Glimpse of life in a Somali refugee camp

At first glance the primary school in Kharaz refugee camp looks much like any other school in Yemen. Four brightly painted spacious classrooms decorated with pictures and slogans surround a dusty courtyard where children line up to be counted. A rectangle of steamrolled concrete with make-shift hoops at either end is overrun by a babble of screaming children chasing a basketball. Its only once you have a look inside the classrooms that you realise there is something out of the ordinary here. In a room half the size of a tennis court, 300 Somali infants aged 2-4 are seated on miniature plastic chairs, packed into the room in tight rows like a deck of cards. Two female teachers drift through the sea of children, using sharp hand gestures and the occasional shrill cry to lead them through a series of songs and chants. The fact that these two women are able to maintain something of a sense of order in this setting (each minding 150 children) is nothing short of a miracle.

“We have four classrooms. We need twenty,” Ismail Abubakr Ahmed tells me as we sit in the dark of his cramped office. Like most other Somalis in Yemen, Ismail made it to Yemen by way of a rickety wooden boat fleeing from the terrors of the brutal civil war in Somalia. After arriving in Aden in 1992 he moved to Kharaz and set up the camp’s only school. He has been a resident and headmaster there for almost two decades.  

“We started in a tent with no curriculum and no support. We used empty cartons as blackboards,” Ismail recalls.

“Now we’ve over 4,000 children enrolled and numbers are growing every year.”

But overcrowding is not the only problem facing Ismail and his school: another is the temperature. Situated on a dusty, scolding hot plateau about 140k west of Aden and flanked by mountains and barren desert, temperatures in the summer can reach up to 47 degrees. Crisscrossed by dusty streets in the sweltering heat, the refugees survive thanks to World Food Programme aid and casual labouring jobs in Aden.

“We lose nearly a third of our students over the summer. They follow their parents to Aden in search of a respite from the heat but also money.”

“The boys go and beg and the girls work for next to nothing as maids in Yemeni’s houses.”

Next on Ismail’s list of hardships is language. Like most refugee camps, Kharaz was set up as a temporary fix, a place where the basic needs of Somali refugees could be met until the violence in Somalia died down allowing them to return home. It was deemed that the children, despite living in Yemen, ought to continue with the Somali curriculum in their native language.      

But in 2003, with tribal violence still raging in Somalia and thousands of African migrants continuing to arrive on Yemen’s shores, it was decided that the language of instruction should be changed to Arabic.

“It is our duty to prepare these children for secondary school where they are expected to learn in Arabic” said Ismail.

The transition has been tough at times; according to Sidewa Yacub, the leader of the educational committee in the camp, some of the students still refuse to speak in Arabic.   

“It’s not only the language but the culture of learning which differs in Yemen. We have had to learn to be flexible in our approach,” Sidewa told the Yemen Times.

The school employs a total of 70 teachers (a student-teacher ratio of 60:1) half of which are Yemeni and half Somali. But it has not always been this way.  

In 2008, Gawad Mohammed, a Refugee Education Programme Officer from Save the Children was making the journey from Aden to Kharaz when ten masked gunman jumped out from the roadside, ordered him out of the car before driving off with it and leaving him in the desert. The tribesmen were not after money for the car but instead demanded that their teachers from the local villages around Kharaz be employed in the school.

“They wanted us to recruit their teachers but most of them only have a high school education,” said Gawad.

According to May Barazi, from the Head office of UNHCR in Kharaz camp, such skirmishes are still fairly common.  Many of the locals believe that refugees in the camp have access to better facilities and services than Yemeni nationals. Outsiders wishing to visit the camp must now travel there with a military escort.

A burning question now faces those living and working in the camp’s school. What now?

A second generation of Somalis is on the rise; children born in the camp are now seventeen years old, and having spent the majority of their childhood inside know of little else than camp life.

Some have questioned the sensibility of maintaining the camp in its current form and location.

U.N. Assistant High Commissioner for Refugees, Janet Lim, recently visited Kharaz camp and said she thought refugees were better off living in Yemeni cities than in camps. In the cities, there is at least a chance of getting a job and building a new life.

“A camp is not a natural setting,” she told a journalist from the Washington Post. “It’s far from anywhere, in the middle of nowhere.”

“A camp should be a temporary measure, but the more you develop it, the more permanent it becomes,” Hakim Ahmed, a young Somali who travels back and forth between Aden and Kharaz, told the Yemen Times.

“The Somali people living here are isolated, apart from the occasional trip to Aden there is not much interaction with the outside world. It’s easier for those living in Aden.”

But not all of the children of Kharaz are destined for squalor and hopelessness.

Ismail says his proudest moment was the day one of his students, a boy named Abdulrahman Fareh who spent his entire childhood in the camp, received a scholarship courtesy of the German government to study administrative sciences at Aden University.

“We are confident that with better facilities we can produce a generation of educated Somalis who will have something substantial to offer to Yemeni society.”

By Tom Finn