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Inside out: A child's world unpacked
Mail & Guardian (SA)
June 23, 2006

Imagine your child comes home from school one day to find that you are not there, writes Nicole Johnson, the house has been burnt down and everyone the child knows has fled.

Imagine your 10-year old son seeing you killed, and then being forced to run for his life, carrying his five-year-old brother on his back.

Try to conceive of two little girls travelling all the way from Burundi to Johannesburg by taxi, by foot, by bus, swimming rivers, jumping over razor-wire border fences in the middle of the night, utterly alone. Imagine those girls arriving at Park Station, sleeping on the streets of Johannesburg in midwinter, not knowing where to turn for help, not knowing the language to ask in.

These stories may sound like the plot of a five-hankie Hollywood tearjerker, but unfortunately they weren’t dreamt up by a scriptwriter - they are all absolutely true and reflect just a fraction of the experiences of refugee children who arrive in South Africa unaccompanied or after being separated from their parents.

Their accounts are told in The Suitcase Stories, a collection of the artwork done by these children in a project that used old suitcases as the foundation for mixed-media art. "A suitcase is about a journey; all the children had their journeys," explains the project’s founder, Glynis Clacherty. "A suitcase has a face that is open to everyone to see and a hidden space inside that we can choose to expose or not." The outsides of the suitcase represent their present lives, while the insides represent their pasts. The project aimed to provide psychosocial support through art and the children’s right to privacy was paramount: they decided how much of their story they wanted to tell (if any), chose pseudonyms to protect their identities and selected which parts of work would be included in the book. Interestingly, none of them wanted to be identified as refugees, and considered themselves as South African now.

The result is a collection of stories that will have even the hardest-hearted, compassion-fatigued cynic among you weeping until you are ugly. The resilience of these children is nothing short of astounding. Their ability to go on, to maintain hope and a solemn dignity in the face of exploitation, alienation and abuse, is humbling.

Jenny’s suitcase
Jenny was 11 when she and her younger sister, Francoise left Burundi. The family had been displaced several times, and they had spent time in refugee camps in Zaire and Tanzania. With both parents dead they were handed from one distant relative to another and badly mistreated.

"I wanted to go to South Africa because my daddy he was saying when I was small, ‘when my little girl grows up, I will take her to London’. So I was thinking South Africa is in London," Jenny explains. Their epic journey began when they caught a taxi to Dar es Salaam and then continued by various buses to the South African border. "In the place where we began, they were speaking Swahili, but in the place when the bus ended up they spoke another language we didn’t know . . .

"And then we gave our money to one person and he ran away. But there was another one who saw him and said he would help us. We went with the man and had to walk through the bush and walk, we walk, we walk, we walk, we walk, shoo, shoo, shoo! And then we cross a river. And then when we cross that river, that man said ‘I have to leave you here now’. I was 11 and Francoise was eight. Two girls in the bush now, on our own with that man."

Paul’s suitcase
Paul was 10 when the genocide in Rwanda began. His father was too ill to leave but sent Paul, his little brother and their mother to Burundi. On the way their mother was shot. They managed to send a message to their father, who despite being gravely ill, managed to find them amid the exodus. "We came to a house and we stayed there. That is where they come and take him away, my dad. My dad said, ‘if you see them calling me, don’t cry. Pretend you are not my child. You just walk away and save your small brother.’ They came at 6 o’clock."

Later Paul and his brother were separated when the younger child was taken to an orphanage in Kenya. "She said, ‘Do you mind if we take your brother?’ I had no choice because Burundi was also at war and anytime I could die. They can only take one of us." Later in his story, Glynis finds him cutting out dozens of pictures of shoes from a magazine. He tells her: "They remind me that I walked. I walked and walked and walked. I was a small boy but I walked. They remind me that I was a survivor that things were very bad and I was only 10 years old, but I walked and walked. And I survived. The shoes remind me of surviving."

Pasco’s suitcase
Pasco and his sister Aggie left the Democratic Republic of Congo after their mother died when they were very young, went to Zambia and then came to South Africa with their older brother. He is now married to a South African woman who will have nothing to do with them. Now teenagers, they fend for themselves on the streets of Hillbrow, where Pasco is constantly harassed by the police and thugs and Aggie has been sexually harassed and threatened with sexual violence. One of Pasco’s biggest problems is his lack of official documents.

"Then I drew a picture of myself on a document. It is the document I want to have. It is the permit from Home Affairs. It is my refugee status permit. But I do not have it. I have a problem with papers. I cannot renew my papers. I am always going to Home Affairs and every time I go they tell me something different . . .I worry all the time that they will arrest me . . . Once we were in the street, there is a police car there another police car and everyone is running . . . There were four of us and they cock the gun like we are thieves, like we kill someone or are thieves . . . It is humiliating, because when they grab you from the belt, giving you a ‘wedgy’ and they hold you up, you can’t do anything. It makes you feel very bad, like you are nothing."

*The Suitcase Stories - Refugee Children Reclaim Their Identities, by Glynis Clacherty is published by Double Storey.

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