Refugee Stories

Babiker Yahya – Darfur, Sudan

Dorti is a sprawling camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs) on the outskirts of El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur. 70-year-old Babiker Yahya lives there with his extended family in a tiny house built of straw. Twelve other family members live in two shelters just metres away - round knee-high structures, each the size of a small breakfast table with 'walls' of twigs stuck in the sand that do little more than demarcate space in the vast desert. There's no roof on either of these shelters. When the torrential seasonal rains come late at night, all 18 family members rush to a more stable mud-brick home where they huddle tightly with dozens of others and wait for the storm to pass.

The fact that Babiker's family prefer their miserable hovel in Dorti IDP Camp to their intact home and farmlands just a few kilometres away speaks volumes about the horrors they have lived through.

Babiker, a thin man with a white beard, wearing a white traditional robe and a tight white cap, says he buried three of his neighbours who were killed in the attack. Still, he counts himself one of the luckiest men in Darfur. Face to face with one of the horsemen, he survived only because the militiaman's assault rifle malfunctioned.

"He aimed his gun at me," he says, telling his story with lively hand gestures. "He wanted to kill me. He prepared the gun to shoot but the gun wouldn't go off. I grabbed the opportunity to run away."

Even though his own house was not burned, Babiker got the message: Shariken village is now off limits. "I am not going back," he says firmly, his arm around the shoulder of one of his granddaughters. "The Arabs will not allow us. If I go back, they will kill me."

Yared Karadongeye – Burundi

For more than thirty years, Yared Karadongeye dreamed about returning to his native Burundi. But when he finally managed to go home from neighbouring Tanzania in late 2007, the circumstances were different from those he had imagined.

"I wonder where I would be today had I not received help from UNHCR," the 65-year-old explained recently at his newly-built home outside the small town of Rumonge in southern Burundi. He shrugged. "Maybe I wouldn't be alive."

"UNHCR organized a truck to transport us all the way home: this was a great help," he explained. Back in Burundi, he was given a kit of emergency shelter items like plastic sheeting to protect his family from the rain and mosquito nets to protect against malaria which is endemic along the shores of Lake Tanganyika. Over the coming months, UNHCR staff provided legal support to help Yared reclaim ownership of his family's land.

Yared and his son have been particularly grateful to receive iron sheeting and other building materials from a UNHCR emergency shelter programme. Both houses are standing now next to a small piece of land where the two families have planted manioc. Yared's son recently opened a small café nearby.

"To have a solid house and to be at home, this makes the biggest difference to me that I can think of. When I settled again here, I felt peace and happiness. Despite of all that I have lived and seen – I was finally home."

Rose – Democratic Republic of the Congo

Before the fighting started in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Rose* and her family lived quiet rural lives. She and her husband had three children, a small piece of land on which to raise them and a stall on the main road from which they sold fish caught in a local lake.

With the outbreak of conflict 15 years ago, their lives began to unravel. Their house was robbed, their business struggled. The final collapse came when armed men entered Rose's home with the intention of raping her two daughters. She pleaded with them to kill her and spare her children.

"That's when one of them pulled out a knife and tore my clothes. He left me naked in front of my girls and they raped me in front of them," Rose recently recalled to a social worker at a UNHCR-run camp for internally displaced persons in North Kivu.

Rose has become a regular visitor to the women's centre in Mugunga II camp, about 25km west of Goma which provides counselling, skills training and literacy courses. With UNHCR funding, the centre seeks to assist and empower women who are survivors of sexual violence, infected with HIV-AIDS, illiterate or otherwise socially excluded.

Breaking the silence is extremely difficult for rape victims in eastern DRC where the subject is taboo and victims ostracised. Many, like Rose, are abandoned by their husbands in the aftermath of the assault.

*name changed

Halima – Kenya

Holding her baby brother, 10-year-old Halima queues to receive her vaccinations at the Liboi Reception Centre for Somali refugees on the Kenyan/Somali border.

“My father owned a shop in Kismayo but they [The Islamic Courts Union] told him he wasn’t allowed to sell his music CDs anymore. My parents think there’s going to be a war, so one morning my mother took me, my sister and my baby brother and left my house. My father stayed behind with two of my brothers and my grandmother.

It took us three weeks to walk here. My mum carried some food and we also begged in the villages we passed. We got here two days ago. They have taken our names and given us food. We have to wait here for about a week for our papers to be checked and then a truck is coming to take us to our new home. My sandals broke on the way here.I am wishing for new sandals.”

Halima and her family are now living with some 280,000 Somalis in three massive refugee camps in the Dadaab region of eastern Kenya.With little prospect of peace in Somalia, they are likely to remain in the camps for some years to come.

Hassan Mahmoud Mohammed – Ethiopia

On a dusty plain outside the town of Kebri Beyah in Ethiopia, there are piles of little stones.They mark the graves of children - mostly children under the age of five who died of cholera and other waterborne diseases. Back in 2005, the people of Kebri Beyah, many of them impoverished Somali refugees, were burying up to one hundred of their children every month.

Says Kebri Beyah resident, Hassan Mahmoud Mohammed, the women once had to walk miles every day to fetch water. They had little choice but to draw it from still, muddy pools where animals bathed, drank and died. It teemed with invisible pathogens like cholera, dysentery, intestinal worms and the larvae of malarial mosquitoes.

"We had no alternatives back then," says Hassan Mahmoud. "As long as it was liquid, the quality and colour of the water was not important to us."

In 2005, UNHCR implemented a major water project in Kebri Beyahto address the acute water shortage.The project involved the sinking of a 200 metre bore and the construction of a series of pipes, pumps and reservoirs to transport and store the water safely.Today, clean water flows from 24 solidly built water points and tap stands around the town and nearby refugee camps. There is enough water for washing, so hygiene has improved. The women no longer spend their days trekking across the plains and their daughters have time to go to school. Best of all, cholera has disappeared, diarrhoea has been reduced and infant deaths in Kebri Beyah have dropped dramatically.

Charity Fikeira – Uganda

Siripi Health Centre, Rhino Camp Refugee Settlement near Arua, Uganda

April 18, 10.40am: Two women laboured in the centre this morning. At 6.15am, 20-year-old Charity Fikeira gave birth to her first child – a tiny but healthy baby girl. Yesterday, as her contractions increased, she walked nearly two and half kilometres from her hut to the health centre, accompanied by her mother, her sister and her sister’s two young children. Charity has attended the clinic here several times during her pregnancy, receiving standard health checks, preventative malaria medication and a supplementary food ration for pregnant and nursing mothers. She has been encouraged to deliver at the centre where there is a basic but clean delivery table, sterilized equipment, experienced midwives and, at least some of the time, an ambulance on standby.

Charity is now resting in the small six-bed ward, her baby daughter beside her. However, things have not gone so smoothly for the other woman in labour. Two hours ago, she was rushed to Arua, the nearest town, showing symptoms of obstructed labour and acute foetal distress. She has had to endure a gruelling two hour journey on rough roads to deliver her baby by caesarean section at Arua District Hospital. “They called and she’s okay,” says the Supervising Nurse. "She is lucky that the ambulance was here and she didn’t have to wait too long.”

By early afternoon, Charity and her family are ready to go home. She has received her UNHCR Mother and Baby packages containing two sets of baby clothes, nappies, towels, sanitary items, talc and soap. The baby is wrapped tightly in a bright new swaddling cloth. “She doesn’t have a name yet,” Nurse Luace explains. “Here it is the father who names the babies. That will happen when they go home.”

Mariam – Chad

Early on April 1, 2008, seven-month-old Mariam was carried into the health centre in the Breding Refugee Camp in eastern Chad. The baby girl had had diarrhoea and vomiting for nearly a week by this time. During the night, she had suddenly developed a high fever. Having no transport and observing the region's strict night curfew, her parents, both refugees from Sudan's Darfur region, waited until dawn before walking two kilometres to the refugee health centre, carrying the feverish child in their arms. Mariam's temperature was 38°C on arrival and the doctor, suspecting malaria, immediately ran a Paracheck test using a few drops of blood from her finger. It was positive.

The staff immediately began treatment for cerebral malaria. By the next morning, the baby girl’s condition was much improved. Her temperature was nearly normal, the diarrhoea had ceased and her vomiting was only occasional. She even managed a tiny smile for her mother, waiting anxiously on the sleeping mat beside her.

Mariam was fortunate to survive her malaria infection.Young children can succumb very quickly once the fever sets in and any delay in seeking treatment can have tragic results. Informing the refugee community of the urgency of seeking help is a priority for UNHCR in Chad, a country where malaria claims the lives of thousands of young children every year.

Sapla - Swat Valley, Pakistan

Some days ago, I went to a hospital in Peshawar to meet people from the Swat district who had been injured and who subsequently lost their homes. I had not clearly pictured in my mind what I would see there; I expected amputations and fractures. Instead, I saw bodies completely burned, open wounds, children's faces that had lost their pigmentation, a baby's burned feet. I heard the crying of women and children in pain.

Sapla* is a young mother from Balogram in the Swat Valley whose family used to raise dairy cattle and other livestock. The 25-year-old is in a hospital room with her three surviving children. Her back and breasts are cracked with severe burns. She has open wounds on her legs and arms and her face is bruised.

Sapla told me she was confused. "The first bomb landed in front of the house. Very soon after, a second and third bomb hit the room where we were. The room was dark. I could not see anything at first. My clothes caught fire, I was like a ball of fire. The roof collapsed. I just wanted to get out. People from the village came right away to help us, they wrapped me up in cloths. I could feel my skin burning – it was unbearable."

The family did a head count and realised the worst. "My three-year-old daughter, my mother-in-law and my brother-in-law, were dead. I could cope with the pain," Sapla said, sobbing, "if only my daughter were alive."

Displaced families like Sapla’s are a challenge for UNHCR. Isabelle Rivolet is a Senior UNHCR Protection Officer in Peshawar. "The immediate response lies in proper medical care," she said of the wounded and displaced. "But their needs, as well as their families', have also to be placed in a context of displacement."

Meanwhile, Sapla does not blame anyone for what happened to her, but admits that she needs time to heal. "It was just God's will that we had to go through this," she said. "I don't feel angry, but I don't want to go back to Swat now. I need to feel better."