1 Case 11: Anette
Abandoned land, a fall and wazungu
Amani and I arrived at Anetteâs home quite exhausted. Although we had made the journey on a boda boda, the steep, slippery roads had made the journey an arduous endeavour. Every time I went to the margins of the refugee camp, I was impressed anew by how far these places were to reach, even on bicycle, let alone on foot. Under a shelter in front of her house, Anette attended to a boiling pot of beans on the fire and a baby on her lap, the youngest of the five children she took care of with her husband. Their homestead occupied a cleared parcel of land not far from the roadside, and was accessed via a compound that was shared by four families. Anetteâs family had spent about two years living in Kyangwali after having fled the Eastern Congo region that was home to Beni, a town that had gained sad notoriety when several massacres of civilians took place there in 2012 and 2013. Like most of the people who lived in this part of Kyangwali, Anette and her family felt that they had only settled there temporarily. One immediately noticed the abandoned land which was being steadily reclaimed by bushy nature after its former residents had returned to their homes in Congo. It was thus not uncommon to see shared compounds like Anetteâs, because people felt increasingly insecure in this remote part of the settlement.
Anette spoke in hushed tones when we talked, as one of her legs was very painful because of a fall she had suffered the day before our visit. She had no money to pay a boda boda to take her to a health centre or to buy painkillers from a closer pharmacy. âThe life that I have here in Kyangwali is a life of suffering,â Anette uttered, before she paused and advised her teenage son to take the pot of beans off the fire. Like other people with disabilities I talked to in this remote part of the settlement, Anette asserted that aid workers did not regularly visit this area. She sensed that information often did not reach very far and suspected that people from this area therefore missed out on assistance. For example, she told me that the first time she came into contact with the organization Aid Global was when she was picked up in a van to attend their leaving event. Anette resumed: âThat is the life I am going through here in Kyangwali, a life of suffering ⦠Just a life of suffering. We need helpers
What we think is this: I think you are keeping us, and we are disabled, we are the ones that cannot help themselves. And those who take care, those ones are like you. You are the ones who look after the ones who cannot support themselves, the disabled ⦠You always come to us here, every time you reach here, you are the one to help those who are disabled.
The day that we went there after Anetteâs fall, some neighbours visited or exchanged greetings from the roadside, inquiring about her well-being after the accident. It was not clear how badly her leg was affected, so Amani and I decided to search for a boda boda in the nearest village that would take her to a health centre. But there was no vehicle to be found anywhere, and there was no mobile phone signal. Instead we gave her some money for medicine and started to look for our own transport back home.
I had first met Anette when I visited Kyangwali in 2014. At that time she had not yet been reunited with her husband and some of her children, and expressed the wish to return to Congo. She had only lived in Kyangwali for few months then, and an aid worker who accompanied me had told me beforehand about her frequent requests to go back home. On that occasion we also discussed how she managed to cultivate her fields without her husband and other family members. Anetteâs disability was evident, as she walked stooped over and limping, stabilizing her right knee by pushing both of her hands against it while taking steps. I followed her to the fields where she planted maize and beans, while she explained that it was the first time she had ever farmed in her life, and that she used to plait hair in a small trading centre in Congo to earn a living. She had received some agricultural advice from the organization NRR,
When I visited Anette again before travelling back to Europe, I barely recognized the place: there were more huts in the compound, which was surrounded by a field of maize. Her oldest son had built his own hut. Even though the place had started to look more like a permanent home, I sensed from their worn-out clothes and ramshackle dwellings that people still had fewer resources in this part of the settlement than in others, as they started to build their new lives as recently-arrived refugees. Chatting with some of her neighbours, Anette prepared beans for dinner. Other people dropped in, including their village chairman, who told me that Anette had been appointed vice chairperson in the last elections and was about to co-represent their village on the Refugee Welfare Council.
2 Case 12: Mugenzi
Knee pads, bars and poison
Mugenzi lived only a few blocks away from the Catholic guesthouse I was staying at, which is why I often had the opportunity to drop in and say hello to him and his family. The first time I talked to Mugenzi, he had said: âYou will find me here. I am always seated hereâ. However, he was often out of the house when I visited, usually in one of the local bars nearby. One day I encountered Mugenziâs daughter Maria sitting on a mat in the shadow of a banana tree with a heap of books and papers. She was studying for a diploma in accounting, which she was pursuing in Hoima, the nearest town outside the settlement, after completing secondary school. As was usually the case when her mother, father, younger brother or older married sister were around, I was offered yellow bananas from their field and fresh obushera, a sorghum porridge, which was very popular in the Ugandan-Congolese border region around Bunagana where they came from.
Due to the good marks she had earned in her last year of primary school, Maria had received a scholarship to study at Kyangwali Secondary School for four years. She stressed that, although her father would do everything he could to enable his children to access education, her further studies in Hoima were only possible due to the head teacherâs goodwill. He allowed her to study for free in exchange for doing work like cleaning the school and teacherâs
Another day when I visited the family, Mugenzi left their hut with his two wooden sticks and the kneepads that protected the stumps of his legs, which had both been amputated just beneath his knees. We sat down on the compoundâs wooden benches and chairs and Mugenzi placed the wooden sticks aside in such a way that he could stretch out the remains of his legs while we talked. I told Mugenzi that Amani had been sick for some weeks and that he suspected that unknown jealous individuals had poisoned him, at which point Mugenzi told me how his oldest two sons had died. It was a good thing that I had already heard some of this story from Maria before, as communication between us was challenging â as well as my struggles to master the language, Mugenziâs Swahili was also rather basic and his pronunciation mixed up with Kinyabwisha words.
He explained that, when they had arrived in Kyangwali, they were allocated a plot of land in another part of the settlement, and only later moved to their current location. Mugenzi recounted that they had moved because both his older sons were poisoned after finishing secondary school. They died shortly after each other, and Mugenzi strongly believed that the neighbours of their former plot had done this terrible deed. He paused our conversation to go into his house â the stump of one of his legs visible behind the knotted trouser leg that fell open â and returned holding a bible. In between its pages he kept documents and photographs, some of which showed scenes from his older sonâs wedding, another his coffin covered in a cloth at his funeral. Mugenzi told me that life had become challenging after his sonsâ deaths, especially as he could no longer afford the fees for his children who still attended school. Much of the agricultural work was now dependent on his wife, whose strength was also weakening because of her age.
As Mugenziâs former neighbours had continued to disturb them by stealing bananas and sugarcane from those distant fields, Mugenzi complained about them to the village chairman as well as the Office of the Prime Minister (OPM). This led to unforeseen consequences which gave the situation a critical turn, when the village chairman threatened to remove one of Mugenziâs familyâs
Mugenzi did not know which disease had caused his legs to swell up so much that they had had to be amputated. While he was still living in Congo, he had crossed the border to seek better treatment at a hospital in Uganda. But he was not able to read what the doctors had written and had lost those papers when they eventually sought refuge in Uganda later on. Picking over the photographs from the bible, he pointed to one in which he was standing on healthy legs, happy to show me that he had been âwholeâ back then. When a relative of his arrived at the compound, he was eager to take out the picture again to show it to her. Unlike this seemingly easy-going attitude towards his disability, he told me in an interview: âIt was hard to see myself crawling when I was a man. I was like a kid starting to learn how to walkâ. When Mugenzi showed me more of the photographs, I learnt about a mentally disabled sister who had been resettled in the US, and that his mother had died in Kyangwali.
I was on my way for an after-work beer in one of the local bars when I glimpsed Mugenzi on his tricycle on the road in front of me. His company came just at the right time, as I recurrently experienced a flat tyre on my bicycle. Like many of the tricyclists I interacted with, Mugenzi knew well which roadside bike shop was better than the others, and how the men in the shop could best solve my problem. After he had also had his tricycle tyre pumped up, we parked our vehicles in front of a nearby house, and settled into the compound of a bar that was an annex to the ownerâs house. A group of people were already enjoying a discussion and, when Mugenziâs wife joined us shortly afterwards, the talk again turned to resettlement, like most of the times when people met during those days in April 2016. Many people were in the process of being resettled in the US, travelling to Hoima and Kampala for interviews and other evaluations, or selling and packing their belongings before catching their flights abroad.
They are even telling me that I will get legs, and that will be helpful, because I have been here for long but I have not got such help from here ⦠Even if I cannot find work, I can at least stand. I was shown people with disabilities [in videos on a computer during the orientation week] who were playing football and who can walk properly because they were given legs.
Despite the hopes Mugenzi had for resettlement, he also felt remorse that his youngest son had never seen their home country, since he was born in Kyangwali. Yet the older children who still were alive not only had memories of their home, but once in a while made visits across the border, as Mugenzi and his wife did one day when they attended a relativeâs burial. But Mugenzi stated: âWe cannot count on Congo because there are bullets⦠I am no longer strong enough to run. Life is not all that good, but even though you may eat little, it is better than where people are being shot at in Congo.â
âµ
Anette and Mugenziâs stories both convey a sense of the temporariness they felt about their stay in Kyangwali. Although they had lived in Kyangwali for different time spans and orientated themselves disparately towards their home country or a future outside the refugee camp, both understood their situation in Kyangwali as one in transit. Another of my interlocutors pointedly described this in a conversation: âOur heart does not settle. Sometimes they [the aid agencies] may take us by force and send us back to our country. We donât have a place where we can stay properly and where our heart settles so that we can forget the pastâ.
Congoâs refugee population was counted as the worldâs sixth largest in 2014, mainly consisting of people who had fled from the first and second Congo Wars of 1996â1997 and 1998â2003. The unstable security situation in many areas of Eastern Congo made it very difficult for most Congolese refugees to return to their homes. âOur heart does not settleâ not only expressed the transitionary nature of life in a camp, but implied the longing for a more permanent home than a refugee settlement can provide. Simon Turner characterizes refugee camps as institutions that are âbetween the temporary and the permanentâ (2016, 141). Refugeesâ lives in a camp can thus be understood as âdoubly paradoxicalâ, as he writes: âfirst, they cannot settle where they are because they are
Without assuming that the lives of people who have not fled their home countries are of a more permanent character per se, the notion of home seems to be a particularly multi-dimensional, transnational and dynamic process for refugees (Al-Ali and Koser 2003, 6). The question of home is not simply a matter of place, but also one of âa longing for a nostalgic past or a utopian futureâ (7). Although people had lived through troubling times in Congo, they often compared their lives in Kyangwali to a remembered better past. Yet they also imagined home as a better future in the US or a European country through the resettlement programme, despite the fact that this was only a viable option for a few of them (see also Boer 2015, 486). This chapter therefore considers the notion of home not only in regard to where people came from, but also concerning their current situation, and where they were going to.
What it means to be a refugee, what the changes and losses, the temporariness and future perspectives meant for people like Mugenzi and Anette cannot be easily assumed (see e.g. Eastmond 2007, 253). Anthropological research has substantially added to refugee studies by critically questioning the experience of forced displacement itself as the main aspect of what characterizes a shared sense of ârefugeenessâ, and emphasizing that common denominator in their lives is actually peopleâs experiences of humanitarian aid interventions (e.g. Harrell-Bond 1986; Malkki 1995). This chapter follows this strand of literature which describes peopleâs experiences of humanitarian aid as being very characteristic in their lives as refugees and in the ways they think about their pasts and imagine their futures. Just as Anette argued that the ones that are âkeeping usâ were supposed to âtake careâ of the campâs inhabitants, people often reasoned that the aid agencies were responsible for their fate and well-being. What was distinctive for refugees with disabilities in this regard was that, despite all the challenges they faced, life in a refugee settlement also created possibilities that they would not otherwise have encountered. This chapter pursues this insight, to argue that the common experience that disabled people had through their displacement was shaped more by the humanitarian
This chapterâs structure represents the multi-dimensionality of the notion of âhomeâ, since my argument is developed around disabled peopleâs wish to return, their present situation in relation to memories of their past, and their imagined futures. The first section discusses the homes that people had left behind, reveals that they did not necessarily want to return there, and challenges a sedentary view of displacement. The second section considers âthe life of sufferingâ in Kyangwali, contrasting it to the opportunities that were available for refugees with disabilities in the camp. In the third section I explore my interlocutorsâ aspirations, imaginations and possibilities for resettling in a third country. I argue that having refugee and disability status created important opportunities for making claims and accessing aid, which able-bodied residents did not have. This shows how disabled peopleâs assumed âdouble vulnerabilityâ also signified a âdouble opportunityâ in regard to their search for a home outside the refugee camp.
3 The Home That Was
Reviewing the problematization of displacement and the approaches taken towards this phenomenon, it immediately becomes clear that they generally include an underlying assumption that people want to return to where they were displaced from. Other than people who migrate out of economic aspirations, refugees are approached from the viewpoint that they were forced to leave their homes. The solutions that the UNHCR targets perceive home as being defined through national boundaries, and eventually aspire to gain a prospective status of citizenship (Ramsay 2017, 13). This is evident in the three long-term solutions offered for protracted refugee situations:1 repatriation back to the country of origin, local integration into a host country of asylum, and resettling refugees in a third country. The link between people and place, which is perceived in these national terms, is made explicit in the function of the UNHCRâs community services, which assume that all human beings have an inherent desire to belong and contribute to a larger supportive community, and argue that this sense of belonging and community is always violated through displacement (Bakewell 2003, 6).
Although the humanitarian system considers this to be the natural solution, people do not necessarily want to return to the homes they have left behind. Their feelings towards, and plans about, their previous homes seemed to be dependent on what my interlocutors had experienced before and during flight. Some stated that they would refuse to return to the place they had acquired their disability in by being shot or beaten up. Others reasoned that it was too dangerous to return to Congo due to their limited mobility. Jacob (case 4), for example, explained that it was too risky for him to go back, as he would not be able to flee to the forest at any given moment when an armed group approached. While Bernadette (case 10) was saving money as she wished to return to Congo, her acquaintances advised her not to do so, knowing that she was similarly unlikely to be able to escape from dangerous situations there with her injured back and leg. It was only when Mugenzi showed me a picture of a friend of his in a wheelchair that I heard about a person with a disability who had actually returned to Congo, despite his mobility challenges.
People who had arrived at the camp recently were more likely to think about returning home. As Anetteâs story demonstrated, some of her neighbours, acquaintances and relatives had already journeyed back to Congo. They were hopeful that they would find their land, familiar structures and relatives in the places left behind. The decision to go back home was, however, dependent on the UNHCRâs evaluation of the security situation in certain parts in Eastern Congo. It was illegal for refugees to spontaneously return outside their official repatriation programmes. This meant that people needed money for
There was already war in Goma in 1990. During that time, we started to run because of that war. And we got used to displacement every year⦠There was fighting between the rebels and the government so we, the residents, had problems and ran here and there, they chased us, they killed others. From 1996, 1997 we were in a war until 2009.
I do not know whether Adam had lived in a camp for internally displaced people (IDP) during that period, but before I went on a two-week trip to Congo to get a glimpse of the place many of my interlocutors came from, he gave me the names of two of his siblings who lived in one of the IDP camps near Goma. Unfortunately I did not have the chance to meet them, given the official permission I would have needed to visit the camp and the short time of my stay in Congo.
Around 4.4 million people were internally displaced in Congo in 2017, including 1.1 million people in the province of North Kivu alone (OCHA 2017). In a place where areas of violence constantly shifted, it was common for people to move between different locations, including their homes and camps. When I asked my interlocutors where they came from in Congo there was sometimes confusion about their various places of residence at different stages of their displacement. Some had moved to new areas, but still continued to cultivate the fields they had left behind. Others had been hospitalized in faraway towns with war injuries, after which they had never returned to their homes.
Moreover, Mugenzi and Anetteâs stories revealed that notions of home change over time. The first time I met Anette, she had expressed her wish to return to Congo. During my fieldwork, however, her husband and the rest of her children joined her in Kyangwali and she seemed to become relatively more settled. She started her work as village vice chairperson, and her son built his own house in their compound. Mugenzi had completely given up all hope of going back after the many years his family had spent in Kyangwali. His life was much more oriented towards the family that had moved to Kampala, like one of his daughters, or abroad, like one of his sisters. As they had already lived in Kyangwali for so many years, Mugenziâs resettlement process was at an advanced stage when I first met him. Hence, peopleâs wish to return, and therefore their notion of home, was subject to change through temporal distance and the alternative future possibilities that became available to them.
Considering that most people in Kyangwali did not necessarily want to return to their home country, why then did they often speak in such positive terms about their previous lives in Congo? Among many people in Kyangwali, home was to a large extent experienced as something from the past that could no longer be home (see also Al-Ali and Koser 2003, 7). Disabled peopleâs narratives about a better life in Congo mostly referred to a time before or between upheavals, or simply to times when people had felt more secure. Also, doubting that âterritoriality, rootedness, and memories of violence are necessarily the primary determinants of identification among people on the moveâ, Jansen and Löfving advise caution in understanding peopleâs expressions of nostalgia
4 âA Life of Sufferingâ: Rather Here than There
When Anette described Kyangwali as âa life of sufferingâ, she brought it up in the context of the role that I or aid workers might play in helping her, or simply to articulate that the conditions in Kyangwali were not good enough to live in and provide a future for her and her family. Anthropologists â most prominently Richard Lee (2012), who identified a âcomplaint discourseâ among the elderly of the Dobe Juâ/Hoansi in Namibia â pay attention to the ways that complaints about the present often go together with an idealization of the past (see also Alber et al. 2008). As a way to describe and possibly also to cope with their current, often very difficult situation, my interlocutors frequently argued that they were suffering more in Kyangwali than they had been in Congo.
When they referred to âthe home that wasâ, they contrasted it with their current situation in which they were foreigners, where they struggled to develop projects or plan for their future, namely, to âbuildâ, as discussed in Chapters 5 and 6 (see also Livingston 2005, 15). In this sense, âhomeâ was a place and a time in which you owned land that was fertile, where you knew and got along with your neighbours. Disabled people also emphasized the substantial familial support and promising business opportunities of a bygone Congo as a way to describe the âinadequacy of the presentâ (McKay 2012, 289). Sometimes this was set in contrast to camp life as one that was pervaded by envy, betrayal and mistrust. My interlocutors expressed in some instances that they felt insecure living in a place where people with different national and ethnic backgrounds were gathered. Especially with regard to his sonsâ poisoning, Mugenzi stressed how careful you had to be in Kyangwali, as you did not know your neighbours well. He explained that he would always say he had already eaten when offered food at somebodyâs place, to avoid the risk of further poisoning. This resonates with what Ramsay observed among Congolese refugees in Kampala, stating that liking neighbours and even having close relationships with them did not
When people described their life as a refugee, their lack of property featured prominently. Whereas most aspects of âa life of sufferingâ they mentioned were an issue for all refugees, not having a property was highlighted as being especially problematic for people with disabilities, as Patrick explained: âYou know, here we are in a foreign land, we are not in our country. So if you lack money, and when you have nothing like livestock to sell, you cannot pay for casual labour in your fields, so that the children can go to school. Here in the settlement, there is nothing that can help you like thatâ. Although Mugenzi had not spent much time in Congo after his lower legs had been amputated, he similarly explained that the ten fields of timber he had once owned there would have given him enough profit to afford a good education for his children, despite not working in the fields.
Lee and others argue that comparisons with a better past allow people to make claims in the present (2012; see also Alber et al. 2008). I described this form of claim-making in Chapter 3, when the people I talked to for example lauded disability services in Eastern Congo in the same breath as demanding better services in Kyangwali. The many times that people used expressions such as, âhere I am, I am just sufferingâ, âyou see, all that is here is just suffering, there is no changeâ, or âhere I am suffering a lot, because â¦â signified not only the many challenges that disabled people were going through in Kyangwali, but also pointed to opportunities for claim-making. There was thus a stark tension between the ways people described life in Kyangwali as âa life of sufferingâ, and the possibilities that were available to them in that place due to their refugee and disability status, in comparison to other settings.
In contrast to disabled people who were not refugees, people in Kyangwali seemed to have many opportunities to stake certain claims, and a comparably high chance that these claims would be listened to. One day when I was talking to a man with a paralyzed arm in one of the nearby Ugandan villages, he asserted: âHere we donât have anyone with a metallic crutch. But I see those in the settlement: when someone gets a small injury, he will immediately receive one. But for us, they will put a slab on you ⦠if you heal, good, if you donât.â¦â The ReHope strategy specified that 30 percent of the refugee assistance should target the host community. All the health centres in Kyangwali were accessible for both refugees and nationals. Yet, while Ugandans could easily access basic
This not only played a role for disabled people, but was of more general significance. While Ugandans were able to attend school in the refugee settlement, they were excluded from benefitting from any of the scholarships offered by the aid agencies. One aid worker I knew thought that the local Banyoro people living in proximity to the refugee settlement in Kyangwali found themselves in more challenging circumstances than the refugees, as they did not have access to a comparably good infrastructure, and they could not receive any regular hand-outs like food, money or clothes (see also Chapter 5). Camp life can thus provide opportunities which are not available in places where humanitarian aid is absent. Researchers have observed around other Ugandan refugee settlements that national citizens in these remote areas perceive refugees to be better off than they are (e.g. Nagujja 2014, 26).
Land was also a contested issue between refugees and the local population in Kyangwali. The first time I arrived there I noticed some makeshift tents in a village outside the settlement. Asking about these, I was told that Ugandans themselves had been displaced by the pressure to make space for more refugees. Later on during my fieldwork another makeshift camp of internally displaced people appeared, within what the OPM claimed to be settlement land. While it was officially asserted that the people living on the land had to be evicted to accommodate the great number of newly-arrived refugees (up to 60,000 Ugandans were said to be displaced), many strident voices argued that these land clearances were actually part of the governmentâs plan to secure access to the oil-rich land around Lake Albert (see Matsiko 2013). At the time of my fieldwork the internally displaced Ugandans were not protected by, or provided with services by, the UNHCR.
Concerning us, the disabled people in Bukinda, the way I am, I care for myself. I have to work with this hand of mine to ensure that I survive and feed my family, to ensure that I get my children to school⦠Even my fellow disabled people, that is the way we are: we have to use a lot of energy since we have no other option⦠But to say that we shall get extra support from the government, for the disabled, there is no such opportunity. I have never seen such help, I have never seen it.
In both Uganda and in Congo I was told â and observed by myself â that disabled people were more successful in staking their claims to organizations that were funded by international agencies and donors than to their own governments. In Kyangwali, as in other refugee settlements in Uganda, benefits for refugees were much more clearly defined by these organizations, and claim-making could often be more directly practiced than towards the Ugandan government. Hence, being a refugee with a disability signified certain opportunities which were not available in other contexts. This was especially relevant in regard to resettlement, which the next section explores.
5 What the Future Has to Offer
Nearly all the refugees I encountered in Kyangwali dreamt of resettlement and a better life in a Western country.2 Considered as being âcaughtâ within a âprotracted refugee situationâ and with no viable options for repatriation or
At the beginning of my fieldwork I toyed with the idea of leaving the topic of resettlement completely untouched in my research. I thought that it was a research topic in its own right and too much to include within my project, even though everyone brought it up quite prominently in our conversations. Particularly in the months between May and August in 2016, when people travelled to Hoima and Kampala for various interviews and check-ups, and when a number of Kyangwaliâs refugees left for the US, resettlement was the number one topic of discussion when people met in the market, in a workshop, a bar, or simply on the street.
Almost everyone whose paths I crossed in Kyangwali had an incredibly positive image of resettlement, described by other anthropologists in regard to Congolese refugees in Uganda as a âblessing from Godâ (Lauterbach 2014, 291) or âwinning the lotteryâ (Jacobsen 2005, 55). From the beginning of my fieldwork I found myself somewhat sceptical of the imagined idyllic life in a resettlement country. I doubted that it would be easy for many people I met in Kyangwali to find work in a future resettlement country, adapt to the new environment and deal with racism, especially considering that most of them barely spoke a word of English.
Their desire for resettlement was based on the seemingly obvious premise that life in resettlement is better than life as a refugee in Uganda. Resettlement was imagined by many to be a context in which it is possible to create, in their words, a ânew life.â For many refugees I worked with in Australia, however, this premise is false.
RAMSAY 2017, 6â7
Nevertheless, those who managed to afford a flight back to Uganda after several years would turn up with new clothes and suitcases full of presents, as Ramsay told me the day I met her. Similarly, I saw how young people with whom I was connected through Facebook uploaded pictures that showed them displaying a wad of dollar bills just days after their arrival in the US. Later on came photographs in front of shopping malls or impressive cars.
I am actually praying to God to help us and bless us, so that they donât take us [to the US] when our age is past, just to go and die soon. They should help us when we are still energetic, so that upon reaching there, I believe, my life will change and I will be very well. The thoughts of Kyangwali and Congo will end. Because I know I will dress well, I will receive an artificial arm. Life will be very good.
What again seemed to matter for peopleâs future possibilities were their chances of âbuildingâ and attaining personhood through being able to provide for their families. What my interlocutors had heard from their predecessors was overtly welcoming and free of problems and complications. Yet, despite the inevitable challenges that people possibly preferred not to communicate too openly, there was enough reason for them to hope for family and friends to receive the same opportunity, as Bernadette stated: âEvery friend of mine who is there [in the US] is praying for me to get thereâ.
In spite of most peopleâs low chances of resettlement, once again the refugee category conferred a very desirable opportunity that non-refugees were not able to attain. This was in particularly stark contrast to the internally displaced people who had settled in and beyond the IDP camps in the Congo and Uganda but did not have any chance of resettlement. Furthermore, refugees who were from countries of origin other than Congo, like Hanifah or Odongo from South Sudan or Vitali from Burundi, had no chance of resettlement apart from one of the special reasons that counted for resettlement entitlement, such as certain protection concerns, marriage and family reunification, medical reasons or discrimination issues (UNHCR 2011a, 197).4 I was told about cases of fraud, where people of other nationalities â even some Ugandans â had tried to get through the process using a false identity (see also Sandvik 2011).
Refugees who are well-adjusted to their disability and are functioning at a satisfactory level are generally not to be considered for resettlement under this category. Only when such disabilities cannot be treated locally or within the UNHCR medical referral scheme, and when they seriously threaten the personâs safety or quality of life, should resettlement on grounds of medical needs be explored.
2011a, 258
Even though the guidance is somewhat restrictive for disabled people, this potential special entitlement left room for a possibility that others without disabilities did not have. For Bernadette (case 10), it was her disability and possibly also her diabetes condition, which required treatment abroad, that eventually brought about her resettlement to the US. Other disabled people were in the process of negotiating their opportunity for resettlement during my fieldwork. Martin (case 9) constantly negotiated with several aid workers about his resettlement needs in terms of treatment possibilities, accompanied by a multitude of medical documents and doctorsâ recommendations. Filonne, a disabled woman who suffered from incontinence and serious chronic stomach problems, also constantly relayed this link between medical reports and resettlement: âThey told me that they had failed, and they gave me a letter stating how they had failed to treat me. They told me that my case has been taken to IOM [for resettlement]â. Filonne was of Rwandese origin and Martin was not registered as a refugee for long enough for the standard route, thus both only
The fact that disability was included in the category âspecific protection needs and potential vulnerabilitiesâ was also relevant to some of my interlocutors in terms of potential exposure to jealousy or persecutory actions by others. Examples of these were Jacobâs insecurity (case 4), Mugenziâs fear of poison (case 12) and Martinâs dwelling (case 9) in the protection house. In her research among Congolese refugees in Tanzania, Marnie Jane Thomson (2012) focused on the official documents that people collected as evidence, given the need to convince aid workers of their persecution and their continuous fear of it. It was especially noticeable how carefully Martin stored his papers that documented his medical problems, but also the court cases and police reports from when his brother had been murdered. Claire (case 7) was resettled earlier than other people, although in her case it was not clear to me if her âmedical needsâ or her need for protection following her house being burnt down was the decisive element in this.
For the lucky ones among my interlocutors whose resettlement process had begun, they did not seem too confident in its outcome. They had been disappointed too many times before and they knew that a successful outcome rested on many factors which they could not influence. Disabled people often stated that it was all dependent on Godâs will, on broader political developments or on the aid agencies, as Mugenzi once commented: âWhere they will take us is where we will go. We are used [to it]â. Mugenzi experienced this kind of dependency within his resettlement process in a rather unpleasant way. The first time, their process was put on hold because Mugenziâs wife and son were ill shortly before they were due to travel to the US. The process was set back, so they had to apply for a new host state in the US, and did not know about the further procedures and timelines. This was particularly challenging as they had stopped planting new crops and already sold their house and plot, in order to buy suitcases and clothes. The subsequent owner of their house was kind enough to let them stay in exchange for rent. Mugenziâs resettlement case was put off a second time in January 2017 when the US issued its immigration ban under President Donald Trump. The last time I visited him, there were no longer any chickens in his compound, and Mugenzi was disappointedly contemplating returning to Congo, if he was not eventually given resettlement.7
How often my interlocutors perceived their situation in regard to home as one of surrendering to the UNHCRâs support or decisions can be set in relation to âthe dependency syndromeâ that starkly contrasts against ideals of empowerment and independence, as this book has discussed earlier. I would argue that disabled people had a relatively higher dependence on aid interventions as refugees than might be the case in other contexts. The aid targeted at refugees somehow entailed their whole life worlds, as they had lost and left everything behind. Thus, they not only experienced a greater dependency, but also held higher expectations, compared to situations when aid interventions happened in contexts of already established domains of life. Hence, being a âbeneficiaryâ, as compared to the concept of clientship (Whyte et al. 2014), was a rather existential condition.
This relatively greater dependence was strengthened by the fact that my interlocutors could not choose between different service providers. Whyte et al. (2014) describe how Ugandaâs landscape of AIDS treatment is characterized through a âprojectificationâ of service delivery, and they highlight the ability to choose between different service providers as being a crucial aspect of the concept of clientship. Within relations of patronage, a patron provides material resources but also protection, primarily in exchange for loyalty. If the clientâs expectations are not satisfied, they can choose to follow another patron, whose services are deemed more appropriate (see also Chabal 2009; Ferguson 2015). Although my interlocutors certainly held expectations about service quality and the logics and practices of aid distribution, their ability to choose between service providers was non-existent.
Yet, the crucial point is that this dependency â however constraining it was â not only shaped my interlocutorsâ ability to access direct aid which they could invest in their families and businesses, but also determined their search for a home, their pursuit of âbuildingâ a future. It was evident that their status as both refugee, and also disabled, enhanced their possibility of finding a better
6 Conclusion
Disabled people often experienced their life in Kyangwali as one in transit â due to the contested temporality of the camp that neither supported a permanent stay, nor offered other long-term solutions for many people â a situation that was incisively expressed in the phrase âour heart does not settleâ. This chapter has looked at how people remembered their past, how they interpreted their current situation, and how they imagined their future.
The chapter challenged a sedentary view on displacement, which was prevalent in the aid agenciesâ approaches towards refugees. People did not want to return for manifold reasons, including their limited mobility to flee again and the often painful memories of the circumstances in which they had acquired their disability. A sedentary view was also challenged through the omnipresence of internal displacement in Congo, as well as the characteristics of the countryâs border region with Uganda. As people from those regions had commuted across the Ugandan borders for ages and sometimes shared a language with their neighbours, and since refugees in Kyangwali often had familial ties not only to Congo, but also to Kampala, other refugee camps in Uganda, or Europe and the US, my interlocutorsâ notion of âhomeâ was not necessarily tied to a common place of origin.
Despite the sometimes horrific and tragic experiences my interlocutors had gone through during war and flight in Eastern Congo, when they spoke about âa life of sufferingâ, they were referring to their current life in the camp, while remembering a better past. My interlocutors strongly oriented themselves towards the aid agencies and their representatives because of what they had to offer: whether that was supporting them to move back home, providing them with the opportunity of resettlement, or offering them economic or educational possibilities to make their life in the camp more bearable. Disabled peopleâs refugee status gave them additional opportunities in comparison to disabled Ugandan citizens, who lacked extra support from the government in terms of medical treatment, assistive devices or educational possibilities.
Nearly every refugee aspired for resettlement, leading to a better future in Europe or the US. Many disabled people based this wish on their hope of better medical treatment, or prostheses that would enable them to walk or work.
Throughout this book I have argued that disability held a particular place in the refugee settlement, because an individualâs body became important for their pursuit of âbuildingâ families and projects in Kyangwali. This chapter has demonstrated that disability had the same significance in regard to searching for a home and thus âbuildingâ a desirable future. This required permanent interaction with the aid agencies which revealed that, in addition to the various changes and losses that happened through displacement, the patterns of relations between refugees and aid agencies indicated important shared particularities of their life worlds. This book thus contributes to the literature that describes peopleâs experiences of humanitarian interventions as very characteristic in the lives of refugees, and the ways they imagine their own futures.
The UNHCR defines these as situations where 25,000 or more refugees of the same nationality have been living in a country of asylum for at least five years (Krause 2016).
During my entire fieldwork period I only came across two people with a disability and a few other refugees who saw their stay in Kyangwali as being permanent. Hanifah and Odongo both said that they would prefer to stay in Kyangwali than return to South Sudan, as the war there had resumed. Most of the South Sudanese refugees had lived for over ten years in the camp, after they were transferred from the Acholi Pi camp in Northern Uganda, at the time it was being attacked by the Lordâs Resistance Army (LRA), the Northern Ugandan rebel group led by Joseph Kony. For many of them, their physical memories of their home country lay far behind in the past. Some of the South Sudanese residents I got to know were also able to engage in larger-scale agriculture like tobacco farming over the years, enabled by good relationships with the camp authorities, who allowed them to rent settlement land. As chances of resettlement for South Sudanese refugees in Kyangwali were practically non-existent during the time of my research, imagining a life in the camp maybe also became a more viable option for their future.
It is the UNHCR that administers resettlement, but in close partnership with the receiving countries. As described in the Resettlement Handbook (UNHCR 2011a), refugeesâ applications for resettlement are first checked by UNHCR officials, who either refuse or waitlist the applications. For the preliminary accepted applications, representatives of the receiving countries select refugees according to their own specific criteria (Ramsay 2017, 4). Once refugees are accepted for resettlement, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) plays an especially prominent role. The organization provides a three to five day-long cultural orientation on the host countries, and arranges all the pre-departure logistics and exit formalities for the refugees who have been accepted for resettlement (IOM Uganda 2018).
From Uganda, the UNHCR resettled a total of two Sudanese refugees in 2014, six in 2015 and another six in 2016. People of Rwandan or Burundian nationality were not resettled at all from Uganda during this period, as UNHCRâs resettlement data finder shows.
This category also included âwomen and girlsâ, âchildren and adolescentsâ, âolder refugeesâ, âlesbian, gay, bisexual and intersex (LGBTI) refugeesâ and ârefugees from minorities and indigenous groupsâ (UNHCR 2011a, 182â201).
The UNHCR has historically considered resettlement as an option of last resort for refugees with disabilities. According to the 1996 manual called UNHCR Community Service Guidelines on Assisting Disabled Refugees: A community-based approach, âit is more advisable to help the integration of the disabled in their own communitiesâ (Mirza 2011a, 526). This has changed, as is evident from the 2004 Resettlement Handbook, in which the UNHCR considers disability to be a factor that warrants special opportunities in terms of resettlement (Mirza 2011a, 526).
Mugenzi and his family were eventually resettled in the US in 2018.