Kakuma field visit report #2: Listening in

"What they have said is, that the country you come from is very good," offers the

IRC refugee incentive worker who is sharing our van ride through Kakuma refugee camp. I blink back at the fifteen or so young faces peering at me, kids living in Kakuma 4 where we've stopped to visit a family. For the past five minutes or so we've been drawing pictures in the dust on the side of the IRC van, our only shared language the goofy smiley faces and squiggles that now tag the vehicle. 'If only I thought to bring a soccer ball to kick around,' I think lamely ('lame' because when was the last time I kicked a soccer ball or was remotely athletic in the heat). I've been reprimanding myself for not knowing more Swahili, which I'm not confident would have helped me communicate with these kids anyway. They'll say something and laugh, rolling their eyes and giggling behind hands, and I can only guess that they're laughing at this sweaty, red-faced white lady drawing crooked cartoons on the side of a car. But now this. "The country I come from is very good." I flashback to the mesh-covered bulletin boards in the mainstreets of the camp and in front of the hospital that host UNHCR's lists of names, names of refugees who have been deemed eligible for resettlement and whose numbers are being called. A rigged lotto. A black-and-white-and-read-all-over Ellis Island. "Ah," I say, "yes, I'm from there." I look out and up over the glinting aluminum roofs, roofs that cap mud-brick houses that roast to well over 105F every day, and see their peaks mirrored in the Rift's steepled craggs that ring the camp. This camp, that I've come to see and to experience and to absorb and to learn from. I suddenly feel indecent, as if I've stepped into a hushed-toned conversation I wasn't meant to hear, an intruder and an outsider to the place of refuge and respite. 

Kakuma 4 hosts the approximately 47,000 new arrivals (mostly from South Sudan) who have come to the camp since January 2014, and it feels much newer than the rest of the camp. The most established area, Kakuma 1, hosts mainly Somali and Ethiopian refugees and feels like a bona fide town, with a bustling shop-lined main street, school yards, bota-botas weaving through traffic, shiny new cellphones lining stall shelves on the side of the road. The incentive worker we've met up with tells me about his work - he's a zone manager in Kakuma 3 - and how in August he's being resettled to Nashville. I tell him about my obsession with the TV show, which gets us talking about music. He reminds me a lot of one of my guy friends from college who has an encyclopedic Rolodex of music knowledge and the enthusiasm of a true music lover. He asks who my team is, referring to the English Premier League, and I respond that I'm too diplomatic and support all the teams, which gets me an eye-roll and hearty laugh. EPL is huge in the camp, he explains. Everyone supports a team, the most popular being Arsenal, followed by Manchester United and Chelsea, and on big game days huge crowds gather in open fields to watch the matches. Soccer (yes, they do call it 'soccer' here too) has a major following; four years ago the Lutheran World Federation ran a program that supported a soccer league in the camp. Each team drew 5 members from 5 nationalities, and there were teams for various age groups. "Parents loved going to see their kids play in matches and celebrate afterwards!" chimes in our security escort, Raphael. "You'd look out onto the field and couldn't even tell where the players were from, it was just one team working together." Though co-ed, there were an equal number of boys' and girls' teams, and the leagues became community fixtures. Players would pool their money and give it to LWF to buy a trophy for the bigger matches. But after three years, the funding for LWF's program dried up (ie. donors lost interest). No funding meant no field maintenance, no soccer balls, no uniforms, no trophies or ribbons, and no cleats, so the leagues became defunct. 

Such is the story of grant-driven funding; a need is identified, so a program is set up and funded. When the program performs well, the needs are deemed met and funding looks elsewhere. As we drove the dusty road back to the IRC compound, a line from a Seamus Heaney poem kept playing over in my ear, that calls for a time when "the longed-for tidal wave/ of justice can rise up/ and hope and history rhyme."