths and weaknesses and feelings and interests and hopes and pet peeves and frustrations. I look forward to hopefully meeting some of these people some day and getting to know them beyond the numbers with which I've become so familiar.

(Me, at my cubicle in the IRC Kenya office).