Ignorance is better?

We were in a rural area. It was a refugee camp and I was there with a delegation of United Nation High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). We were looking at issues related to persons with disability in the refugee camps and before that visit, I had already been to some other refugee camps in Africa.

The road leading to the refugee camp, left the city to meander through fields dotted with small huts. Thin and dirty children in tattered clothes occasionally stood by the roadside to look at our big UN vehicles passing.

If outside was poverty, inside the refugee camp seemed like the land of plenty. There were lot of international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) with lot of expatriate staff. In the health centre, their was plenty of staff and no medicines seemed to be lacking. I had a long conversation with an Australian speech therapist working with children who had speaking difficulties, asking her about the general conditions inside the camp and the different services available there.

"What about the local people living outside the camp?" I had asked. Persons outside had looked malnourished and without any services, left to fend for themself in an isolated remote area. "No, we can't provide any services to the locals", I was told. It was because of policy decision by government here. UNHCR staff and international staff were responsible only for the refugee camp and they were prohibited from having any kind of interaction with the local population.

But international NGOs could have started separate projects for the surrounding countryside, I had insisted.Isn't it terrible to pass in front of those huts everyday and see them so poor and so vulnerable? There are only funds for emergency, no one gives money for ordinary poverty, they said.

The person showing us around took us to the high school in the refugee camp. It was a wonderful place with nice uniforms, a large field where children were playing, and some committed expatriate teachers, who explained their work including the use of internet to bring the world to the refugee camp.

I was a little upset. I thought it was discriminatory with all these resources that they had in the UN, giving the world to the refugees inside the camp walls, while just outside those walls, people of the same skin colour, same language, similar facial traits could die of hunger, their children faced malnutrition, and died of usual simple illnesses like diarrohea and mealses. So perhaps, I was condescending in my interaction with the students of 12th standard. I don't remember the exact words of my question. Perhaps it was something to do with their future.

A young man sitting at the back stood up to answer me. I think that he said some thing like, "We are prisoners in this cage. This wonderful school, these wonderful teachers, our learning internet, our learning French and English, what use is it? It only serves to make us feel worse. We have no future. UNHCR can provide only school education. There is no university here and I can not go outside the walls of this camp. And, after passing 12th, all these wonderful programmes finish. Then we go back to our families in this camp, to work in the fields. For working in the field, I don't need any of this knowledge that I have got, it will only serve to remind me about the wretchedness of my life, to know how much we are missing. It is terrible to know what we could be and be forced to be nothing."

I was suddenly reminded of this episode while reading the story "Sudama's children" about poor kids in rich private schools in Delhi in the latest issue of Outlook. "There are two kinds of pain—the pain of growing up in a jhuggi with little hope of change, and the pain of adjustment in studying with well-off kids in a private school. How do we know which is worse?"

I think of that youngman's heartbreaking answer in the refugee camp and the choices he had. Yet, compared to the life of living in poverty, outside the refugee camp, where hunger and disease are likely to kill you young and at the best, you will grow up to eke out a miserable and difficult life from the fields! What would you choose if you had this choice?

***

Along the way

"Do you mind if I sit here?"

I looked up at her. I was really engrossed in my book, the glass of tomato juice almost forgotten on the table. It took me a moment to understand her question. "Sure", I nodded, moving my bags to make place and removing my jacket from the other chair, putting it at the back of my chair.

She seemed to be around thirty, a big round red bindi in the middle of her forehead and wearing a crumpled pale chicken kurta. She took off a big black bag from her shoulder and then removed the big ruck-sack from her back. Sighing deeply, she sank onto the chair. I went back to my book. She sat there cupping her chin in her hands, her elbows on the table, looking at the queue in front of the cash counter, persons waiting to give their orders. I couldn't concentrate on my book but tried to go on with my reading, forcing myself to not to look at her.

Finally I looked up and took a sip of the juice from the glass. She was still sitting there with her chin in her hands, looking at the queue, lost in her thoughts, unaware of every thing else. Then her telephone rang. She moved slowly, bending down to pick up her black bag and searching inside for the telephone. By the time she found it, the telephone had stopped ringing. She looked at the telephone screen, pressing some buttons and her lips tightened. She put it back in the bag and closed it, placing it on the ground.

The telephone rang again almost immediately. This time she did not move. After a while it stopped ringing. I was suddenly embarassed. As if I had trespassed into her privacy. I looked at my watch. Perhaps, it was time for me to move. My flight was from the northern terminal and I had to take the shuttle train.

I picked up my jacket and the bag. Then I nodded at her but she was lost in her own world. As I walked away, her telephone started ringing again. I stopped briefly to look at her. She still sat there with her chin resting on her hands, her eyes closed.

******
I had put on two shirts, one over another but I was still shivering. I was almost tempted to wrap the woollen blanket in the room around me as I went out for dinner, but I resisted. Outside, it was still raining.

In the dining room, I was looking around for a place when I saw him. He smiled at me and nodded, pointing to the empty chair in front of him. I vaguely remembered him as we had waited at Bologna airport for the flight to Paris and both of us had missed our connecting flights.

Air France had put us at a hotel inside the Astrix resort, about 20 km from the airport. He seemed happy to have found an "Italian" co-passenger and was a little suprised when I told him my name, that was clearly not Italian.

I slowly sipped a glass of red wine, hoping it would warm me up. It was July and yet so terribly cold. In the mean time, he was gulping down big sips of a dark liquid, that was surely stronger than my wine. Emtying the glass, he raised his hand at the waiter for a refill.

I am not much of a drinker and after a little wine, I tend to become silent, if not downright sleepy. He was the other kind, the type who opens up after a few glasses. Soon he was telling me about himself. He lived in Reggio Emilia, about 30 km north of Bologna and worked for some factory that exported machines.

He didn't ask me any questions and I was content to listen to him, feeling the wine take away a bit of that chill that seemed to have seeped down to my bones. Soon he was telling me about his wife. She was anorexic and refused to eat. She was worried about gaining fat and in the process, thin as a skeleton. She had been admitted in hosiptal twice but nothing seemed to work. He said that he was stressed and not too sure if he could continue much morewith this life. In front of him, she tried to eat but he was sure that afterwards she went to the toilet to vomit.

I was horrified. I knew about anorexia but I had never thought about living with someone anorexic.

Soon he was crying. Big tears coming down on his cheeks. He was catholic he said, and divorce won't be right. But he had no other way. It was destroying him and he couldn't bear it any more.

We walked outside and the rain drops probably helped in stoping his crying.

"Good night, I am really tired, must go back to bed now!" I said. "Good night" he mumbled after me as I walked towards my room, thankful that it was in another wing of the hotel.

In the morning, when the airport bus came to pick us up, he didn't even nod at me. It was as if we were strangers.

***