Becky Palmstrom

Published as a blog with the New Internationalist, here.

We are pushing our way through a mass of sweating women in brightly colored headscarves. On this particular morning, I am joining my students in performing that most loathed of activities: cutting a line. Glimpses of faces and bodies appear, then blur back into this throng of femininity: the hips of a Congolese grandmother, rounded and draped in green; a tear shining on someone’s cheek; an adolescent collarbone jutting out from a pink Lycra shirt. We are all headed toward a warehouse in the middle of a 20-year-old refugee camp in Kenya.
We are still far back, jammed in lines that weave and pulse their way into the warehouse, like veins to a pumping heart. But we are frantic: it can take all day to wait in these queues, and our small gang does not want to linger for hours in 110-degree heat, and I am supposed to be running a workshop that officially started two hours ago… and that is how I find myself queue-jumping an aid distribution line.

Operation Queue Jump is a ragtag bunch. Cala offers us determination; Amida is the strategist; Kailey has her sharp tongue, essential for clearing people from our path. Then there’s me, aged 27, a Welsh graduate student turned aid worker. My greatest contribution is my white skin – a ticket to privilege among the black, earthy and golden tones of one of the most cosmopolitan refugee camps in the world.

The Lutheran World Federation, the NGO running this particular handout, does not assign appointment times, so twenty thousand women wait for four or five hours in the baking heat to collect their aid. This is the way all distributions in Kakuma Refugee Camp work, from food to firewood. In the two-decade history of the camp, neither the NGOs nor the United Nations has come up with a better alternative.

‘You will go first, Becky,’ Amida, the planner, says, as she leads us away from these queues to the line at the back door of the warehouse.

‘We will follow,’ says Kailey.

The tools I teach in my video production workshops often seem less valuable than the privilege my students gain from my personal proximity. It lets them wander into the gated NGO compound, ensures us meetings with important people in the camp, and, as now, saves hours of waiting for basic necessities.

Cala laughs at how much of life’s basic workings she must explain to me. The bimonthly ritual of aid distributions has governed her whole life. She is originally from Sudan and is a noncitizen of Kenya, the country she has lived in all her life. She has no family. She dropped out of school in the camp early, but not before she learned English and Ki-Swahili, the lingua franca of Kakuma. Although her writing is patchy, her dark eyes flash with intelligence. They gleam as she pushes me through the crowd.

I take a breath, put my head down, and pretend that I am burrowing, instead of pushing my way through mothers, daughters, and wives. Kailey shouts at people to let us through. I hear Cala and Amida giggling behind me. I apologize when I feel the crunch of someone’s foot beneath mine.

Just as we reach the fence at the front of the line, we see her: the gatekeeper.

She is drenched in sweat and wields a white stick as she herds women back from the wire fence protecting the warehouse. Like almost everyone with authority in the camp, she is Kenyan.

Refugee camps bring trade, infrastructure and employment to certain regions, like this poor corner of Kenya. The international community donates most of the money that keeps Kakuma running, with the agreement that Kenyans get the jobs. Most of the time the jobs don’t go to the local population, the Turkana tribe, which has an even lower literacy rate than the refugees and higher levels of malnutrition, but to more educated folks from Nairobi, like this woman with her stick.

For the women crammed against the wire fence that morning, she is all that stands between them and today’s aid allotment: a few bars of soap or a couple of bags of soap powder, two pairs of ladies’ underwear, thirty disposable sanitary pads, and two washable pads, all meant to last four to six months. Some 20,000 women here each received 64 disposable pads last year, while an average North American woman uses 264 sanitary items per year.

The refugees of Kakuma come from many conflict-stricken African countries, such as Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Forbidden to settle in Kenya, Kakuma’s 76,000 residents have no option but to wait for resettlement elsewhere. Kenya has nearly 400,000 refugees, mainly restricted to camps which seem designed to keep refugees from getting too comfortable and neglecting to emigrate or go home.

The United States usually accepts less than a fourth of this number each year from across the entire world, and it is one of the largest recipients of refugees. As the number of refugees far outweighs the number of resettlement spots, most people spend years waiting. Thus, temporary places of protection have morphed into modern-day purgatories, limbos, waiting rooms. More than ten million encamped refugees worldwide have fallen through the gap between nation-states.

I came here to train refugees in filmmaking, in part to allow people to tell their own stories in their own words, for what good it might do them, and in part to shed some light on what it means to spend so much of your life waiting.

Published as a blog in the New Internationalist, here.

In camp myths, the name Kakuma means ‘nowhere’.

From the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, most aid workers fly 530 miles over the Great Rift Valley which splits this part of Africa in half. Passing the glittering waters of Lake Turkana, turn left at the Ethiopian and Sudanese borders, and just when it seems you might crash into the lush mountains of Uganda, you will see it, springing up from the desert plains: row upon row of corrugated tin roofs and mud homes. The earth is cracked by years of baking under a hostile sun.

Behind walls of recycled plastic bags stitched together and under roofs made of World Food Program cans hammered flat lives a population almost the size of Berkeley, California.

This is nowhere.

Living Nowhere.

Nowhere has bad drainage. The unpaved roads don’t usually need it, since the region averages less than 12 inches of rain per year. But I arrived to storm clouds – and streets already swamped with murky water. The indispensable white 4×4 van that carried us and our equipment through the camp on our filmmaking missions was covered in mud those first few days.

‘When it rains, the streets of Somalia smell so bad,’ said Abdul, a skinny 18-year-old who talks too fast in every one of the four languages he uses. He was sitting up front just then, where he could manage the music, while the rest of us crammed into the back.

‘Somalia does not smell as bad as Ethiopia,’ 17-year-old Amran shouted, hitting him on the head, yet somehow keeping her headscarf tucked in place. The yelling moved between Ki-Swahili and English and back again. Abdul updated his Facebook profile through his phone and yanked up his baggy jeans.

By Ethiopia, Amran didn’t mean the country between Sudan and Somalia. She was talking about a stretch of market in Kakuma, where the 6,000 Ethiopian residents live, many of the other camp residents shop, and the impoverished local population, the Turkana, sell firewood in exchange for some of the refugees’ food rations.

When Kakuma residents say Baghdad, they don’t mean the Iraqi capital, either, but the area of the camp favoured for drinking local home brew, fist-fighting, and passing out in the street. For these young people, this cosmopolitan encampment is the whole world.

The whole world.

The camp was built in 1992, when the Kenyan government carved out a space for the thousands of Sudanese ‘Lost boys’ fleeing across the border 80 miles to the north. Despite growing to hold 76,000 residents, in certain ways, Kakuma Refugee camp is still a temporary fixture on the harshest landscape in Kenya. Over time, other people fleeing conflicts and persecution arrived: Ugandans, Rwandese, Congolese, Ethiopians, Eritreans, Burundis, and Somalis.

In a way this is a temporary country, now composed of 14 nationalities; 88 churches and mosques; 12 primary schools; one hospital; one high school; three graveyards; three libraries; and any number of ‘hotels’, as they call the small restaurants. It has its own laws, regulations, and customs. Yet this is a country almost entirely reliant on social security handouts meted out by the humanitarian aid workers – the de facto government.

Kenyan law stipulates that refugees cannot leave the camps without a permit. The camp residents are not allowed to work for a real wage, own property, or grow almost anything in the dusty soil, and so they are forced into dependency, often for decades; the average protracted refugee situation lasts for 17 years. As Jeff Crisp, head of policy development for the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees writes in the Refugee Survey Quarterly, ‘The right to life has been bought at the cost of every other right.’

In not out.

Like the concentration camps upon which the first post-World War Two refugee camps were modeled, control of the residents seems as crucial as protection of them. Lives are summed up in measurements: 2,100 calories of food per day, 2.5 liters of drinking water, and shelters that measure 3.5 square metres. One of my students called Kakuma a ‘cold, hard prison’ – somewhat ironic, since he fled persecution in search of a better life.

Picking out the ironies of Kakuma would become part of life here for the next six weeks, as would generators, sweet Ethiopian coffees called macchiatos, red tablets to overcome iron deficiency, endless meals of cabbage, and accompanying my students on the quest for ladies’ necessities.

Published as a blog in the New Internationalist, here.

The gatekeeper with the stick is in midscream when she sees me.

Cala, Kailey, Amida, and I are now crammed against the fence. My smallest finger curls around the wire. The woman’s face changes; she recognizes I am an obvious member of the ‘aid worker’ set and shouts at the other women to let us through. I put my hand on Cala’s and talk about the importance of my workshop and why these women can’t spend five hours in a queue that day. Suddenly, we stumble into the warehouse clearing.

Kailey, like Cala, is Sudanese and grew up in Kakuma. Since Cala has no family, both she and Kailey live with Kailey’s mother in a tiny shack. Kailey often uses her mobile phone as a speaker to play music, and the two of them dance, to shrieks of applause from my other students. Cala is the quieter of the two, and the more stubborn. Her face stays blank right up until the moment she bursts into giggles. Amida, the third woman with me on this mission, arrived in the camp a year ago from Congo and is not as confident in English or in the rhythm of camp life.

Within minutes they are all clutching bags bulging with feminine goodies. We drag ourselves back through the disgruntled throng.

We are sweating, but triumphant. I see the green plastic packages of Naturelle pads already arrayed on the dusty ground for sale next to the line. Amida, Kailey, and Cala will sell some of their feminine products to buy fresh vegetables, milk, and clothes. None of these items are provided by the camp, but they can be obtained in the markets, which are supplied by outside traders. Life in Kakuma requires constant negotiations.

Constant negotiations.

When their supply of pads runs low, women look for alternatives (reusable pads, old clothes, paper) or ways to make money so they can buy more disposable pads. One option is also to use the washable pads the NGOs hand out. Washing the pads requires water, which is only available at certain times of day and must be carried from shared taps through the streets. When the allotted soap is used up, more must be bought in ‘Ethiopia’ at more than a dollar per bar. In addition to this, carrying soiled reusable pads around in 110-degree heat is unpleasant, my students tell me; it puts students off coming to school.

The Lutheran World Federation now gives extra pads to girl students attending classes. But that’s still not enough for everyone.

‘The pads usually don’t last until the next distribution,’ one woman tells me. She has sex with men, for less than sixty cents each time, to earn money for milk for her child, lotion to protect against the dry climate, clothes, and sanitary wear. She never uses condoms. The men don’t like them.

A report released last year by the Humanitarian Accountability Project confirms what women tell me: that the lack of alternative livelihoods pushes women to trade sex for clothes, lotion, and pads.

On the world’s television screen, refugees are almost always seen as products of the conflicts they fled, their past, and as problematic immigrants arriving in Western countries, embracing their future. What we forget is their story in between: often, decades spent in refugee camps, waiting. They are almost never understood as existing in an extended present, a nowhere place, like Kakuma.

Extended presence.

In contrast, in that ongoing present, I notice people rarely speak of their past. Although I spend many hours talking with my students, I never ask why they left their home countries. It seems taboo. Instead, I wait for them to bring up personal anecdotes and stories. But they seem to prefer focusing on day-to-day moments.

One of the things we do talk about is women’s panties. Victoria’s Secret lists seven distinct panty categories, and hundreds of colors and patterns. In Kakuma, when the underwear is included in those seasonal distributions, there are only four options: small, medium, large, and extra large. All are variants of the granny-pant.

‘We don’t want to wear them,’ Joyce says, swinging her bag. ‘They are so unsexy.’

An employee of the Lutheran World Federation designed the panties herself, here in the camp. Some refugee women make the panties, using 19 sewing machines. The women are paid 20 Kenyan shillings (23 US cents) for each pair they stitch. Amida thinks the low price shows.

‘They fall apart,’ she whispers. Everyone screams with laughter. Amida speaks English accented with the French she learned in Congo. Her family converted from Catholicism to Islam recently, and she tosses her veil over her head haphazardly as she walks. She often forgets to wear it.

‘They’re made for old women,’ Cala agrees. Kailey puts one hand up to her mouth to guffaw. She wraps her other arm around Cala’s shoulders. Living together as they do, they act like best friends or sisters. Their skinny frames shake with laughter. At moments like these, it’s easy to forget that both Cala and Kailey are mothers.

Not what I want.

For schoolgirls only slightly younger than Cala and Kailey, the underwear is sometimes too big, Cala and Kailey say. But just as some refugees find ways to work illegally outside the camp or to escape to Nairobi without an official permit, others find ways to bring different types of underwear into the camp.

‘You can buy nice panties in “Ethiopia”,’ Kailey says, referring to the main place to buy black market clothes. Cala nods. The nice panties, which include lace and tiger print varieties, are trucked in from Nairobi by Somali or Ethiopian traders. But they must be paid for. ‘You need money for nice things,’ Amida says, playing with the plastic bracelets that jangle at her wrist. She wishes she had more nice things.

But, my students inform me, it could be worse. We could be in Dadaab. Dadaab is a series of camps 450 miles away, where 270,000 more refugees live; in Dadaab there is not enough funding to offer any sanitary pads or underwear. Kakuma, with its unsexy panties, is known among aid workers as a five-star camp. The residents are reminded to be grateful.

Published as a blog with the New Internationalist, here.

Sadia is not grateful.

Sadia is sick of waiting. The 19-year-old is tired of putting her life on hold while her application for resettlement is processed.

She is short and sturdily built. She is Ethiopian and teaches me the difference between the Oromo and the Tigray. She tells me when it is appropriate to tell people off for being late, and informs me which communities are arguing that week. She leads workshops with me. When Cala and Kailey start missing class, she marks their absences beside their names with tuts of disapproval.

Sadia is also an exception, in that she talks about the past. ‘Becky, I want you to take my story,’ she says to me one day as we both sit in the office. ‘I want you to tell people what happened,’ she says. ‘Maybe it will help. Maybe someone in America will hear and they will help me leave. I want to leave. I want to study.’

The generator stops humming. When lunchtime hits in Kakuma, the lights switch off, and darkness and silence pour into the room.

Sadia tells her story carefully, administering it in small sips, like medicine that is hard to swallow. ‘My parents were taken,’ she says. ‘Back in Ethiopia. I was 15.’ There is deadness in her eyes.

I bring my head closer to hear the words that catch in her throat.

‘Then they came for me,’ she says.

‘I was in jail for two weeks. They would tie my hands and put me down a hole – hanging there for days. Beside that pit was a pit for the people who died. They would beat me. We ate the scraps left over from their meal. They kept asking: were your parents part of the Oromo Liberation Front? I said I was still a child – I didn’t know what that was.

‘It was in the jail that I was raped. They all raped me.’ Her son is from the rape. At school here in Kakuma, she says, other Ethiopians beat him and call him names.

I want to reach out and touch her, but she doesn’t look like the woman I worked with every day. The Sadia I knew plastered her golden face in my white sunscreen, removing her veil to get the cream in properly. She sang along to the radio at the top of her lungs, and shamelessly teased everyone about their love life. But this woman is smaller.

‘Now, I’m just waiting,’ she says, as we sit together in the darkened room. ‘I need a new life somewhere new.’

‘Can you help, Becky?’

She is not the only one to ask.

* * The Waiting Place… For people just waiting.

Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come, or a plane to go or the mail to come, or the rain to go or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow or waiting around for a Yes or No or waiting for their hair to grow. Everyone is just waiting.

Waiting for the fish to bite or waiting for wind to fly a kite or waiting around for Friday night or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake or a pot to boil, or a Better Break or a string of pearls, or a pair of pants or a wig with curls, or Another Chance. Everyone is just waiting. – Dr Seuss.

Published as a blog with the New Internationalist, here.

Everyone wants to start life over somewhere else.

People’s fortunes rise and fall according to the resettlement lists posted at the UN compound every week. The citizens of Kakuma talk about asylum countries the way they discuss their favorite football teams (Manchester United and Chelsea). They rely on information gleaned from the Kakuma rumour mill, the generator-fueled televisions that play at the ‘hotels’ at night, and those who have gone before.

‘Australia’s the best,’ someone says. ‘It only takes a year for the paperwork. It’s really fast.’ Australia, though, won’t take people who fail parts of their medical examination, particularly those with HIV/AIDS.

‘America’s tough since 9/11,’ someone else says. ‘It takes forever.’

An Ethiopian friend, Mamush, calls me, excited and drunk. He has spent his entire adult life in Kakuma – waiting for this day. ‘I am going to America, Becky,’ he cries. He left his country when he was 21 years old. He is now 42 – and during that time in Kakuma, or ‘the crossroads’ as he calls it, he has been ‘waking up each morning and trying to find a way of killing time.’ He tells me I don’t understand what time means in Kakuma, because I act as though there is not enough of it. ‘For us, Becky, there is too much.’

When I see him the next day, he tells me he will meet Obama in America. He tells me he will write books. He tells me Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela represent the greatness of America. ‘In America there is freedom,’ he says. ‘I want freedom.’

Mamush has seven days to say goodbye to everyone he knows. I ask him where in America he is going. ‘I don’t know,’ he says. He hasn’t checked yet. I ask him what he will do once he gets there. ‘I will do anything,’ he says. ‘I have been waiting my whole life – and now this is my reward. This is the end of my journey.’ A week or so later he will arrive in Baltimore.

Everyone is somewhere on the path to resettlement.

‘I was supposed to go to America,’ says Andrew, 30, a towering Sudanese teacher. ‘But September 11 happened and they stopped my case.’ Andrew is one of the Lost Boys, the first refugees to come to Kakuma. He and thousands of others walked there from Sudan in 1992. Almost 4,000 Lost Boys were resettled in the America in 2000. Andrew was not among them.

I tell him that his application might have been rejected because he said he handled a gun and fought in Ethiopia when he was seven years old. If you admit to fighting in a conflict, you are often denied resettlement in America. He doesn’t seem to hear. He still hopes that America might change its mind.

‘Until then, I’m still lost,’ he says.

Published as a blog with the New Internationalist, here.

When people stumble off the small World Food Program (WFP) plane, they are often greeted with a hearty ‘How is Kenya doing?’

As time goes on, it seems more and more appropriate: Kakuma is not Kenya. When people introduce themselves here they say ‘I am Sudanese by nationality…’, as if there is a second half of the sentence… ‘but really I don’t know where I belong.’ People talk about Kenya as though it is a vague shape on the horizon somewhere else, instead of the ground beneath our feet, just as Uganda is the place where the rains occasionally come from and Sudan is where the ivory bracelets for trade originate, so Kenya is elsewhere. Here is Kakuma – it belongs to no-one. With none of the rights of Kenyan citizens, third generations of young people grow up here, unsure what nationality they really are.

Here, in these nowheres, people lose their working life, their childhood, their sense of nationality. They wait. But while they wait, they grow old, fall in love, kill time, have babies, watch premier league football matches, lose sleep, tell stories, build churches, catch up on sleep, go to school, create mosques, braid hair, menstruate, argue with neighbours, drink tea, check facebook, drink beer, dream, get married and, much to the frustration of NGOs, pass on rumours.

Like the one about MixMe.

Exercise.

The discussion starts because of a blue and orange t-shirt. Affiliation between t-shirt bearer and t-shirt message is not crucial, I soon realize. NGO clothing sells for 500 KS ($6.20) in Kakuma’s Ethiopia. But, I still don’t know this and the shirt bears the logo of the food supplement, MixMe, on the left breast.

MixMe prevents anemia, says WFP. The refugees say it prevents babies.

I ask if anyone eats it.

‘They put family planning in it,’ Sadia answers, surprised at my ignorance.

‘Oh Becky,’ she says in a fit of giggles. ‘No-one eats it.’

If people do try it, the powder is almost tasteless, though some people say it tastes of iron. It comes in handy as an adhesive when mixed with water. It is used for fixing broken shoes, or gluing together iron roofing.

‘It sticks to the ground like glue,’ says one boy. He postulates on how the active MixMe ingredients might interact with human stomach acid to dire affect. Eating it is not worth the risk, he concludes.

MixMe is not wholly useless to the economy of the camp, however – people are paid to collect the packages – strewn in the dusty soil at the end of food distributions. A nutrition survey in March last year was puzzled as to why there was ‘no significant drop in anemia rates among women of reproductive age’1 and calls for investigation into the low uptake of MixMe despite its distribution.

For 16-year old Libin, the reason is obvious: ‘Giving us MixMe is all about reducing the population of Africa,’ she says. She knows she can’t be sure this is true but she doesn’t eat it all the same – just in case. In a few months from now, WFP will give up on changing hearts and minds and will burn its remaining stock.

Published with the New Internationalist as a blog, here.

On a large outdoor screen, the flickering image is several meters tall and illuminates the night. On screen, Rose Nakeny is sitting on the dusty ground outside her mud brick home, swatting the flies away from two children who wander in and out of the frame. Her face bears the marks of domestic abuse. She is drunk.

Rose Nakeny is one character in a series of short documentaries my students and I made during my workshops. This is the premiere, and the audience is made up of hundreds of Kakuma residents. I know the sequence by heart – I have spent four days drinking luminous green soda and editing the films alongside my students.

On screen, the interviewer asks Nakeny why she drinks. She says it is because of another child she had: a child she saw hacked to death by a man with a machete in Southern Sudan. She is slurring her words, obviously drunk.

Disconcertingly, the audience starts to laugh.

I stare at the crowd, unsure if I am interpreting the roar of sound correctly.

Nakeny continues to talk in the Dinka language, her words subtitled in English. ‘My child was killed,’ she says. ‘I take alcohol because of my child.’

Sadia shrugs. ‘There are just so many people like this, weeping about their past,’ she says. ‘She’s funny.’

I used to think storytelling was healing. The people I meet in Kakuma don’t seem to believe this. Most seem terrified of telling their stories. Perhaps they want to distance themselves from tragedies that are all too familiar. Perhaps they believe they too will be laughed at or seem self-pitying. Or perhaps they do not want to endure comparing their stories with others that are worse, or better.

Many refugees tell me they believe forgetting is the best way to deal with their past. Forgiveness is too much to ask, they say, unless you’re in America apparently, where it will be easier to forgive. How can they forgive the people who killed their parents, torched their homes, forced them to carry guns and commit murders, raped them, left them to walk away from everything they knew, facing wild animals or militias? And, so the logic of Kakuma says: if they are not going to forgive, then what is the point of remembering? Forgetting is sometimes the only defense one has.

Forget.

‘Everyone has a story here,’ says a Congolese resident. ‘People are tired of listening.’ There’s also the chance that you might end up living next to the people from the same community that set fire to your home. ‘You’re still living it here,’ he says. ‘It’s just not over yet.’

Sympathy, like everything else, is rationed in Kakuma. It makes storytelling as muddy as the streets after a storm.

I ask my boss to remove the Nakeny scene from the documentary. I don’t want her to be laughed at anymore.

Published as a blog with the New Internationalist here.

When you walk away: Take One

‘I couldn’t stay in the room,’ Scisa says. ‘I said I wouldn’t go to one of those meetings again.’

The 30-year-old incentive worker from Congo is talking about evacuation protocol and a meeting of humanitarian agencies about what happens if things go wrong. It’s an evacuation plan. It doesn’t include Cala, or Amida or Scisa. It doesn’t include any of my students. If the region becomes too violent, the expats and Kenyans (the first-class citizens of the camp) will be evacuated, leaving everyone else to fend for themselves.

‘It makes it hard to trust the NGOs or the UN,’ someone says. ‘How can you trust them?
If things get really bad, they’ll leave us.’

Everyone else nods in agreement.

‘How can you trust anyone who leaves you like that?’

Indeed.

When you walk away: Take Two

The sun is setting. I am standing on top of the white van, looking out over the camp. I can see Kakuma spread out, in its dusty, dirty, yet sunset-infused beauty. Even the rocks where people shit and the gulley where trash rots look glorious, from this distance. We will be showing our final films later that evening, and we’re exhausted from an intensive week of film editing.

In 10 hours I will be in an armed convoy driving towards the horizon, away from Kakuma. Soon, I will leave all this behind.

One of my students, Libin, is dressed in white from head to toe; she is dancing. Her whole figure looks like made of white linen. The cloth blows in a wind I can’t feel. Her limbs are like water – billowing out around her as she moves – and when she looks up at us, the world tilts and this feels like the center of everything.

Dance the pain away.

Cala and Kailey are sitting with their heads together, and I go over to them. Cala doesn’t look up, and Kailey silently leaves, making me the designated listener. Cala sits with her arms wrapped round her knees. I ask her if everything is okay.

‘I can’t stay with Kailey’s mother anymore.’ Cala says. ‘She doesn’t like the baby. She tells me to go out onto the street and sell my private parts.’

What about the NGOs in the camp, I ask. Could they help? A list of programmes available to women runs through my head. She has already tried.

‘They gave me some hand lotion,’ she says with disgust, and laughs a little under her breath.

‘When I told my boyfriend I was pregnant he hit me and said I was sleeping with other men,’ she says. Then when he ran away, she, like most single mothers in the camp, was called a prostitute. Soon there was no other way of making a living. ‘Now, I have to sleep with men.’

Cala is shivering. Her voice loses all its lulls and lilts.

‘I tried to hang myself,’ Cala says. ‘That’s why I missed the workshop on Tuesday and Wednesday.’ She licks her upper lip and moves to cross her legs.

‘Why did you do it?’ I ask.

‘I didn’t know what to do.’

‘What about your baby?’ I ask.

She scrunches up her shoulders, like a teenager shrugging off her parents’ nagging.

‘I don’t have anyone here, Becky,’ she says. ‘I am a size two.’

In Kakuma, people are given numbers to mark the size of their family, to determine how much food aid they receive. Until Cala had her baby, she was a size one, meaning she was an unaccompanied child.

‘My throat hurts,’ she says, from where the rope was. I try to talk about other options. I suggest ideas for other jobs she could do to earn money. I try to listen properly – I don’t want to lose her. I press into her hands all the money I have on me, but it is not enough to start over.

‘It is so hard,’ she says. ‘Just so hard. This is how we live.’

Almost every single mother I meet in the camp seems to have been pushed into a form of prostitution. Men will come at night to your home and insist on sleeping with you, they tell me. Your honour is ruined, and at the water tap in the mornings, other women push you to the back of the line and call you names.

The prejudice against women like Cala can be so palpable that redemption seems all but impossible.

I ask her what she wants.

‘A shop,’ she says, in the market. ‘I want to be able to make my own money.’

Hope.

People are gathering in front of the white van, ready for the film to begin. Someone, probably Abdul, is using the van speakers to blast his favorite Tanzanian pop.

Kailey comes over and puts her arms around Cala protectively. Together, we pull Cala to her feet. And suddenly, we are dancing.

It is a song I don’t know, but I dance. The air is full of music. I dance because I don’t know what to say. I dance because in this moment, I too want to forget, and want them to forget. I dance frantically and ridiculously to make Cala laugh. The moon rises. The sky is huge, and it feels as though we are dancing in it. The ground seems far below us.

As Burma’s people go to the polls this month in an election which is unlikely to change decades of military rule, Becky Palmstrom looks at how the urban poor survive in a country without working banks.

Yangon, Burma: A small boy with enormous eyes pushes a beat-up bike through the unpaved streets of Hlaing Tharyar, a township outside of Rangoon, Burma. In his hand, he clasps the equivalent of just over $1.70 in grubby local kyat notes. His name is Chit Thaw and he just turned eleven. This morning he is headed to the local pawnshop.

For Chit Thaw, borrowing money is a daily chore. His first loan takes place before breakfast, when he borrows 5000 kyat (around $5) from a neighbour. It must be paid back with ten per cent interest by the end of the day – which works out to a staggering annual percentage rate of 3650. Without a regulated system for borrowing money, the vast majority of Burmese people have no access to formal credit at all. Informal moneylenders and pawnshops are at the heart of half the population’s lives.

The money in Chit Thaw’s sweaty hand this morning is from the $5 loan of earlier that day. Every morning he takes the borrowed money and rides his family’s bike, standing upright to reach the pedals, across a bridge to a nearby market to buy fish paste. Fish paste, one of the staples of Burmese cooking, is a fermented, pungent mush that accompanies everything from breakfast noodles to soup.

It takes Chit Thaw over two hours to fetch the fish paste. In the cool time before sunrise he rides, past wood and tin shacks glowing with candlelight or the quiet of households still asleep. On the journey back, he passes empty fields covered with hand-washed plastic bags flapping in the wind, like injured birds stranded in the sun. In Hlaing Tharyar, plastic bags, just like everything else, have a price and these will be sold to brokers for recycling.

Chit Thaw takes the fish paste to his mother, who sits all day at her spot on the dusty ground of the market near their home. By the end of the day, they hope to have made back the 5000 kyat plus interest. Even if they temporarily escape from the daily grind of debt, all it takes is one visit to the doctor, a particularly strong storm damaging their flimsy roof, a funeral or a wedding and they are once more pushed into the hands of the loan sharks and pawnshops.
‘Every day we borrow, unless we have a good sale of fish paste on a Sunday,’ Chit Thaw explains. ‘We make the money a day at a time. Sometimes, we don’t have enough for rice, but we pay back the money.’ On those days when there is no money for food, Chit Thaw, his mother and his two sisters drink a glass of water to fill their bellies before they go to bed.

Chit Thaw pushes his bike hard to keep the stubborn wheels moving, eventually reaching a smart green building. It is cleaner and sturdier than any of the other buildings on the block. It was, after all, the pawnshop. Back from the wholesale market, it is into this building that Chit Thaw is headed.

Unlike downtown Rangoon, the British didn’t build their grand four-story terraces and colonial buildings in Hlaing Tharyar. It is a sprawling mass of tin, tarpaulin and wood, linked to the garment, battery and soap factories of Rangoon by ferries that pick their way across the grey river to collect the young women workers every morning and night. Open sewage, erratic electricity and dirty water mark the routines of daily life. What it lacks in crumbling charm it makes up for in the industriousness of its inhabitants.

The cottage industries here flourish despite, rather than thanks to the country’s military junta, which took power in 1962 and which with stage-managed elections this month will likely continue to rule the roost. The junta has mismanaged the economy for decades. It failed to put adequate controls on the banking system, which meant, that in 2002-2003, almost every bank was implicated in international money laundering. The result was almost every bank was closed.

Financial institutions fundamentally rely on trust in the government, something that few people have in a country where the government once made an overnight decision to devalue certain bank notes because of an astrologer’s predictions that those denominations were unlucky.

The other reason for the lack of functioning banks is government restrictions on interest rates, says Sean Turnell of Burma Economic Watch, which monitors the economic situation in Burma from Sidney, Australia. Although a few private banks opened this September, they are owned by businessmen with strong ties to the military elite and Turnell sees them more as ‘cash-boxes’ for these businesses rather than working banks. The government sets the interest rates at 12 and 17 per cent per annum, for deposits and loans respectively. ‘These rates are below the inflation rate – making both depositing and lending a losing proposition in real terms, and thus robbing the financial sector of any real financial intermediation role,’ says Turnell.These fixed interest rates minimize the interest the government has to pay against its own debts, he adds.

There are repercussions for Chit Thaw, too. To supplement his family’s daily loans, last month Chit Thaw borrowed $1.50 from the pawnshop. It was a tough month for his family; school fees were due. Tough months are frequent for families like his.

The government-licensed pawnshop’s interest rate of 15 percent is the same if you are borrowing just for the day or for the month, making the daily interest rate higher than the private lender Chit Thaw visits each morning. If, after three months, Chit Thaw cannot buy back the pawned item, it becomes the property of the pawnshop owner, who sells it back to the community at a bargain price.

The woman behind the counter is busy with a steady stream of customers. She barely looks at Chit Thaw. Droplets of sweat settle on her face as she searches out his account in her notebook. He hands over a small folded piece of paper.
‘1500 kyat?’ she says, checking the number. ‘And then interest.’
‘1,725 kyat,’ Chit Thaw says, counting out his money.
‘There we go,’ she says, wiping her face with her sleeve, as she hands over a neatly folded traditional Burmese sarong, known as a longyi. It once belonged to Chit Thaw’s father, who died of tuberculosis when Chit Thaw was two-years old.
‘I miss him,’ Chit Thaw says, ‘But all my memories of him are vague. Now I have to look out for my mother.’

Nobody wears the longyi; it is a memento of a father, but it is also collateral for the loans the family needs. Pawnshops evaluate the value of clothes based on how worn they look, so, it is better not to wear clothes you pawn. Some people in this area share pots and plates with their neighbours as their own sit in the pawnshops.
Chit Thaw’s transaction, a loan of $1.50 is as close as most people in Burma ever get to a formal system of borrowing money.

‘I don’t ask people their stories when they come in for money,’ says one pawnshop employee, whose shop sits along the single rail track that circles the city. ‘It makes people uncomfortable or embarrassed,’ he says with calm pragmatism. Behind him a few sewing machines hang from hooks along the walls, like carcasses strung up at an abattoir. Piles of unclaimed items are wrapped in newspaper and arranged in precarious piles. The old clothes and cooking utensils lying in the pawnshop are both desperate and mundane moments condensed into solid form: the hospital bill, the journey to visit a dying relative, the school fees, the love affair that ended badly. A man enters the store clasping a sewing machine to his chest and unable to hide the drunken stagger in his walk.

‘My sister had a fight with her husband.’ he says. ‘They were fighting all night – she needs a ticket to leave town.’ The pawnshop manager redoubles the knot of his blue-checkered longyi and motions the man to put his sewing machine down. The manager places his hand across it, like he’s stroking an animal. Sewing machines in Burma look like they are from a 19th century Victorian novel; electric sewing machines, just like electric irons, have no place in a country where blackouts are so common.

The manager pauses to weigh up the desperate stance of the man in front of him and the quality of the machine.
‘15,000 kyat,’ he says, the equivalent of $15. As the man staggers out, holding his money, the manager turns to me. He admits business has been good in recent years.
In 2008, cyclone Nargis struck Burma, leaving 138,000 dead and leaving a further 2.4 million severely affected. Those who still had collateral to pawn went in droves, eager to borrow money to repair their homes and tide them over. As the global financial crisis has made things worse, in Burma, pawnshops are about the only industry that is thriving.

This is as close as most of the 59 million citizens of Burma get to a financial institution. Sean Turnell sees such institutions as the ‘canary in the coal mine’. ‘They are the first signal of a political economy that is dysfunctional,’ he says. ‘They trade in products that are simply based on trust, backed by the law and convention. The principal assets of [a financial institution] of course are the loans that it makes, but these are simply “promises to (re)pay” when all is said and done. If there is any doubt that this will take place, perhaps because of monetary and/or political uncertainty, these are worth nothing at all.’

As Chit Thaw negotiates his bike and his father’s clothes out of the pawnshop, he raises an arm to cover a yawn. He was up at 4.30 this morning.

By the time night falls the people will swarm to the child-sized tables of the teashops, to drink Chinese tea and sugary coffee mix and watch the generator-powered TVs. It is at this point that Chit Thaw’s neighbor will call back the morning loan, with ten per cent interest. Chit Thaw hopes his mother will have sold enough fish paste to pay back the interest and buy rice for dinner. If not, they will drink a glass of water and go to bed, and tomorrow once again Chit Thaw will take his father’s clothes to the pawnshop.

By Becky Palmstrom

Published in the New Internationalist, November 2010.

MUSINA: Unlike schools and offices in South Africa, the criminal gangs along the border between the World Cup hosts and Zimbabwe did not take a break because of a sports tournament.

As thousands of foreign fans flocked to the football stadiums and hundreds of journalists arrived to cover the first African World Cup, along the border another influx of foreigners received a different sort of welcome. They were not met with bright green and yellow flags and vuvuzelas, instead, these foreigners faced armed attacks and a pattern of sexual violence employed systematically to traumatise already vulnerable people.

“All I was thinking about was the work that I will do in South Africa,” says 16-year old Grace Moyo*, as she sits rocking the two-year-old child she cares for. “I was just saying God help me so that I will find work.”

It was the day before the World Cup opening ceremony when Moyo began a journey she had taken once before, crossing, without papers, the parched bush-land, three barbed wire fences and the Limpopo River.

Just as her small group reached South African territory she saw four armed men waiting. They forced the women to remove their clothes before raping each one of them in turn.

“When they were trying to rape me – I fought against them and so they put a gun to the baby’s head and so I let them rape me,” continues Moyo. “I think that if I didn’t have a child they would have killed me.”

Known as the magumaguma, from a word meaning “to grab”, the men took all of Moyo’s clothing when they left, a final indignity to punish her resistance. Tied up on the side of the road, the women were left in the midday sun. None of them filed a case with the police.

The civil society organisations working along the border say her story is typical: If there are men crossing, they are forced to have sex with the others in the group. If there are no Zimbabwean men, as in Moyo’s case, themagumaguma, both men and women, do the raping. Condoms are never used.

“It is a crisis,” says Mikael Lepaih, head of mission for Medicins San Frontieres (MSF). “We are seeing a pattern,” he says. “It leads to questions as to if the gangs are using HIV as a weapon.” Since January of this year 143 rape survivors have sought medical treatment at MSF clinics in Musina, some as young as 14 years old.

“These numbers are only those that register with us,” says Tambu Matambo, the MSF Musina deputy field coordinator. “We think the numbers are much higher.”

Matambo had recently worked with Moyo and put me in touch with her for this story.

Forced rape of family members is now so common that Zimbabweans deny being related: “If the gangs realize you are related they force you to have sex with each other,” says Matambo.

While special courts set up for the World Cup offered rapid justice for fans visiting the country, the police seldom register sexual violations along the border, and nobody has been prosecuted for the attacks. The South African government spent 53.5 billion rand, or six percent of the country’s budget, on stadiums and transport infrastructure. Along the border Zimbabweans were met only with humiliation.

Despite ending deportations last year, South Africa’s treatment of Zimbabweans is partly to blame for their vulnerability, says MSF. In a country where domestic workers earn on average R75 a month, most Zimbabweans cannot afford the R1100 needed to buy a passport, leaving people with little choice but to cross the border without documents, and dependent on the very criminals who rob and rape them. Once they cross many apply for asylum status.

“Most of the people say political problems as such are not the issue, it is economic problems.” says Thabe Mogoboya from Lawyers for Human Rights, a legal organisation that works in Musina. Coming to South Africa, “is a recipe for a better life. But if this is the case, your claim for asylum is unfounded according to the refugee act,” he says.

The asylum process allows people to stay for 30 days while their case is decided, but 99% of cases are turned down. Even with the option to appeal it is a system that fails to recognise the reality of migration between the two countries, says Lepaih from MSF.

Worse still, the systematic nature of the sexual violence, regardless of gender, may suggest the collaboration, or at least tacit consent, of border officials and police officers, says Thabe Mogoboya, particularly on the Zimbabwean side. “It needs both governments to say let’s do something about this problem,” he says. “More so when there are allegations that the Zimbabwean soldiers are involved.”

For a country anxious about foreigners, turning a blind eye to systematic abuse along its border is a way of dissuading further migration.

About 300 Zimbabweans, like Moyo, file for asylum at the Department of Home Affairs in Musina every day. Hundreds more cross without papers and are never registered.

South Africa is being congratulated on its success, but now that the world’s largest sporting tournament is over, it is time to apply the same urgency and efficiency used to host the World Cup to its problems along the border.

*Grace Moyo is a pseudonym.

By Becky Palmstrom
Published here on August 5 2010.