Flowers From The Exile

The childhood is an innocent stage of life that everyone goes through. The infancy is when you can’t tell the difference between good things and bad things. For example if someone gives you an ember and a date, you will choose the first one because you don’t know that it will burn you.

The childhood is something very memorable, but only to those who were born in their own country, with their parents, with their peerage and with the landscape of their homeland.

Living as a child in the refugee camps is very different from any other country in the world. Here the situation is different from in our home land Western Sahara that is divided and occupied by Morocco. The families are separated. There is a wall. The children are suffering from many things: the war and its results, living far away from the homeland and living in exile. The children are deprived of living a normal childhood.

How should we remember our miserable childhood? We lived it as orphans. Many children lost their fathers in the war after the Moroccan invasion into Western Sahara in 1975. How can the children remember the loving compassion of their parents when their parents died before they were born? How should we remember our landscape that we have never seen? And our home parks that we wished we could play in with our friends?

The children in the refugee camps study the primary school in the camps, and they have to finish the rest of their education outside the camps. Many stay away for years and years to get an education. What will be the situation of them and their parents? How do the parents feel when they are deprived of seeing their children growing up? Sure if our country was free, this wouldn’t happen to us.

I’ll try and place my self in the position of a Saharawi mother, so many questions and worries will enter into my mind. How is my child now? Is he happy, is he sad? Is he studying or wasting his time? For how many years am I deprived of hugging my children because they are studying far away from me? A lot of people around the world can’t imagine not seeing their children for many years, maybe 20 years! These things happen to the Saharawies.

One day I was listening to my favourite radio channel BBC Arabic. There is a program that is called BBC Extra. I always listen to that because there is 10 minutes in English to learn the language, and I am very interested in that. That day they were talking about youth who leave their families to study abroad. Asking them how do they feel? How is their new life? And they were asking the parents too.

Listening to this I asked myself: what about us? We left our homes and our background many years ago. What about the children that is not in the spot light? The world doesn’t look for them, doesn’t see the suffering of the Saharawi children living in exile in the refugee camps. They are deprived of feeling a normal childhood. The childhood of the people that are my age went by. But it makes me think so deeply about today’s and tomorrow’s children. Our situation requests more attention from the world, more knowledge about the Saharawies.

Finally, the Saharawi children are flowers coming from the exile to say to the world that we are here calling for peace to spread over our country! We want to see children born far away from the fighting and the war. That’s enough, enough! It’s time to break the silence from the world and do more to find a solution for this issue. And we are looking forward to that day the children could benefit from a real childhood.

Written by Lwaly Dadi Ramdan