People without country

I spent the morning at a refugee camp built to provide short-term refuge for 5000 Liberians. Fifteen years after opening, it is now a teeming city with at least 45,000 exiled residents.

Liberia entered civil war in 1989 when Charles Taylor led a coup d'état. However, in the midst of the offensive, his supporters fractioned and began to fight against each other. The fighting escalated and has resulted in an exceedingly complex series of alliances, and attempted takeovers. A number of separate tribes/people groups have cycled through shifting loyalties and been on different sides of the conflict at different times. It has been a heinous war marked by torture, rape, child soldiers, and ethnic cleansing. Thousands and thousands of people have been forced to flee for their lives. Several peace accords have been signed, then broken. Refugees have fled and returned several times. The country remains in a state of chaos and destruction, with all hope focused on an election that will take place in October. There are more than 50 presidential candidates which in my opinion is not a promising sign. The odds that one of the 49 losers will be disgruntled enough to take up arms are and try to force his way to power seem high.

The living conditions at the camp are abysmal. No one expected it to last this long or grow this big. Only recently have parts of the camp been equipped with electricity (most areas do not yet have power). There is no running water, there are not enough toilets. A wooded area of the camp has become the public toilet, however it has also become a cauldron of criminal activity and is known as a place where people are raped or robbed.

These people are without country. The country they remember has been destroyed. Their families have been separated, social networks broken down, their cultural practices distorted and marred by warmongers. They are in a foreign nation with a different culture, a different language. They have enduring loss, horror and tragedy beyond imagination. The future remains precarious and uncertain…

I spent the morning with a group of teen-age mothers. We met in a counseling room without electricity meaning no fans or lights. We had to close the windows to keep our conversations private, yet the class did not keep out the sound of a blaring radio or a long line of people waiting to fill out forms for an office next door. The young women are all without family in the camp. A few of them “live” or at least sleep on the porch of an office building. Although they are at least fourteen and their bodies are physically able to bear children, malnutrition and the strain of war and refugee life has stunted their development such that several of them looked only 9 or 10. It was very strange to see them holding and nursing their own children.
All of these girls became pregnant after being raped. They have survived one of the most traumatic experiences a human being can go through and now they must struggle to keep themselves and their children alive. They are the most overlooked kind of war casualty. They have not been wounded in battle, but they are victims of a society that has broken down to the point of total depravity. Young women bear the brokenness of men who have been so destroyed by war and violence that in one girl’s words, “they cannot tell the difference between a human and an animal.”

It is hard to articulate what it felt like to be there. There are tears in my eyes while I write this. I feel sadness, but even more I feel moved with respect. Deep respect. In the face of such suffering, these young women still know how to laugh.
As a whole, the camp was full of life. Frustration and depression hung in the air, but it was combated by a sense of determination and gratitude for another day of existence. While I was there, I was in awe of the human ability to survive the unsurvivable, and create life out of ruins. In these moments, psychological theory fails me and I can only understand it as God’s tangible grace. Even in the wake of the ugliest human perpetrated atrocities, God is not absent, but intimately present in the reconstruction of human hearts and lives.

It was hard, very hard to enter such a desperate place, but it was not hopeless.