Right Where We Belong

How Refugee Teachers and Students Are Changing the Future of Education

Sarah Dryden-Peterson

• Editore: Harvard University Press
• Anno: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780674276369
• Argomento: Sciences sociales
• Categoria: Émigration et immigration

A leading expert shows how, by learning from refugee teachers and students, we can create for displaced children—and indeed all children—better schooling and brighter futures. Half of the world's 26 million refugees are children. Their formal education is disrupted, and their lives are too often dominated by exclusion and uncertainty about what the future holds. Even kids who have the opportunity to attend school face enormous challenges, as they struggle to integrate into unfamiliar societies and educational environments.In Right Where We Belong, Sarah Dryden-Peterson discovers that, where governments and international agencies have been stymied, refugee teachers and students themselves are leading. From open-air classrooms in Uganda to the hallways of high schools in Maine, new visions for refugee education are emerging. Dryden-Peterson introduces us to people like Jacques—a teacher who created a school for his fellow Congolese refugees in defiance of local laws—and Hassan, a Somali refugee navigating the social world of the American teenager. Drawing on more than 600 interviews in twenty-three countries, Dryden-Peterson shows how teachers and students are experimenting with flexible forms of learning. Rather than adopt the unrealistic notion that all will soon return to "normal, " these schools embrace unfamiliarity, develop students' adaptiveness, and demonstrate how children, teachers, and community members can build supportive relationships across lines of difference.It turns out that policymakers, activists, and educators have a lot to learn from displaced children and teachers. Their stories point the way to better futures for refugee students and inspire us to reimagine education broadly, so that children everywhere are better prepared to thrive in a diverse and unpredictable world.

1

Teacher

Jacques sits on the edge of the only chair in his one-room home.¹ It has thick, well-worn armrests and the once-overstuffed blue cushion on the seat sags a little while a bright yellow embroidered doily is draped carefully across the top, behind Jacques’s head. It is almost seven o’clock in the morning and, in the equatorial country of Uganda, that means the sun has just risen, no matter the time of year. The room is dark, though. There are no windows in its concrete walls and the lacy, white curtain that covers the one narrow doorway to the outside has not yet begun its fluttering dance in the so far calm and windless morning.

This is the one time of day that Jacques is alone, that his guard is down, that his mind is quiet. His children, Julie and Nicolas, are in the back of the house, in the little laneway that separates this row of concrete homes from the next and the next. In the rainy season, the laneway fills to become a creek of dirty, sewage-like water with swarms of malarial mosquitoes. This time of year, at this time of morning, it is filled with soapy, laughing children from around the neighborhood, splashing water from brightly colored plastic basins onto their skin, still warm from sleep, wriggling with the chill of the cold water. The lucky ones, those for whom a day of learning stretches ahead of them, know that every inch of their bodies must be clean before they put on their perfectly washed and pressed school uniforms. Julie and Nicolas are among the lucky ones.

Jacques’s wife, Marie, is on the front stoop. She is bent at the waist, deeply attentive to a large tin pot balanced on a charcoal stove. There are no handles on the pot, only a skinny rim, which she holds steady with her almost heat-resistant hands. Marie has been up for hours. The morning porridge has been made, served, and consumed. But the midday meal cannot wait. Matoke, a Ugandan staple that her family, in their new home, has only just learned to like, takes hours to cook. She has already peeled these hard, green bananas with a knife and set them to boil in a pot of water lined with shiny, pliable banana leaves. She stands up every once in a while to get away from the heat of the stove and, each time, adjusts the red, green, and yellow swath of cloth that is tied tightly around her waist and that falls straight downward to cover her almost to the ankles.

Jacques enjoys these few minutes on his own. The family’s one-room home is by night a crowded bedroom and by day a crowded living area. There is no wasted space. Dishes and cooking supplies, neatly stacked, line one side of the room. Mattresses, already put away at this early hour, are tucked behind the cabinet. A small shelf, behind the chair where Jacques sits, holds their most prized possessions: photos from home, and books.

Julie, age six, comes into the room and, with a slight shiver from the predawn air, walks over to sit down next to her father, to share in his warmth. Jacques knows that Julie never likes to be far from his side. She gazes up at him and smiles. He smiles back down at her and squeezes her gently.

A few years ago, Julie had hair full of braids, with red and white plastic beads that clicked when she moved her head, which she did often for the love of the sound. A schoolgirl now, Julie must have short, cropped hair, defined by the school as part of the uniform. She can look serious in the semi-darkness, but her sparkling and playful eyes belie that impression.

“Julie,” Jacques says, in Kiswahili, “can you fetch me the Bible, in English.”

It takes Julie only a split second to jump from her seat, gracefully place herself in the narrow space between her father’s chair and the bookshelf, and pick out the correct one among the many: not the French one, not the Kiswahili one, not the Luganda one, but the English one, as her father had asked.

Jacques smiles when Julie hands him the Bible. “Thank you,” he says, in English this time.

“You are most welcome,” Julie pipes back in the sing-song way she has learned to say these English words at school.

Language is a constant reminder to Jacques that this is not his home. Home is DRC. Home is the Kihunde language. Home is the family he has not seen in five years. Jacques is a refugee in Uganda. Home is a place where he could build his future.

For Jacques, though, home is also what he makes for his children no matter where they are. “You cannot leave the future of your children for others to take care of,” he says.

“They do not know that we are refugees,” Jacques explains about his children, sadly yet with a matter-of-fact tone. “Nicolas,” who is three, “knows that he is Congolese, he knows that he comes from Goma. He knows that his grandmother and grandfather are in Goma. Julie knows that also. They do not think they are Ugandans.” Jacques pauses, but then quickly continues. “But they do not think we are refugees.”

Yet not a day goes by when Jacques is not reminded that he is a refugee. The Jacques of home, the husband to Marie, the father to Julie and Nicolas, does not dare enter the streets of Kampala—Uganda’s capital—as himself.

When he walks away from the neighbors who know him, he becomes a different person. Small in stature, in the streets of Kampala, Jacques becomes small in presence. His body stiff and rigid, he weaves between the crowds of people shining shoes, selling tomatoes, on their way to somewhere. His own eyes are always focused on a destination, never on a face. The broad smile that is always present when he is in the company of family and friends disappears. So changed is his look and disposition that he becomes unrecognizable.

And that is his goal. Jacques was a human rights activist in Congo. His work began as a personal protest against the persecution of his minority Bahunde ethnic group in his home districts of Walikale and Massisi. As the conflict in Congo grew, he became involved with an NGO named L’Action pour la Défense des Droits de l’Homme au Congo (Action for the Defense of Human Rights in Congo), which fought, visibly and in many districts, for the rights of civilians. But government forces on one side and rebel militia on the other are both powerful in eastern Congo, and it is civilians like Jacques in the middle who bear the burdens of the conflict. Over four million people have been killed in Congo since 1998, more than in any other part of the world.² While this massive conflict has seemed to escape attention outside Congo, the human rights activities of a small group could not escape the attention of the authorities.

In a letter dated December 26, 1999, the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Interieure (General Directorate of Internal Security) ordered the immediate arrest of anyone associated with the human rights group with which Jacques worked. Two days later, he was imprisoned and later tortured, only to escape on January 17, 2000, when a fire spread through the prison and all of the guards fled to protect themselves. The International Committee of the Red Cross helped Jacques and Marie, who was pregnant with Julie, to reach the Ugandan border.

When he arrived in Uganda in late January 2000, Jacques was one of 236,100 refugees there. Overwhelmingly, these refugees had fled Sudan, which was then enduring a decades-old civil war, but there were also growing numbers of people who had come from DRC and a few from Somalia.³ Uganda’s refugee policies at this time fell under the Control of Alien Refugees Act (CARA), an outdated legal framework that predated Uganda’s 1976 ratification of the 1951 Refugee Convention.⁴

The Act determined where in Uganda refugees had to live. It severely restricted refugees’ freedom of movement and mandated that they live in rural and isolated refugee camps, known in Uganda by the magnanimous words yet no less constraining concept of “refugee settlements.” As Zachary Lomo, then the director of the Refugee Law Project of Makerere University in Kampala, described, “Legal mechanisms are in place in terms of opening the door and allowing them [refugees] in [to Uganda], but once they were in, their lives were chained. They used all forms of chains … [saying] ‘You are only a refugee if you accept my terms.’ … The Control of Alien Refugees Act actually creates criminals of those refugees who leave the refugee settlement.… All of this affected the ability of the refugee to exploit their own abilities.… The whole refugee system is control-based to satisfy the ego of the ‘helper.’ ”⁵ With control over where and how refugees could live in Uganda, these global and national “helpers” defined parameters for any possible new home in exile. Though the Act was not consistently or strictly applied, assertion of control over where and how refugees lived—rather than practices of protection of their rights—was a key component of refugee policy in Uganda at the time of Jacques’s exile.⁶

Jacques did not know the specifics of this Act, but these specifics circumscribed every action he took from the moment he arrived in Uganda. Before Jacques could even enter the office of InterAid, the NGO mandated to assist refugees in Kampala, his way was blocked by a big sign on the door that stated “It is government policy that all asylum seekers must register at entry points in the north. You are, therefore, all asked to return to the north and register there.”⁷ The “north” was more than five hundred kilometers away and the cost of getting there was far more than Jacques and Marie had to their name. They stayed in Kampala. They were seeking refuge, but they could not register for the protections of refugees, which they would receive only within the distant settlements.

After five months in Kampala—Jacques remembers the exact date and time, June 22, 2000 at 10 A.M.—he was stopped at the Kibuye roundabout. This roundabout acts as a kind of guard post for Kampala. With five roads that come together at this very point from in and out of the city, the traffic is always stopped: bumper to bumper, mirror to mirror, with drivers able to reach out and touch each other. In this jam of invisibility, it is usually easy to pass through it from one side to the other, unnoticed. But as unrecognizable as Jacques is as Jacques, he is immediately identifiable to any Ugandan as a foreigner, a refugee, or, in the derogatory slang he heard so often, “MuZaïri,” a word literally meaning from the former Zaïre but said with a tone that signaled to Jacques “you are not welcome here.”

Jacques was stopped at Kibuye by two men, one in a Ugandan police uniform and one in civilian clothes. Knowing well his own body’s reaction to fear, Jacques was not surprised when he felt beads of sweat begin to form at the nape of his neck and his heart begin its side-to-side dance. He recognized the man in civilian clothes as an information agent from the Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie-Goma (RCD-Goma), the main rebel group operating in his home of eastern DRC that was fighting to overthrow Congo’s then president, Laurent-Désiré Kabila. It was RCD-Goma that had arrested the members of Jacques’s human rights group. The government of Uganda had been working with the RCD-Goma in eastern Congo, trading military support for the right to exploit Congo’s rich mineral resources, in particular diamonds and the tantalite used to make cell phones. Now, with so many refugees from Congo in exile in Uganda, this collaboration extended into Ugandan territory.⁸ Human Rights Watch documented the danger in which this placed refugees: “Refugees from the territories of the DRC controlled by Uganda until October 2002 are under the control of the same authorities responsible for their original persecution [in Uganda]. Human rights activists and other prominent community leaders are frequently followed by security services of the RCD-Goma, and sometimes threatened. The situation is so difficult for some refugees that they are terrified to leave their shelters.”⁹

Luckily, the RCD-Goma agent did not recognize Jacques as a human rights activist wanted by Congolese authorities, only as a Congolese man. After two hours of questioning and having his documents confiscated, Jacques was released. Heading straight to the Kampala offices of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the international agency responsible for refugee protection, Jacques related his experience.

The UNHCR protection officer had a simple answer. He told Jacques, “You are a civilian in enemy territory. The only place we can protect you is in the refugee camp. You must go there immediately.”

“Allez au camp [go to the camp]” had not yet become the familiar refrain for Jacques that it would be years later, when he would come to think of it as UNHCR’s throw-your-hands-up-in-the-air solution to every refugee’s problems. He did not yet know what the camp had in store, only that he was not safe in Kampala. So he and Marie packed their few belongings and, with newborn Julie, made the day-long journey to the Kyangwali refugee settlement in western Uganda.

Jacques knew the refugee camp was in a rural area and that he would need to take up, for the first time in his life, subsistence agriculture. “I had never held a hoe!” he exclaimed. Even so, he had what he called “hope in his heart” that he would find safety and that his family would be tranquille, the French word that, said aloud, sounds exactly like what it is supposed to mean: calm, quiet, serene, peaceful.

In the camp, though, Jacques encountered the very same RCD-Goma combatants, now attempting to pass as refugees. Jacques was so fearful that he did not want to leave his small, mud-walled home. He was terrified of being killed in the middle of this camp and abandoning his family to a fate he could not bring himself to imagine. Eight months later, he and his family packed up again, left the refugee camp, and moved back to Kampala. Jacques and his family were part of a growing number of refugees—now over 60 percent globally—who settle in cities, defying the persistent stereotype that refugees, by definition, live in camps.¹⁰ He preferred the fear of living undocumented in a place that would allow him to practice his profession over the fear of having to subsist where he had to dig and cultivate, unsuccessfully and in fear, to feed his family.

---

Jacques i...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• A Note on Word Choice
• Abbreviations
• Prologue: Our Futures
• Map
• 1. Teacher
• 2. Sanctuary
• 3. Power
• 4. Purpose
• 5. Learning
• 6. Belonging
• Epilogue: Home
• Appendix: Doing the Work
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index