Refugee Girls Want to Change the World. Will We Let Them?
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Jessica Deng, 21, teaches a math class at Bahr El Naam Primary School, an all-girls school in Kakuma Refugee camp.Deng herself wonders if she will reach her goals. She wants to go to college to study public health. She’s applied for a scholarship to a university in Canada. But it’s highly competitive; she’s already been rejected. Twice.
For now, Deng and her students are stuck—along with 185,000 other refugees—in Kakuma. It’s a purgatory where most people depend on the subsistence rations passed out by the U.N. for survival. They're barred from working outside the camp and must search for jobs within the small economy that has sprung up—running makeshift shops selling soda or shoes or working for aid organizations.
One day I see a girl unconscious—she fainted during a break between classes. The school doesn’t have a nurse. Instead, the girl’s friends carry her into a space between two buildings seeking room and shade. They gather around, fretting and shaking her. The scene escapes the notice of most students and teachers. The teacher I’m talking to checks in and tells me the girl has been fainting regularly lately, but she’ll wake up. There’s nothing else to be done.
In 1991, Kakuma was just a small town in a barren part of Kenya. The camp was established as a UNHCR location in 1992 when thousands of refugees—including the—began arriving. Soon, more refugees poured in from Ethiopia, Somalia, and Sudan. By 2014, Kakuma was 58,000 people over capacity and the UN created a new settlement just north to accommodate those continuing to flee.
Marie Jeserine is in her third year at Kakuma Refugee Secondary School. She walks 50 minutes each day to get to campus.Most days, the sun is hot and unforgiving. But when the rain comes, it often floods the camp and washes away homes. It happened to Deng’s family “all the time” when she was younger, before they were able to move to higher ground, she says. “We’d have to come back again and build it again because there’s no where we can go.
I visit one classroom that has more than 200 students, leaving the teacher only a few square feet in which to stand. Many men in the community scoffed at the idea that Deng would go away for high school, telling her that girls were stupid and she would drop out. Deng was tempted, as she struggled with subjects like chemistry and geography and the intense pressure to do well on tests. One time, she failed an exam badly, despite studying hard, and came to her teacher crying. “I wanted to go home,” she recalls. “I told her I was very discouraged…I rather would stay at home than get such results.
The five secondary day schools in Kakuma face many of the same problems as primary schools. The classrooms are overcrowded; students sit four or five across at desks designed for three. They share textbooks among as many as eight other pupils. Schools don’t have the money to do all the science labs in the curriculum.Marie Jeserine, a 20-year-old in her third year of high school, has other gripes. She wants a bigger library and more latrines . She’d also like school buses.
Martha John Korok, 19, is one of them. She’s among the thousands of South Sudanese driven from their homes in the last decade. Her family first tried to outrun the violence without leaving the country, moving from place to place. But Korok remembers the gunshots each night. In South Sudan, “you can’t spend a night without bullet,” she says.
The whole ordeal strengthened Korok’s resolve to do well in school. She had a new dream: She would become a doctor and prevent what happened to her dad from happening to others. So when she got the chance to attend Morneau Shepell, she took it. When classes finish, students meander in groups to their dormitories to change from their plaid skirts and teal T-shirts into colorful sundresses. They gather in the dining hall on weekends to hold dance parties or watch movies on the school’s small flat screen television. Some girls are married; their husbands can come to visit, but the girls can’t leave campus during term.
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