MY CHILDHOOD IN A REFUGEE CAMP

My Childhood in a Refugee Camp Espoire Habimana

I grew up in war conflicts believing that there was no hope for a better future for children. As a child in war conflicts, I lived in constant fear of war with no idea of how the conflict began in the first place.

Children are the most vulnerable ones in these conflicts that they did not cause. War affects every aspect of a child’s development. Children impacted by armed conflict can be injured or killed, uprooted from their homes and communities, internally displaced or refugees, orphaned or separated from their parents and families, subjected to sexual abuse and exploitation, victims of trauma as a result of being exposed to violence, deprived of education and recreation, and at risk of becoming child soldiers. Many children like myself never knew what it was like to live in a peaceful democratic country. Somehow war became a new normal.

I was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo during a war that has killed over 6 million innocent people over the past two decades. The war took the lives of some of the members of my family, friends, colleagues and neighbors. And, rape against women has become of the tool of the war.

At an early age I found myself in a refugee camp where we had absolutely nothing. Our parents lost everything they had worked for their whole lives. As a child first you see the hopeless face of your parents. Nothing is a worse defeat in life than for children in conflict war to see their parents – whom they once saw as super heroes – as powerless and hopeless about the future.

One thing I believe helped me, as well as other millions of children who find themselves in these political conflicts, is playing. My choice was to play soccer. Playing as a child was a refuge from all the misery that surrounded me. It was also a meditation that would take me to a fantasy world where I got to be very creative in finding ways to invent new games to play. Personally, I believe that the reason I never had trauma from the horror I faced as a child was because of playing. We used to play even though we sometimes did not get enough to eat.

We used to make our own soccer balls out of plastic bags and clothing we could never wear again. Nothing felt better in the refugee camps than being the child who had the soccer ball or who knew how to make the good one that could bounce up higher. Looking back at trying to make the perfect ball, we forget how genius we became by trying new things. We used to take a balloon, fill it up with air, then cover it gently with plastic bags and cloth, then sew it up so that it would not break.

Whenever we were not making these soccer balls we were running behind old car or bicycle tires with sticks in a game we used to call “driving a car.” As children in our situation nothing felt better in life than knowing you had the power to create something that was very useful. In the refugee camps, besides spending hours standing in line to fill large jugs with water, there was nothing else for children like myself to do besides playing outside. Most of us would only go indoors in the tents just to sleep.