Guest Blog by Peter

Peter's Reflection on Training at Meheba Refugee Settlement

11-15 January 2011

MCC provided a small peacebuilding grant to enable the offering of 2 weeks of training for community leaders in the Meheba Refugee Settlement in northwestern Zambia. (A refugee settlement is different from a refugee camp insofar as in a settlement, UNHCR does not provide for ongoing food/shelter needs. Refugees are given land to build their own houses and to farm to feed themselves. Tents are collected by UNHCR after a few months and food distribution ends after two years.) Much of the impetus for targeting this forgotten corner of Zambia came from Issa Sadi, a Congolese refugee who lives and works in Lusaka. He was a resident of the camp for 8 years before moving to Lusaka with his Zambian wife who needed better medical access. Issa still has contacts in the camp with FORGE (an NGO that has worked in Meheba for the past 8 years) and is in touch with some recent flare-ups of rioting and conflict among the various nationalities living there. He helped make the training a reality through his contacts at the Ministry of Home Affairs (which oversees the camp).

The first week of the training focused on peace issues. We titled it “Skills in Understanding, Analysing & Transforming Conflict.” I was the lead facilitator, Issa was a co-facilitator, and Maria Krause—on a 1-year MCC SALT term—provided logistical support and teaching assistance.

Going into the training, Issa warned us that suspicion was running fairly high among the many nationalities in the camp. These include Angolans, Congolese, Rwandans, Burundis, Sudanese, Somalis, and Zimbabweans. Thus, on the first day of the training, we sought to build a collegial atmosphere by engaging participants in several exercises. Moving outside the classroom, we mapped the settlement together by having participants stand where they live in relation the the main road that basically runs up through the centre of the settlement. In this way, participants very clearly saw who their neighbours were and we tried to encourage them that these are their teammates in peace. Next, we divided into pairs and attempted trust falls (keeping their legs stiff, one person falls back into the arms of their partner). This simple exercise helped us laugh and, hopefully, begin to create a small foundation of trust to build upon during the rest of the week.

The settlement is made up of several zones or blocks. There is usually a mix of nationalities within each zone. Training participants were community leaders from these zones, picked because of their positions and because they could communicate in English. (Issa had told us going in to the training that he expected to see the use of 2-3 translators simultaneously since there are many language groups in the camp. I'm glad that the Refugee Officer and FORGE opted for English speakers as it made my work much easier and enjoyable.) While there has been much repatriation of refugees over the past few years, Meheba had a recent influx when Zambia shut down 2 other camps and consolidated all refugees at Meheba. Thus, the ~5,000 refugees that had been remaining grew to almost 10,000 by the end of 2010. (Meheba has had up to 80,000 refugees in its 40 year existence. The camp is not small—nearly the size of Maryland—and quite spread out.)

There was enthusiasm for the material and for the chance to try and constructively address some of the conflict issues in the settlement. Participants were able to name quite a long list of conflicts that they have seen in the settlement—between groups, within groups, between refugees and administration. But they were also able to identify a long list of positive historical efforts that have been made to reduce or address conflicts within the settlement. They practiced analysing conflicts using some practical tools for mapping causes, effects, and relationships. Brainstoming was done around what kinds of activities and initiatives could be useful in creating/fostering positive relations among various groups in the settlement.

Since being a peacebuilder has so much to do with communication, the training spent time on gaining skills to enhance communication. Participants explored the dynamics of communication—hindrances and helps that make a difference. There was learning around how to find common ground in the underlying interests that people have rather than in the hardened positions that people usually present and in which they persist. All these learnings then put participants in position to work with their zone teammates in the creation of a modest action plan for peace. Identifying issues that were pressing in their particular zones, each group crafted some initiatives that they would take to help build peace and understanding. Since Cheryl's illness postponed her travel to the settlement in the week following me, the training participants were given the intervening week as a chance to do fieldwork: implementing 1 or 2 items from their action plans.

By the end of the week, one participant remarked to Issa that he started the training with quite a bit of suspicion of his fellow participants. However, the experience in the first week of training helped that mistrust seep away. He plans to bring homemade chapatis to the second week of training to share with all participants as a celebratory sign of his sense of learning to trust them. These are small signs—seeds—of peace, but as Jesus said, “consider the mustard seed....”