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Adventures in Kyangwali Refugee Camp - An Educate! Internship Participant Recounts Her Experience

By Sarah Tracy

We sat in a hut on little wooden benches while we waited for Chimpaye Perus's younger brother to fetch her from their small plot of land, where she was picking beans. My guide for the day, a stand-out Educate! student, Gaspari Innocent, brought me to her house in Kinakyeitaka because he knew that she was a good candidate for sponsorship.

She applied for sponsorship one year ago, but her application was held and she had not been admitted yet. She had been waiting patiently for one year.

Her mother seemed so happy to see me when I met her. She is lame and walks with a limp. Gaspari whispered in my ear that she often suffers from bouts of Malaria. She cannot fix the holes in the roof of their hut and does not cook much.

Perus cautiously stepped up to greet me after changing into her turquoise school uniform for the interview. She is radiant, but very shy. Gaspari helped me translate while I asked her questions about school and her favorite activities. She likes to read, cook cassava for her family, and she wants to be a nurse.

I met her father and he introduced himself to me very briskly, as if he were ashamed to see me there. Gaspari told me that he has other wives to whom he pays more attention and only comes by Perus's house for food and a place to sleep. He doesn't contribute a single shilling for schoolfees.

A few minutes later, along the way to the home of another young hopeful, I am in the middle of a tight circle of primary schoolchildren at Kinakyeitaka Primary School. I can feel their breath tickling my arms and I start to sweat as the sun beats down on my light skin that makes me a spectacle in the camp. Gaspari begins talking to them in Lunyoro, a language that they all understand.

I remember only the word for "hello", "oliyota," from our brief group language session that we had in Kampala, the nation's capital. Gaspari begins to give a lecture on the goals of the Educate! club that was founded in Kyangwali by a boy named Benson. Its name is COBURWA. The "CO" is for Congolese, "BU" for Burundi, and "RWA" for Rwandan. Supposedly they now have an entry fee of 40,000 Ugsh! Eric talked to Benson about setting up a bank account for COBURWA and also about including a "Su" for Sudanese, to lower the tension within the camp between Congolese and Sudanese Educate! fans. Really, there are fans!

Signs were posted on trees everywhere along the path to St. Patrick's (a Catholic church with lodging that served as our home base for the week). These signs said "welcome" with all of our names and one even said "Long live Eric!" We all laughed, but were horrified by the fact that they were practically worshipping him.

I met Soranje, my next interviewee, after being introduced to her tiny mother whose eyes sparkled when she grasped my hand with both of hers. Soranje and her older brother Zabos showed me to a private alcove beside their hut and I started asking questions, carefully and slowly, about Soranje's schooling and their family's financial situation.

Soranje's voice cracked when she spoke and she looked uncomfortable. Zabos was on the verge of tears when I said that we could only sponsor Soranje right now, and maybe we could sponsor him later. He did so much for her, including writing e-mails to me in her name, and nearly forgot all about himself. He doesn't have enough money from bean and maize sales to pay for his schooling this upcoming semester. Soranje looked underfed and small. She didn't have a school uniform. I left her to go back to school and Zabos followed me around the camp for the rest of the day, despite his tired feet and growling stomach.

On the way home that night, I met a father of five children whose leg was decapitated by a bomb in Rwanda. It's so difficult to be crippled in Kyanwali because families live off of what they grow and sell from their plots of land, and if you can't tend to your plot of land you will suffer. I took the two kittens at St. Patrick's to bed with me that night for extra comfort and fell asleep curled up on the floor.

The next day, Gaspari introduced me to a widow and her oldest daughter, Dinah, who is eleven years old. Dinah was adorable and she understood English better than her mother did. Her mother desperately wants to give her children a chance to become well-educated and successful.

Gaspari did a good job of translating for me, but when I asked Dinah what job she would like to have when she grew up, he gave her three examples (nurse, doctor, engineer), which I was afraid would narrow her response, since at first she had said "I don't know." I was glad when she said something different-a mathematics teacher.

I met a young boy who wants to be a dentist and took a photo with him. He wants to provide refugees with dental care when he grows up because few can afford it and many have major cavities and missing teeth. It turns out that he is also super at drama and really dedicated to COBURWA. We discovered this when we saw him perform in the Educate! Day Celebration.

Due to a series of interviews that lasted longer than expected, I was late to the celebration and had to borrow someone's bicycle. I pedaled while Guma, my good friend, pen pal and Educate! student, rode on the back because his legs were tired.

The bike had no brakes and extremely skinny tires. I couldn't reach the ground with my feet and Guma kept saying "try to control it" in a calm voice as we sped down the hills and bounced everywhere over the bumps, avoiding pedestrians, boda bodas, other bikes, and cars. It was the craziest bike ride of my life!

I arrived at Kinakyeitaka Primary School half and hour late and the celebration was being help up just for me! We sat in a row of chairs under a tent and listened to music and the COBURWA anthem. We saw traditional dancers dressed in purple and white for Amherst College, ate some posho, beans, rice, cabbage and matoka, and watched the COBURWA members perform a play about refugees. One of them played the role of Eric-camera, backpack, and all.

The play was elaborate, with costumes, memorized lines, and loads of props. Each of us gave a speech, and I talked about adding an "S" for Sudanese to COBURWA. My speech began with a statement about "mahoro," which means "peace" in Lunyoro. The tension between different nationalities in the camp arises from outside organizations sponsoring students from only one of the nationalities and from unfair, Sudanese-biased, resettlement processes.I had a microphone to speak into and the Bahati, one of the leaders of COBURWA, was my translator.

Everything was so well run and organized. The COBURWA club raises money to pay for books and school fees for primary school students in the camp. Its members are some of the best Congolese students in the camp. They dig for money. We saw a duo of young men do a crazy pelvic dance and nicknamed them "the gyrators." The whole celebration lasted nearly seven hours and throughout the celebration, over fifty applications found their way into our hands and pockets. I felt so overwhelmed.

That night, I read through a stack of forty applications before I went to sleep.

Back in NYC, at 11:30pm, the middle of the night Uganda time, Eric and I were eating dinner at a small French restaurant across the street from Boris's apartment. We told him some good stories and talked about Educate's aims as well as money matters that kind of went over my head. After dinner, I had to call a taxi and pay fifty dollars for it to take me through Brooklyn and back to my hotel door. That is ten dollars short of enough money to sponsor a primary school student for one semester. "Ridiculous!" is all I can mutter, as I climb out of the backseat of the car. And it is ridiculous.

We cannot change the way money works, but we can change how we spend it. Education is a smart thing to spend it on, don't you agree?