A Safer Place

How might we handle the flood of refugees?  Today, perhaps only 1 percent of the world’s refugees are resettled.  Most spend years in temporary accommodations, waiting for a solution; i.e., repatriation, resettlement or local integration.

Then there are the thousands of Somali refugees welcomed in Djibouti.

Somalis have been refugees the longest, as decades of violence and instability have prevented them from safely returning home.  Somalis in the Ali Addeh refugee settlement in Djibouti were born and lived there to adulthood.  It is now their home in every way.

Djibouti presents an alternative to isolationism: hospitality and protection as an intentional response to regional insecurity.  The country is poor and has perhaps little to offer, but it is a safe place for the refugees, a great step up from where they were.  There's help for them there and perhaps some hope for their children.
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Djibouti was established as a host country for persons seeking refuge.  It won independence from France in 1977, just three weeks after war began between Ethiopia and Somalia.  Tens of thousands of refugees flooded across the border, seeking safety, food and water.  All were welcomed.  Eight years later, when famine and conflicts in the Horn of Africa intensified, tens of thousands more refugees came.

Government officials in Djibouti proudly cite their history, a national ethic of hospitality, and the economic advantages of population movement and diversity as all central to the country’s handling of refugees.  Their law ensures refugees, asylum-seekers, and Djiboutian citizens equal rights to education, health care, work, and movement outside refugee camps.

Today, migrants in Djibouti include Yemeni refugees fleeing war, Somalis fleeing political insecurity and drought, and Ethiopians escaping political persecution and deadly poverty.

This is the Loyada checkpoint on Djibouti's eastern border; about 250 meters farther, a Somali guard station.  It was quiet when we were there.  It's just a few miles away from where my friends live.
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I met a gracious fellow in eastern Africa, just a few kilometers from the Somali border.  He has a large family; his wife and children plus a widow and her children who they'd taken in.  He didn't have much, some goats and a camel and a house he'd built from scavenged wood and sheet metal, but he'd accepted them and made a safe place for them.  It's a long and incredible story; they came as refugees.

Waving goodbye, the last time.

His kids dragged me home to meet the family, and we became comfortable friends.  They welcomed me every time I was in country, and they never asked for anything.  They work hard to survive and the kids work hard to help. 

It took me a long time to grasp the depth and breadth of his grace as a man and their nobility as people.  As I remember the smiling faces of his children, I lament what he might think of my country today and how he and his family might have been treated had they come to our border.