We have a choice of which memory we decide to take away from this year’s AUC celebration of World Refugee Day.
The first is of a killing. The second is of children playing.
I know which memory I will take with me, and it starts with the moment I heard a busload of singing children coming down Qasr El-Aini street. When the children got off the bus, they stood in line in their green and blue plaid uniforms, which, though tattered, singled them out and kept them organized. Their teacher called them forward two-by-two to fill out nametags and proceed onto the campus, where activities organized by a group of AUC student volunteers, including myself, greeted them.
The little children wrote their names slowly and deliberately, sure not to make a mistake. When one little girl discovered she wrote a wrong letter in her name, she refused to scribble it out and instead started again. At one point, in the hurry to process all the children, I inadvertently tore a child’s nametag in half. The child laughed and forgave me, but I knew from his initial look of shock that my careless mistake risked causing pain somewhere deep down.
This day meant a lot to these kids. This was, afterall, a day to celebrate them. Two thousand people, including these one hundred and fifty Sudanese and Palestinian children, came together to appreciate the music, food, art and life of refugee culture – a culture that belongs to no one specific country, but instead the world as a whole, serving to remind us that borders cannot, and should not, separate. As a volunteer working with the children at World Refugee Day, I reveled in many of the children’s acts of innocence and sweetness, yet at the same time trembled at some of their acts of despair and confusion.
I reveled when one little boy entered the campus and looking at the tall buildings asked me, “Is this a school? or, when one little girl watching me pick up some trash came along to help.
I trembled when most of the little kids, given blank pieces of paper and pens to color, drew flags and wrote names of different country presidents, while others drew human figures pointing guns at one another.
Flowers and sunshine are not on these kids’ minds, but trying to find an identity is.
It is no wonder then that on one piece of paper I found the insignia of a local Sudanese refugee gang – a gang that would later that night take the life of a 24-year-old man, a member of an opposing Sudanese refugee gang. For the hours that the children played together – unaware of the violent act that would later unfold – it seemed as if the children were coming closer to finding the identity that they have been looking for as minorities in a country that often despises their presence, and as ex-citizens of a country that no longer protects them.
The identity these children were finding was not that of a nation or a gang, but that of a child, loved and enjoyed by all those around. On one corner of the AUC campus, a group of Sudanese children sat around an Egyptian female student from Ain Shams University who summoned up all their imagination in asking, and then executing, their face-painting wishes.
On another side of the playground 20 Egyptian boy scout volunteers knew no fears of friendship in playing a huge game of twister with the children. In the bathroom, a French-Canadian student washed a little girl’s scratch and assured her she didn’t need to see the nurse. One American volunteer and a Sudanese teacher sat together patiently all day by the side of a crying boy who was too sick to play. While it may be tempting for some to point to the killing that happened outside AUC last Friday as evidence of the need to distance ourselves from refugees, the fact of the matter is that with each step we take away, instead of together with refugees (as is the spirit of World Refugee Day), we risk a little child drawing a gun that will one day stain the streets with blood.
Until refugee children are given the identity they deserve – that of children, playing and learning carefree in the world’s embrace – there will continue to be a choice in what memories to keep.
