A home or a refugeecamp?

A refugee camp is a place where a people, who have fled from their country, live until their return. It is a people waiting to return to their home land and their own territory. But if you can’t return, and have waited for change for 37 years, how do you adjust? How are a people shaped by the long wait?

Many people in the Sahara refugee camp have never experienced their home country and have never been on the run. How long can a people wait before they choose to make the refugee camp their home? They live their lives in insecurity about the future, and Inshallah (if God wants to) they will return. For that reason people don’t build beautiful houses to live in. And why should they? If they do settle down, wouldn’t that be the same as giving up?

An individual have to do make the best out of it. Live every day as best as he/she can, but at the same time never give up hope to return to their real home. My uncle says that this is how it is supposed to be right now. That this is Gods will, and that they will get their award in heaven. Nevertheless many young people grow more and more impatient. They want change.

My father here is one of the few people who have spent all his money, and some of his neighbors’ money, on a solid house. And when I asked him why, he answered that he wanted to see his son grow up with shelter from the harsh weather and a nice place to come home to. He has spent his whole life here in the refugee camp and he is now 36 years old. He was born here right after his family fled from the occupied territory. My father has never seen Western Sahara, but that does not mean that he feels that he belongs here. He is born with the stories, the longing and the waiting.

I don’t know what the long hours, days, months, years, and decades of waiting will do to a people, but I am sure the waiting will not make them less eager to get back to their real homes in Western-Sahara.