An extract from A Life Removed: Hunting For Refuge In The Modern World by Rose George.

Refugees don’t cause problems. They already have problems—UNHCR tolerance campaign, Cote d’Ivoire, 2003

The road to Tabou is six long boring hours of red dust and fatal potholes. It is a long straight road from Abidjan, which stretches along the probably beautiful coast. Potholes doesn’t do the craters justice: these are holes that literally stop a 4WD in its tracks.
On the other side of San Pedro, a large convoy of white vehicles zooms past. I count six buses, a few 4Wds, some flashing lights. The buses are labelled GTZ, the logo of the German state development agency, and they’re taking lucky Liberians to Abidjan, because they’ve been provisionally accepted on the US resettlement programme. Earlier, a smaller convoy of buses, less flashy, and fewer in number, had gone past transporting Burkinabé Ivorians. Migrants who had lived here for years, who decided that their best option was to go to a country they had never lived in, but that Ivorians had decided was their home.
I hadn’t known about the US resettlement plan before I arrived in Tabou. I’d wanted to write about a new UK programme that was supposed to start in Ghana, but the Home Office were striving to be as unhelpful as they could – “it’s not the right time to talk about it” - and the programme kept getting postponed. Anyway, the UK resettlement is for only 500 Liberians; it hardly seems significant, against the 6000 people that the US is planning to take in.
It is causing tension. On Sunday morning, we drive to Tabou’s transit centre. The UNHCR programme officer is visiting at the same time, and she is hot and harried. She says, “don’t mention resettlement here, on any account. Only 50 people out of the 4000 camp residents are eligible and there’s a lot of anger.” Jennifer says not to worry about it. “They’ll think that any white person here has to be involved in resettlement. You wouldn’t be here, otherwise.”
You don’t have to mention the word, though, to see where people’s aspirations lie. The zinc booths – actually, hangars -  are supplemented by huge green tarpaulin tents, and people write their dreams on the outside of both. Here is Booth 3A, New Jersey City. Here is The State of Illinois. There is Chicago, and Los Angeles. There is, puzzlingly, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. “Huh,” says Anthony, “I wouldn’t live there. It’s probably even poorer than the rest.”
Anthony is the refugee chairman for Tabou. That’s a considerable job. Tabou’s population is 28,000 without the refugees (or slightly smaller than Leighton Buzzard). The refugees in the whole Tabou region number four times that. So he has two assistants to help him, especially as he also works full-time as an education officer for the IRC. Jennifer met him one day in the camp, when she was still learning the ropes, and where IRC had made the mistaken gesture of giving out t-shirts. “I know now,” Jennifer says, “that if you give out one thing, you have to have 4000 of them.” But back then, they didn’t know that. The t-shirts were for women who completed a GBV workshop, but people wanted the t-shirts, not the workshop. And they wanted the t-shirts because they were t-shirts, not for anything that was written on them. A change of wardrobe is a precious thing, in a refugee camp. But it’s not unheard of. “When I first saw a refugee camp,” says Julie, a young American nurse who runs the Action Contre La Faim therapeutic feeding centre, “I was surprised to see commerce. I expected refugees to have nothing.”
In fact, there are little stalls here, selling peanuts and trinkets. There is a young man with a new bike, which he bought from the proceeds of his “small small business.” Young Ivorian girls come in bearing small plastic bags of dubious “mineral” water. You have to be careful, walking round the camp, not to step on fish laid out to dry, patches of dull silver things on the sandy ground. There are small gardens with sparse cassava leaves and other greens. Under a hangar, a group of small boys hammer away at scrap metal, making toys for themselves. A truck, a bus, a 4WD like the NGOs have. There is activity here, just not enough.

***

The industriousness of refugees is a subject of much academic discussion. The stereotype – a helpless refugee, dependent on hand-outs – is inaccurate. In Ghana, Buduburam camp has the reputation for being the best camp for Liberian refugees in West Africa (Liberia has been spitting out refugees long enough for someone to draw up a Top Ten). It’s also a case study.
When 40,000 refugees arrived in 1990, UNHCR did what it usually does, laudably; it set up a camp, 35km from Accra and distributed food, non-food items (blankets, tents, some pots and pans) and provided classes in skills such as tie-dyeing and carpentry. In 1997, after Charles Taylor won the elections, 3000 refugees agreed to return to Liberia. UNHCR cut off distribution to the remaining 40,000, deciding that Liberia was safe enough (wrong), and that deprivation would encourage refugees to go home voluntarily (also wrong).  At this point, the many people who believe that refugees live off and live for handouts would expect disaster. Instead, refugees turned entrepreneurs. They used small loans and money from relatives abroad, and the camp kept going. It kept going so well, it became the subject of an Oxford University study into how refugees live without humanitarian assistance.
Today, 45,000 refugees still live in Buduburam. There is a market, shops and several phone companies. (The first “communication centre”, BuduCom, was set up in 1995 by a man on a bike with a mobile phone. Your correspondent calls his phone; he gets on his bike and brings it to you.) There are even a couple of internet cafés. It’s almost a self-reliant town. The conclusion, wrote the Oxford University researcher, is that “the crux of the matter seems to be that refugees will utilise whatever opportunities remain open to them in order to maximise their situation.”
This conclusion depends on the assumption that opportunities are available. Again and again, when I ask refugees why they can’t work or travel or improve things, they say simply, “But I am not Ivorian. How can I?”
The opportunities in Tabou transit centre are limited. But they are no more limited than opportunities outside. Agrippa Choloplay has lived in Cote d’Ivoire for 14 years, since his father was killed along with Samuel Doe in 1990. He lives in the town of Tabou, but things are hard. “We used to cut wood and sell it. We’d earn about 2000 CFA daily. It was enough, to buy food. Now, no way. They don’t let us do that, since the crisis started.” He makes money by helping fishermen gather in the nets, when they let him. It’s once or twice a week, so his family only eats once a day. In the transit centre, at least, there are three meals a day, even if they all involve bulgur wheat. For this reason, some of its registered residents don’t live there, but they register for food aid. Who wouldn’t?
There are complaints about the food, of course, and about the accommodation – the booths are noisy, and you have to sleep near strangers. But this is a transit centre, not a refugee camp, and it’s subject to lower standards. Even so, there are dozens of latrines, seemingly clean and each bearing a bizarre hand-painted sign. The men’s are decorated with pictures of a white man with a bushy 1970s moustache and hairdo, who looks like an extra on a seventies cop show. The picture on the women’s is even odder; a buxom white lady, thrusting out her breasts, her hands on her hips. Perhaps this artistic flourish can be explained by the fact that a German charity built them.
There are several NGOs working in the camp. Not as many as at Wilson Corner IDP camp in Monrovia, which bears a sign that reads like an NGO shopping list. I count about 15 acronyms, before the car drives on. Caritas runs the clinic, ACF runs the therapeutic feeding centre. All the malnourished babies in Tabou come here – the refugee ones, that is. It is a frustrating irony for aid workers that their mandate doesn’t usually cover the host population. A sick Ivorian baby here would get more international assistance over the border in Liberia.
The babies are tiny and the booth is baking hot. Julie is the only international worker here, because she’s waiting to train some local staff. For now, it’s her and a handful of volunteers. One of them, Chris, jumped onto a ship one day in Monrovia without telling his family. “It was there, so I got on it.” He got word through an uncle in Italy, who told his family in Monrovia that he wasn’t dead.
I don’t know much about ACF, but I like their business cards: A dotted line where the name should be, to be filled in as appropriate. “Yeah, that sums them up,” said someone from IRC. “They save money in good ways.” Humanitarian organisations have personalities. CARITAS run clinics, GTZ build things. So do IRC, though they also pride themselves on being the only NGO with a mandate in refugee assistance. (The UN is made of member states, so UNHCR is a governmental organisation). IRC says it provides developmental relief, because it’s not hand-outs, but help-ups. Other agencies call it “the construction company.” At the transit centre, they do WATSAN (water and sanitation), GBV and informal education programmes. They do more work in the refugee population outside the transit centre, because there are 4000 refugees in the centre, which leaves 36,000 outside it. Some of their work includes emptying wells of human remains for Ivorians. In one area, after the war, only 5% of wells were operational, because so many bodies had been tipped in them.
Tabou’s residents delineate their situation very simply: They are “in the fence”, and everyone and everything else – jobs, money, opportunity – is outside. IRC’s education programmes have to be officially called “informal,” though they have the usual trappings of school – teachers, lessons, books. They can’t be called schools, because the Ivorian government objects, understandably, to a parallel English-language system being set up. Because of this, less understandably, UNHCR abruptly terminated the English-language refugee schools in 1999, and hasn’t replaced them yet. Most refugees don’t speak French, and it’s hard to go to school when you don’t speak the language. “What, do you expect a 14 year old to start in elementary class?” one says. There is much indignation about the schooling situation, because these are poor countries, and education is power. There is concern about it, too, because bored teenagers with this much level of frustration sometimes grow up into rebels.
In the dusty football field at the transit centre, I see two young women, in their Sunday best, hugging each other. Joetta and Esther are teenagers and sisters, and bored. “One minute I was doing my school exams in Harper,” says Esther, “and the next minute MODEL arrives and I’m a refugee. It’s not easy!” Of course it’s boring here, they say. There’s nothing to do. They play football, or do chores, or do their hair. All around the camp, there are little huddles of women, combing in weaves. But there are also more natural looks than there would be normally: Palm grease is expensive and not everyone can afford it. “I want to go back to Liberia,” says Esther. “I don’t,” says Joetta with a wicked smile. “I’ll come back to London with you. OK?”
Joetta and Esther are here to watch a circus. It is a circus with good intentions, but it’s going badly wrong. UNHCR has recruited the Ivorian reggae group Magic System to come and play a concert. They played one a couple of days earlier in the village of Gozon, and the intention was to repeat it here. Magic System are one of two notable pop stars that are fronting UNHCR’s tolerance campaign. Theme: Your tolerance can make the difference. There are posters and t-shirts, all with sensible slogans. One of them reads, “A refugee doesn’t cause problems, he has problems.”
Magic System released a song for UNHCR, called SOS Refugié. The UNHCR information officer in Abidjan gives me a copy, but I can’t understand it and the song’s terrible. But Magic’s heart (there’s only one man, really) is in the right place – he’s flown from Paris just to do goodwill events, and he’s already taken a tour of the transit centre and asked all the right questions. So say the UNHCR people, at least. Everyone else sees a mess. It’s noon on Sunday, and the churches are in full singing voice, in two booths right next to the stage where the performance is supposed to be. After a greeting ceremony by a young girl in skimpy cloth and chalked skin, who throws rice and gives him a kola nut, Magic looks stumped. He doesn’t want to disturb the church services, but he can’t stay because he has to get back to Abidjan. The result is a flop: The church services will only last another 40 minutes, but the Magic System road show gets back in the 4Wds and leaves. It also leaves a mini-riot: there’s a box of cassettes to be given out, but not 4000 of them. An orderly queue forms, and then there’s trouble.
I’m no camp expert, so I wonder if my expectations were too high. But Jennifer’s not too impressed either. Afterwards, when I’m interviewing two refugee officials, they say, “the churches did it deliberately. They’d promised to use some other booths – there are several empty ones, further from the stage – but some people were angry. They don’t want a concert. They want rice, and resettlement.”
The two officials are middle-aged men. Tanneh-Bartee Senneh – Bartee for short – is Co-Chairman of Administration of the Refugee Committee. Reverend Moses G. Hyneh is Co-Chairman of Operations. They have laminated ID cards to prove it, though it’s not clear what the committee does to require so many staff. I see Bartee early one morning, doing his rounds. “We do it every day, just to check, to see if there’s been any violence or anything.” The camp has had problems with sexual violence. “It’s not UNHCR policy to provide partitions, so everyone in the booth has to sleep next to strangers. Before people could afford to set up partitions, there was no privacy. Women had nowhere to change. They had to come back and hold their lappas like this” – he mimes a woman who is changing under a cloth, like she’s on a beach – “and it was very embarrassing for them.” There are things you get used to, as a refugee, and things you never do, like being naked in public. No matter how often you’ve been stripped at checkpoints.