Concerns

Nguenyyiel. Refugees. Refugee camp. South Sudan. War. I just can’t picture it. Visualizing it is still near to impossible even after weeks of reading about it, or what’s worse: the more I read the more complex it all gets and thus harder for me to imagine. 

I also read that important international organizations, the kind that have many acronyms in their names, agree that education in refugee camps is of paramount importance because it restores a certain sense of normalcy to children, in addition to helping them to become productive members of society.

Leaving issues about normality aside, I found it hard to reconcile this statement with the appalling statistics we are presented with a few lines later about fear, violence and hunger. 

Confession: Even though I have been a teacher for some years, I can’t really say I know what education is, regardless of my serious attempts to face the question. 

What I do know: At Nguenyyiel there are children, there are teachers, there is some sort of school and my task is to help the teachers from that school provide a better education to those children. 

What I don’t know: What to do. What kind of curricula is relevant in situations like these? What deserves to be called education in those cases? What can you ask from them and what should you offer children who have been first hand witnesses of the worst sides of men?

Right now I chose to weave through dialogue with questions that can help us find each other. If freedom was to be a colour, which one would it be? If family was to be an animal, what animal would it be? What about peace? However, there is one that sticks with me: If education in this site was to be a bird, could it fly?

Dust

The omnipresence of poverty shocks me. Misery spills through every front: you can look at it, listen to it, smell it, touch it with your hand. It fuses with non-misery and challenges it, turning it also miserable. Bothering. The very least is lots among those who have nothing. 
The gaze lands inevitably over layers of decay: Half-built buildings, half-built streets, houses that only made it to the attempt, cars on the verge of collapsing, amassed garbage. And everything is insistently covered by dust.  
You don’t get to not see it. There is nowhere to hide, it is impossible to dodge and hope to forget. Poverty is everywhere and from the second floor of the sad and chipped building where I sleep you can see those who have nothing passing by. And from the bus that’s still standing thanks to some magic spell, you can see those who have nothing. And from the street, on foot, you can see the ones who no longer have the strength or the will to keep walking.