For Refugee Children, "Home" is a Changing Concept

Hillary Mayell
for National Geographic News

March 9, 2004

For many children in the world, their last memory of home is of being
roused from sleep in the middle of the night, bundled into whatever
clothing comes quickly to hand, and running and hiding to escape
marauding raiders, bombs, fires, and gunshots.

Today there are an estimated 20 million children who have been forced to flee their homes; around 10 million were forced to leave their homeland.

For many of these children, the concept of "home" is forever altered. No longer a house, a hut (or even a tent), a neighborhood, friends, or family, home becomes a distant memory one needs to recreate.

"To Feel at Home" is the theme for this year's annual poster contest sponsored by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR).

The contest is designed to encourage U.S. students to view life from the perspective of a child forced by war or persecution to leave their homes, perhaps forever.

"How refugees rebuild their lives and feel at home can depend on what food, shelter, family, friends, and resources they have available," actress Angelina Jolie, goodwill ambassador for the UNHCR, said when announcing this year's contest. (See poster contest rules.)

No Place Like Home

Challenges refugees face vary greatly. Some are able to eventually return home, others will spend years in tent-city refugee camps, still others will emigrate and face the challenge of fitting into an entirely new and different culture. Some children will face these challenges with their families; many are orphans.

Even when refugees are able to return home, life is not easy. In some cases, another family has occupied the family's home. In the absence of paperwork proving prior ownership—and in many cases such paperwork never existed—possession is nine-tenths of the law.

Sometimes there are no homes left standing.

"Some of the villages in Kosovo were 98 percent destroyed," said Joung-ah Ghedini, a UNHCR spokesperson who has spent the last seven years working in refugee camps in Bosnia, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi, Kosovo, Serbia, Eritrea, and Colombia.

"In many cases the infrastructure was destroyed not as collateral damage, but quite deliberately" Ghedini said. "As soldiers leave an area they contaminate the water, physically smash pumps. We saw it in the Congo, in Rwanda—really it's quite common."

More than 230,000 people fled Kosovo when Serbian forces left the province in June 1999. When the Kosovo residents returned, they faced daunting obstacles.

Kosovo winters are harsh. "For one three-week period, temperatures remained at -25 to -35 Celsius (-13 to -31 Fahrenheit). There were no houses, no heat, no electricity," Ghedini said. "People lived under heavy-duty plastic sheeting with perhaps one room winterized."

In addition, the land remained littered with mines.

"Not just mines left by local Yugoslavs," Ghedini said. "There were also a great deal of cluster bombs that had been dropped by air, scattered around the countryside."

Cluster bombs, depending on the country in which they were manufactured, are bright yellow, are round or oval, and look like toys, particularly to children who no longer have toys or sports equipment.

Survival in a Tent City

Many refugees fleeing violence spend years living in the tent cities of refugee camps, frequently moving from one to another in the face of yet more violence. Survival becomes the focus of their lives.

The current crisis in Africa illustrates the grave problems faced by refugees. Since fighting broke out in Sudan a year ago, more than 110,000 Sudanese refugees have fled across the border to Chad.

Living along the border in shelters constructed of branches and straw, the refugees contend with scorching days, freezing nights, blinding sandstorms, and extremely scarce water. Most crossed the border with little or no belongings. Cross-border raids remain a constant threat.

For these refugees, the majority of whom are women, children, and the elderly, it could be years before they are able to return home. The UNHCR is racing to establish inland camps farther from the border, to keep people safe.

One child Ghedini met in a camp in Burundi illustrates the challenges these children face. The girl's parents had been killed in a raid. Rebels left her and her grandmother alive to send a message to people in other villages and the camps of the horrors they could expect to face if they stayed.

When asked what she thought of the camp, the girl told Ghedini: "I don't know what to think about anything. Living here, I don't hear the gunfire, or the shelling, but I'm still scared; maybe I'll be scared like this for the rest of my life."

"Here's an 8-year-old who has survived more than most adults, and she's not griping, not complaining. That's all she knew: being scared about being able to go to sleep at night and not worry," Ghedini said.

In Colombia more than three million people have been forced from their homes by guerrillas and paramilitaries. The AjA Project (Autosuficiencia Juntada con Apoyo) teaches kids the basics of photography and provides an outlet for self-expression. One child, José William Claros Conde, a ten-year-old, described for the project organizers the photograph he took as follows:

"When we played, we played ball, or if not, my brother would chase cars and I would go to play with my friends … Sometimes I saw that my parents were sad because we couldn't go out to play because other kids had been kidnapped and taken by the guerillas and all that. That's why my parents got very sad."