You Might Live in a Refugee Camp if you…

Have to walk miles to get water for your family’s daily needs.
Get food from the UN to feed your family for a month.
Live under a tarp while you gather materials to build a home.
Wake in the night with nightmares of things you saw on your escape from war.
Wonder where members of your family are and if you will ever see them again.
Ask others if they have seen your parents/children.
Join another family since you lost yours.
Question if your children/parents made it out alive.
Hope to find them someday.
Picked up unaccompanied kids while on the run.
Don’t know where to go with your own family plus the many kids you gathered along the way.
Arrived in a refugee camp, stunned, afraid, and without basic supplies.
Build a hut for your family to live in from mud, sticks and grass.
Cook all your food over an open fire, despite the temperature outside being in the 90s and 100s.
Send your children to collect firewood every day so you can cook.
Sweep the dirt floors around your home to make them neat, but have trash surrounding your plot of land because there is no trash pick-up.
Walk to the borehole with a big tub on your head full of dirty laundry.
Wash your laundry at the borehole using the tub, water and soap.
Load your wet laundry on your head to walk home.
Hang your laundry on the line to dry, if it doesn’t rain.
Carry long branches on your head.
Carry bags of vegetables on your head.
Carry cans of water on your head.
Walk everywhere you go, with things on your head
Strap your baby on your back so you can have hands free to load things onto your head.
Chop dirt up with tools.
Make bricks from dirt and water so you can build a house.
Fire the bricks by burning them until they are dry.
Make more bricks to sell.
Chop up dirt to plant crops.
Take care of your garden.
Pray for rain.
Reap what didn’t die from lack of rain.
Load a bicycle with your crops, if you are lucky enough to have one.
Ride your bike with your crops, your wife with your baby on her back and a bag on her head behind you, and your young child in front of you, hours away to sell crops.
Ride your bike back with your family and the things you bought at market with the money you made.
Sell whatever you have to pay your children’s school fees so they can be educated.
Look for jobs, but find none because you aren’t educated.
Sit and despair at your plight and the hopelessness you feel.
Gather and sit with other men who are also hopeless.
Numb your despair with alcohol when you can find some.
Sit and wait to go home to a country you do not recognize any more.
Wonder if you will ever get to go home.
Wonder what will become of your children.
Wonder…