Activity 1
What particular difficulties do you imagine women and children refugees face? Please read the following stories and try identify with your classmates the biggest difficulty faced by women and children refugees

Mariyam's Story
Mariyam, a 48-year-old Sabean-Mandean woman from Basra, was abducted in Iraq by two men on 6 July 2005. Throughout the three days of her abduction, she was beaten by three men. On the first day she was denied food, water and access to a toilet. On the second and third days she was raped by all three men.

On the third day her captors blindfolded her, put her in a car and left her in a street after threatening to kill her and her family if she reported the kidnapping. She took a taxi and went home. When she entered the house her husband immediately started beating her.

Three days after her release Mariyam went to the police to report the incident in a bid to convince her husband of what had happened. A week after the attack a woman came to her house and told her she knew she had been to the police and now all her family would be killed. Mariyam then fled with her family to Syria.Since arriving in Syria her husband has cut ties with her and she has seen one of her attackers in Damascus. She is severely traumatized and afraid to leave her house. She is surviving solely because of the support of her sister.

Taken from: Amnesty International, Iraq: Suffering in silence : Iraqi refugees in Syria , 12 May 2008. MDE 14/0110/2008. Online. UNHCR Refworld, available at: http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/4847a4841f.html [accessed 17 July 2008]

Alfredo's Heritage
Fourteen-year-old Alfredo Chivunda was born in a refugee camp in Zambia, so he has never known his country of origin, either at peace or at war. His family is from Cazombo, an Angolan town near the border with Zambia which was hard hit during Angola's decades-long civil war. After the peace pact was signed, refugees started coming home again to a country ravaged by war and littered with landmines. Despite the level of destruction, people, including Alfredo, have been flocking back to their villages, anxious to rebuild their homeland. Now, for the first time in his life he is living in his ancestral home, trying to find a school there.

But, too old to attend primary school, he quickly discovered that secondary schools had not yet been rebuilt. What’s more, having grown up in Zambia, he doesn’t speak Portuguese, the language of instruction in Angola. Alfredo is especially worried that he will lose key years at school: "The Portuguese which they do speak here will be hard for me to start learning, because it is so late. I will have to start again and that will be hard also."

Alfredo left Zambia on his own, and now he stays in a small village, 40 minutes’ walking distance from Cazombo, with his half-brother Manuel and his family. A lot older than the other children in the village, he feels lonely. "In this village there are no people to be friends with who are my size." He indicates a typical 5-year-old height with his hands: "All of them are just this size. I have no friend here. My only friend is this tree. I always stay here with the tree, reading a book. That’s all."

Courtesy of UNHCR:
http://www.playagainstallodds.com/factualweb/us/2.4/articles/Alfredo_heritage.html

Feah's Long Road Ahead
Feah is from Sierra Leone. Her normal, happy family life was shattered on the day armed rebel soldiers suddenly arrived at her parents’ cocoa plantation. Feah and the younger children of her family were collecting water from a nearby stream, when they saw the rebels approach the plantation. Terrified, the children hid from the armed men, but from their hiding place they heard their mother’s agonized cries as she was tortured by the soldiers.

The cries went on for many hours, and the horrified children could do nothing to help. They could only stay where they were, hoping the vicious soldiers would go away without discovering them. When it was safe to leave their hiding place, the children found their mother. She was dead and by her side was the machete with which the soldiers had assaulted her.

Feah and her brothers and sister searched for their father but could find no trace of him. Perhaps he was still alive; perhaps he had been abducted by the rebels. Whatever had happened to him, Feah, the eldest child, now had to take care of her young brothers and her sister. She had to take them somewhere safe. It was too dangerous to remain on the plantation, even to remain in the country, while government soldiers and rebels ruthlessly attacked civilians as well as each other.

As Feah and the children traveled on foot through the countryside, they avoided soldiers and others who would hurt or take advantage of five unaccompanied children. The journey to safety took them seven days and seven nights. At the end, they reached the neighboring country of Guinea, and sought shelter and safety in a refugee camp.

That was a year ago. Feah has had to grow up quickly. Her childhood ended abruptly the day her mother died. Now aged 14, she is responsible for her sister, Kadiatu who is 4 years old, and her brothers, Aiah, 10 and Junior who is 2. A third brother, Komba, escaped with them; but during the flight from danger, Komba caught a chill which developed into pneumonia. He died in Feah’s arms. He was only 5 years old.

Feah’s daily life is hard. She has to walk long distances to local villages to earn money. She pounds newly harvested coffee and husks rice for the Guinean farmers, receiving less than 50 cents for each sack of pounded coffee or husked rice. Sometimes the payment is just a small quantity of spilt rice grains. On market days, Feah helps traders to sell used clothing. For a full day’s work she earns less than a dollar.

Courtesy of UNHCR:
http://www.playagainstallodds.com/factualweb/us/1.4/articles/Feah_Sierra%20Leone.html

Florence's Safe Haven
Florence was born in Bukavu, in eastern Zaire (now re-named the Democratic Republic of Congo) close to the border with Rwanda. Her mother was a businesswoman who traveled on the job and Florence lived with a foster family. One day, in April 1994, while visiting her mother in neighboring Rwanda, tragedy struck.

"We had heard rumors that Tutsis were being massacred by Hutus when I was visiting my mother on that fateful day. We didn't take it seriously," she recalls. "Then on the third day of the massacre, as we sat at home, me and my Mum, I left for a few minutes to collect something from her room, leaving her alone in the sitting room... Those few minutes saved my life." A group of angry men with machetes walked in and started shouting at her mother. "One of then pulled out a long knife and stabbed her on the chest twice," recalls Florence, in tears. "At this point I practically went mad and left through a back door... running." She did not stop until she crossed the border and reached Bukavu.



She got a shock when she told her foster family what had happened. "They sent us packing... me and my little sister." Florence found shelter in a refugee camp. She was forced to sell her daily ration of food in order to care for her younger sister. A few weeks later, they embarked on a 700-km trek to the central Zairian town of Kisangani, a journey that took them over 45 days. "On the way we fed on fruits and nuts, quenching our thirst with water that was often so horrible that it makes me shudder to remember it."

There, she hid her identity, fearing that the witch-hunt for ethnic Tutsis was not over. Aided by the fact that she spoke a range of languages including Swahili and Lingala, as well as French with a Zairian accent, she managed to pass for a Zairian. Furthermore, she renamed herself with a Zairian surname, which helped her board a plane that was flying displaced war victims to Kinshasa. "We were adopted by sympathetic people, but I often lived separately from my little sister who lived with another family," she explains.

To pay for their school, she worked as a babysitter. "I take after my mother who was very active," she says. A young theological student at the school brought her plight to the attention of a Polish priest, who was moved to tears by her story. He helped the two girls travel to Poland in 2000.

Courtesy of UNHCR:
http://www.playagainstallodds.com/factualweb/us/1.4/articles/Florence_Rwanda.html [accessed 17 July 2008]

Activity 2 - Question
What makes women and children refugees more vulnerable than male refugees?

Activity 3 - Scenario
The number of women and children refugees coming to your country has increased recently. You are responsible for ensuring that these two vulnerable groups are provided adequate protection and care. What measures would you bring about to ensure that protection?

Links and further reading:

War has Changed our Life, not our Spirit – Experiences of forcibly displaced women:
http://www.jrs.net/pubs/books/wb.php?lang=en

Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children
http://www.womenscommission.org

Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers:
http://www.child-soldiers.org


Please note that images in no way correspond to stories.