What life is like when you go back to your Country

Written by Florisa | 04 June 2010

From December 2009:

In Burundi we visited a resettlement camp for returnees i.e. people who return to their country of nationality, after having lived elsewhere as

refugees, in some cases their entire lives. Our blog www.thereishopemalawi.info/blog contains more stories, but there is one major factor that affects the quality of lives of returnees: their level of education / vocational skills.

Take Papa Noel (in the photo with his sewing machine). This is an adult man—born in a Tanzanian refugee camp, where he married a fellow Burundian born in the same camp. Their children were born in Tanzania. Last year they “returned” to Burundi where they belong. Their UN-built shelter is a space of 13 square feet, made of a tin roof, plastic sheets for “walls”, a wooden door and a hard mud floor. The space serves as a bedroom (for adults and children of both genders together), a living room, a storage space for food, clothes, etc, and a working space for Papa Noel. Apart from farming, in the Tanzanian refugee camp he learnt tailoring, which is now his only hope of a livelihood. The vast majority of returnees are only skilled as farmers, and now therefore idle and poor, as they have no land because of disputes over land rights that affect the whole country. This is why There is Hope believes in equipping refugees while in exile to study and acquire skills, useful wherever life may take them next.

The man in the below picture said to us: “It is unspeakable joy to be back in a country that I can call my own, but it is unspeakable pain to endure the scorn of not being able to access the wealth that my parents had struggled to build.”