Precious Food

Its 6 o’clock in the morning when my alarm goes off in Kigoma, western Tanzania, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. Today I’m leaving for Kasulu, the hub for several UN agencies that are working in the refugee camps that are located along the Burundi border.

These camps, located only 50 kilometers from the border, house almost one hundred thousand refugees. The influx of refugees started with the tribal wars in Burundi and Rwanda in the early 90’s, when later also refugees from Congo arrived. The Rwandese refugees have successfully been repatriated, and the majority of the refugees that are still living in the camps come from Congo.

We’re driving the 120 kilometer stretch to Kasulu on bright red dust roads and, even though it has been raining fiercely in the last days, the quality of the road is remarkably good. The road meanders through bamboo forest and banana plantations, and the landscape starts developing the characteristics where the Great Lakes region is famous for: numerous hills.

Along the road the by now familiar décor: plenty of bicycles that have been loaded with the largest variety of cargo, ranging from enormous bags of charcoal to this mornings’ harvest. While passing by, my eye catches a young kid who is seated on the back of his fathers bicycle. He’s wearing his school uniform, and is holding a chicken firmly on his lap. The official colors of the uniform – blue trousers/white shirt- show adaptation to the environment: the shirt has been dyed pink by the influence of the red mud.

Since we’re driving through a Security Phase One area, we are obliged to stay in close contact with ‘Base’, using the HF radio. Halfway, the driver takes the handset for the radio check: “INDIA FOXTROT 7-3 with DELTA FOXTROT 9 in mobile CHARLY DELTA 117, moving from INDIA to UNIFORM – Switching radio to UNIFORM”. We’re halfway to Kasulu.

After a short breakfast upon arrival in Kasulu town, we pick up a colleague from our field office and continue our drive to the refugee camps. I have no idea what to expect – the only images that pass in my mind are the television documentaries from Sudan and Ethiopia.

During the drive, my colleague explains me more about the background of the Burundian refugees in the Mtabila camp. Some of them arrived early 90’s and thus are already staying for almost 16 years in the camp. An entire generation of Burundians has grown up here and has never visited their homeland – their KiSwahili is probably better than their Kirundi.

When arriving in the camp, I directly understand that the image I had in mind does not even come close to the actual description of the camp. No barbed wire, no tented camp with blue UN sheets. Mtabila resembles at first sight an ordinary Tanzanian village, located in an open forest. Over the years, temporary housing has been replaced by traditional clay and grass houses. Banana and mango trees are abundant and everywhere you look, children are playing on the streets. Even the overloaded bicycles are a common sight here on the red dust roads. I am a bit surprised.

A major difference with the Tanzanian villages surrounding the camps is the fact that the Burundians in the camp do not have the opportunity to engage in farming to produce their own food.

Instead, this is where WFP comes in. Daily WFP feeds the 100.000 refugees with different commodities: Beans, peas, maize, vegetable oil, corn-soy blend and salt. It doesn’t need rocket science to see that we’re talking about tons of food per week here. Each and every week, for already years on end. I witness the monthly recurring food-handout in both camps and see how the bags are collected by selected women, and redistributed within their families as they carry the food back to their homes. The bags that I have seen coming in on bulk vessels in the port of Dar es Salaam, I earlier regarded as cargo. Cargo, that just needed to been shipped inland. This experience in the refugee camps has given a face to my work in the port, changing my view from bags with cargo to bags with food.

When a week later I walk through the warehouse in the port in Dar es Salaam, I notice that one of the bags of beans is torn and that, slowly but continuing, the beans roll under the pallet where the bags have been stacked on. I alert one of the storekeepers, and we try to recondition as many beans as possible. Since not only have these beans been travelling already for weeks to get here, but every 200 grams of beans makes a meal for someone in the camp. And they depend on us.