Stayees and the people who have sense

And then, the realisation that the people who suffered most after a refugee crisis lasting many years were actually those who stayed at home (now after years granted their own bit of jargon: ‘stayees’). In Juba in 2005 the Juba people saw themselves as heroes for having lived through 20 years of hell (and it was truly grim) and the SPLM who believe they should be grateful for being liberated (and incidentally should give up their posts and jobs to the incoming SPLMs who ‘enjoyed’ -- according to Juba people -- in exile). The people coming back from 15 years in refugee camps in Uganda were taller, healthier and much better educated than those who had stayed at home. Something which was the case in eastern Congo also where refugees came back who had had no interruption to their education when they were in exile, to live among a mentally, and sometimes physically, stunted (better word xx) population whose schools had all been closed for years.

In another place, aid workers could be heard actually to question whether a water supply or an electricity supply was a good thing. Questions no one would dream of asking in Ghana or Kenya, or in Europe.

And then what about the time when the wars in Congo were dying down and the UN system declared that it was now time for the population to start going back home to Bunia. A whole integrated programme was mounted along the route from North Kivu, way stations provided with water and so on. But no one went. Why? Well once again, no one actually asked the people. Their children were all in school. The school year had three months to run and there were important exams to take. No one was going to move until they were over.

During all this, I wondered how we forgot, occasionally, our common sense. One of the kindest people I know who over the years, by his practical approaches has made life easier for so many people in conflict and post-conflict areas, seriously suggested, after the massacres in Bunia that one way to guarantee a better future would be to make sure that we only aided schools where all the children of the warring tribal groups attended together. This was just months after massacres, when the communal graves were everywhere What parent would take (or send) her child across the increasingly serious line between the factions to make an ideological point?