Beauty and the Bush: Buduburam, Liberian Refugee Camp

"Ain't got no home, ain't got no shoes, ain't got no money, got no class....
Ain't got no mother, ain't got no culture, ain't got no friends, ain't got no schoolin'....
And what about god? Why am I alive anyway?
Nobody can take away....
Got my hair, got my head, got my brains, got my smile,
Got my arms, got my hands, got my fingers, got my legs,
Got my heart, got my soul, got my blood, got myself...
I've got life, I've got my freedom...I've got life!
And I'm gonna keep it! " Nina Simone, Ain't got no...I got Life

I met Morris on February 26th, 2008. Accra was melting and my slight hangover from an unmonitored batch of Star beer simmered in the heat. I had just returned from a 2 month tour of surrounding countries -- Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin, and Togo -- and after two months, I still wasn't sure exactly what I was doing here. In Africa, I mean. So in a fuzz of heat, head pain and ambiguity, I strode right into Buduburam, the Liberian refugee camp set a few kilometers from central Accra. Buduburam has been around for 17 years but has not yet fully matured from what it was originally intended to be -- a makeshift city to house the shifting lives of a people on the run. Hunched along the Takoradi highway in the dumpy green outskirts of Ghana's cosmopolitan capital city, Buduburam looks like a bag of bones woven together by rusty tin, dried reed mats, and plastic rice sacks. But the crudeness of its shelter gives way to a thrum of public activity. The day I arrived, kids kicked soccer balls in dusty fields of trash, goats and chickens ducked and grazed amid the constant stream of trading feet, and women covered by straw hats sat lining the busy highway, holding protest signs spelling out nasty messages for the UN. The protesters' heads bobbed through the heat like rows of UFO saucers, and I smelled the sourness of wounded pride, saw the same beleaguered expressions that entranced workers' strikes and street art in the barrios of San Francisco. There was trouble stewing here.

Five Malta Guinesses and a pack of cigarettes later, a bearded Italian volunteer worker and a slightly thuggish diamond hunter from New York had offered me a few slivers of the story. Thousands of Liberians have fled to the Buduburam refugee camp since war began in Liberia in 1989. It's population has swelled over the years from a peak of 50,000 to its now dwindling population of 20,000 or so. While the refugees have no rights as citizens in Ghana, they have been supported for the last 17 years by the UNHCR and Ghana Emmigration/Immigration Commission, which pay for the camp's rent, electricity, and water. After the second phase of Liberia's civil war ended in 2003, the UNHCR began the slow process of repatriation, offering stipends and providing transportation for refugees to return to Liberia. That all stopped last June, when the UNHCR officially withdrew all administrative support and now offers only a stipend of $100 for those still wishing to repatriate. Well, the problem is, $100 isn't even enough to get back to Liberia. Those still at camp had refused to return to Liberia in earlier years, when transportation was provided, because they feared for their lives. Now that things finally seemed peaceful enough in Liberia, no one could afford to get there.

What I discovered in the following weeks, stumbling into serendipity in its most tragic attire, was the story of a people who could not have been stomped on by any bigger boots of Life, God, Humanity, whatever you want to call it. Buduburam represents the end of long, hard run from the traumas of war; but what madness drove these refugees from the forests of Liberian was just the beginning of a much more complicated, incessantly turbulent fate. It is this later chapter that I imagined to be the most debilitating. To have your only home and sense of place in the world vaporized and swept away entirely as if it had never existed; to see your source of livelihood, the plot of land you reaped and sowed, the herd of goats you sheparded for milk and meat, the fish gathered by your handmade nets at dawn each day, entirely infested by militia and burnt to the ground; how could you then exist? How could you still feel alive if your home, your family, your career, and your identity was just all of a sudden...gone?

Walking around Buduburam, however, you're sure to behold a much different truth. The men and women of Buduburam survive and survive well, with authority, unabated. They sell Coca Cola and biscuits from China in little open-air stands that line the dirt streets. They have babies and weddings. They go to school and the sounds of drums and singing vibrate through tinny alleyways every Sunday morning. There's a bar, a disco, and even a newspaper published every month. So the story I hear from an Italian and Yankee diamond hound leads me to a very different conclusion from what I see here on that dusty February afternoon. Life here has not been halted by the stresses and complications of displacement. Instead I see, as a woman passes me carrying a 10 kilo plastic sack adorned with a simple graphic of Africa on her head, the intent gleam of endurance that says "Yes, we have been stomped on but we can still carry the whole damn continent on our shoulders."

The signs of protesters give me a hint of yet another layer of existence in this haphazard city. There is active activism here. As many do when life kicks them down, the Liberians here have seen all of the gut punches of war as an opportunity to stand right back up again, more determined than ever to let the world know that they do, in fact, still exist. Having just finished Ishmael Beah's "A Long Way Gone," it was no strange coincidence that the first group of activists I met were a group of former child soldiers living in Buduburam, who came together, despite formerly divisive branding of rebel vs. army, to construct an admirable swathe of hopes and dreams for their future. The Initiative for the Development of Former Child Soldiers (IDEFOCS), is a nascent project in the official sense but was born from a long struggle against the temptation of returning to war.

When the forests of Liberia began to burn in the early 1990's, these then pre-teens fled from their villages and were eventually captured by rebel or army forces. The older soldiers offered them the front of protection and sustenance, which was difficult to refuse given that battle lines did not distinguish between civilian and military targets. The boys were unknowingly fed soup mixed with gunpowder and marijuana, which disrupted their ability to comprehend reality and delivered them into the exploitative hands of rural military pundits. Before many of them had hit puberty, they had become regular killing machines, taking revenge on opposing forces, civilians, the trees -- anything that could compensate for the loss of family and childhood innocence they had suffered.

These former child soldiers were disarmed and de-drugged by international peace keeping forces at various points over the past decade as the war ebbed and swelled again, each of them making his separate way to Ghana, where Budubudram promised at least the relief of a long distance separation from a war torn home country. This was the first mending stitch, for they could not have remained in Liberia as anything but child soldiers. The bush that had once been their home, their source of food, the bones of their village dwellings, was now a place of terror, darkness giving shelter to violence that crept through the evening trees, always insatiable.

They were safe at Buduburam, at least in the beginning, where old grievances were buried for the sake of peace, a fresh start, a daily life not soiled in terror and retribution. But the unlikely temptation of war followed them all the way to Ghana. It's no secret that African wars show little mercy to anyone, civilian or not. Depleted populations of able bodied males (young or old) must be restocked to continue the fight. When those had mostly vanished, the war generals sent their henchmen to the one place where people were desperate enough to fight a mercenary war: refugee camps. Funded by generous stashes of blood diamonds, the recruiters trekked to refugee camps all over West Africa to recruit for wars in Liberia, Cote d'Ivoire, and even Sudan. It was almost too easy for them. Their offer of $100 cash on the spot -- and a free ride back to war where the army would at least provide food, water, and the empowerment of a gun -- was more money than most refugees would see in their entire lifetime. In a refugee camp where a $.05 bag of pure water was considered a luxury, you might imagine how economic desperation coupled with glorified promises of revenge could easily sway even the most peaceful of men.

I met one Rastifarian, Francis, who took the deal because he wanted his aunties to be able to start their own small business. He gave the the $100 to his family to purchase a small vendor table, a grill, and some cassava for roasted street food, and boarded a bus at 4 am heading for the Western border of Ghana. But when the bus driver stopped for Cote d'Ivoire customs, letting his passengers alight for a bathroom break, Francis took his rucksack to his shoulders and ran, ran until sunrise, ran until he was far from trouble and could board another bus to Accra. He had desperately needed the money, but in the end he couldn't go back to war. "I just couldn't fight again," he said with a solemn smile.

Keenly aware of the desperate and exploitative nature of mercenary recruitment, Francis joined a few other former soldiers who proclaimed themselves Buduburam's delegates of peace. The group spent hours upon hours roaming the camp, talking to everyone, discouraging the notion that there was no other way to survive except through more war. "It was difficult to promote peace," said Morris, IDEFOC's Executive Director. "How can you promote peace if every body is starving and people still feel the need to avenge their families and villages?" It was then, in 2003, that Francis, Morris, and other former soldiers formed IDEFOCs to create the foundations of a better life: self-sufficiency, rehabilitation, de-traumatization, and solidarity. If they couldn't erase their collective past, then they could at least reign in the monster, reshape it into something gentler, take what had been wild and destructive and make it docile and useful.

Their broad goals began within the backdrop of their years of fighting -- the bush. For one 30-year-old IDEFOC member, another Francis, the bush meant everything to their collective recovery and resistance to war. It had to once again fulfill the role it played before all the destruction. It must feel safe. It must provide shelter and a source of livelihood. "We had to put the beauty back into the bush," Francis would often tell me. He and the other boys put down all notions of guns and picked up hoes, shovels, and rakes to restore what was rightfully theirs; a sanctuary in the forests. They tilled the ground of a quiet clearing outside the Buduburam camp surrounded by tall, leafy trees and planted potatoes, eggplant, tomatoes, and corn. Now whenever IDEFOCs holds a meeting, they harvest from their garden and cook a hearty meal to share together over discussions of the future. This "farm," as they call it, is a retreat from the bustle of camp activity, but it is also much more than a quiet place to relax, to work, and to eat. In this little zen garden, ex-combatants can use their hands -- once instruments of death and destruction -- to create life. "This represents everything we want," said Morris, bent over a row of potato leaves shimmering under the heat of a midday sun. "We can use our strength to create something good. We can sustain ourselves, feed our families, and build a community rooted in trust, cooperation, and a unified desire to keep the peace."

When I visited them in 2008, their goals had expanded from preventing re-recruitment and hunger. They have already instigated an education program for kids at the camp and desire to one day become international mediators to prevent and halt child-soldiering. They are also actively developing programs for rehabilitating and de-traumatizing other child soldiers.
One Canadian volunteer I met was working with IDEFOC to create a regular PTSD counseling program, in which a foreign volunteer would provide therapy and train IDEFOC members to become counselors themselves. Another volunteer, currently enrolled at NYU and an aspiring social worker, met with IDEFOC members every Friday to present trust workshops. I visited the farm one late Friday afternoon to discover most of the members sitting quietly underneath trees, filling personal journals with their experiences, regrets, and dreams. When they learned I am a writer, Francis and Morris became terribly excited about the prospect of me teaching a workshop on creative writing; although my short visit did not permit the time, I encouraged them to continue journaling to release burdensome memories and log personal emotional progress.


IDEFOC is no fancy, well-funded NGO. Their office sits among the trees of a small shady clearing, table and chairs handmade from rough, skinny branches and twine. But their ambitions and progress are larger than the heart could imagine. Now grown men, the members of IDEFOC would not have hesitated ten years ago to take a rival boy soldier down, even if neither of them had voluntarily chosen to join ranks. Today, they support each other in complete solidarity and extend that equanimity to other refugees who have also struggled to overcome the war and its wake. Grace, eight months pregnant at the time I visited Buduburam, still bears scars from unimaginable types of attacks on her and her family in Liberia. Her husband, also an ex-combatant, returned to Liberia after the second war had subsided, only to be killed in an unexpected bout of revenge. As a widow, mother of four-year-old Patience, and expecting mother of yet another baby girl, Grace had little means to support herself and her family. But during every visit to the "farm," I would see Grace sitting on one of the rough birch benches, brimming bowl in hand complements of the IDEFOC boys. "We take care of each other," she'd say, "cuz we the only family we got."


On my last visit to Buduburam camp in April of 2008, the situation at Buduburam camp was quickly deteriorating. The UNHCR officially pulled out all responsibilities for the refugees but kept their promise of a $100 stipend for those repatriating to Liberia. The protesters refused the inadequate sum, which unnerved the Ghanaian Interior Minister to the point of threatening forced removal. As I flew back to the states, reports from colleagues in Ghana indicated that Ghanaian police were now arresting and displacing camp residents with no warning, often at 3 or 4 in the morning. An email from one IDEFOC member, Brocks, awaited my arrival back home in the states. "Dear Jessica...How are you? For us we are like living in fear as former child soldiers on the refugee camp, for we have been threatened by the Interior minister who says he is coming to arrest all excombatants...But good news, Jessica...IDEFOCS has a new born baby girl!" Grace had given birth to a healthy child. All of the threats and instability in camp that yet again threatened to wipe out the threads of their existence were overshadowed by that one ineffable joy that keeps these ex-combatants going; life itself. They may not have much -- homes, money, political rights, basic human rights. Some may wonder, given the relentless plagues on their livelihood, if they even have a God. But they do have their lives, and with those lives, they plan to continue proving to the world that men do not naturally want war, violence, and retribution. Like the beast who, when kissed by beauty is able to reveal his true, inner self, their love for each other has resulted in the impossible; a complete transformation from a brutal, violent past to a future that is filled with hope and possibility. The members of IDEFOC have restored beauty to their bush but perhaps more importantly, they have restored beauty to themselves.

How you can help

As of May, 2008 Some IDEFOC members have relocated to Liberia where they are in the process of securing 5 acres of land to continue their sustainable agriculture program. They also plan to continue developing PTSD counseling sessions, raise funds for education scholarships for ex-combatants, and provide functional sanitation and recreation for all former child soldiers living in Liberia. They would like to connect with volunteers interesting in counseling, agriculture, sanitation, peace education study, sustainable programs, and scholarship sponsorship.

Contact information:
Initiative for the Development of
Former Child Solider
Paynesville City, E.L.W.A Junction
Monrovia, Liberia
Tel. # 002316-492228
Email: idefocs@yahoo.com/ childsolider_formersolider@yahoo.co.uk


Concerning the situation at Budubaram, all refugees have been asked to leave the camp at the end of October 2008.

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