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Refugee-camp Gasinci

Wilbert Helsloot did volunteer for SCI in the Balkans between 1993 and 2006. Deeply impressed by his work camp experience in a refugee camp in Croatia 1993 during the war in Yugoslavia he started a long time commitment for conflict resolution in the Balkans. Read more about him.

  

Refugee-camp Gasinci

The consequences of a civil war portrayed

March, 1993. There are about 300 refugeecamps in Croatia, legal and illegal ones. Far most of the refugees come from Bosnia and have been victim of ethnic cleansing. In January 1993 I stayed for four weeks in a recognized refugeecamp near Osijek (East-Croatia). As volunteer I organized and ran childrenactivities, together with other youngsters.

Arrival

Refugee camp in Croatia (1994)
    Refugee camp in Croatia (1994), Photo: Suncokret

It is a half hour walk from the village to the refugee-camp. It doesn’t go quickly, we carry backpacks and other belongings. We pass the last houses and a bare landscape start to fill our sight. A thick layer of snow covers the ground around us. For a moment there is nothing more than only some trees. The sky above us is clear bright. We however don’t have time nor mind to admire the starry sky. It is about fifteen degrees below and the first mind-thought is the future arrival in the camp. We pass a sentrybox, where soldiers are playing cards. The camp has been built on a distant and isolated place, where a miltary trainingsfield used to be. Not far beside the camp there are still Croatian soldiers situated. A bit further we see a pond, and behind that lighting houses. Something is being announced by loudspeakers. It is a strange, but at the same time somehow beautiful view. Isolated lights of a small village. At the entrance of the camp our co-leader, who had picked us up, informed the police about our arrival. Next we are walking further down the road. The contours of houses are already visible in the darkness. At one side of the road quite big barracks are situated, the ‘bungalows’, further at the other side smaller barracks. We are heading towards a bungalow. Prepared for the worst in the Netherlands, the comfortable warmth which welcomes us while opening the door, is a positive and pleasant surprise. A woodstove, a very common heating-tool in rural area in Eastern Europe, takes care of more than average comfort. Sixteen matrasses, divided over 2 rooms, lay next to eachother on the floor. Not long hereafter, we have our first team-meeting, where we are told what our activities and tasks will be. Besides the children-activities, our primary task, we are supposed to continue English and German language classes. Furthermore there is at night a ‘disco’, not more than a simple teenager- club. There is an improvised school, being run by the Croatian volunteers. Besides that there are smaller tasks, like distributing vitamines to the children, doing dishes for the elderly and cleaning the school. We are asked if we have ideas for activities ourselves. Theater is being mentioned and also my idea to start a camp-newspaper is appreciated. Both activities are applied to teenagers as target-group. It is a fruitfull beginning of the workcamp. A good group-spirit was already present in Zagreb, where the volunteers met eachother and had common preparation. Our motivations and expectations, which we shared there, matched with eachother and led to mutual identification and recognition.

Children in refugee camp in Croatia (1994), Photo: Suncroket
   Children in a refugee camp in Croatia (1994), Photo: Suncokret

The next morning the children react cautiously and play a waiting game. A bit later a large number of snowballs flow in the air to try us out. Whoever throws back, is going to be popular and especially pelted. The plan to make snowmans appears not to work out. Later in the week the children will trust us more. It is not easy for the children. They make friends in the 3 weeks that a group of volunteers is here and saying goodbye can sometimes be painful. They have to start again with a new group, so also ours. The teenagers have to get used as well. There were no structural activities for them yet, only now a meeting early afternoon to talk with eachoter and the group of volunteers. When they drop in one by one at the first meeting, they look to us in a resigned way. When they sit around the table, I bring carefully forward the idea to make a camp-newspaper together. A spontaneous applaus is the response. I am flabbergasted. They were really eager to do something, but I can’t hardly imagine that a youth-worker in the Netherlands will be treated to hand-clapping.

Daily live in the refugee camp

Three times a day people set out for the eating-hall, alone or in small groups. The parade is remarkably grey. Grey trousers, long black skirts and brown jackets predominate the scene. But the parade is mostly grey because of the face-expressions of the people. Resigned, without emotion. They don’t care anymore. There is a lot of hidden grief in the camp. Most of the 1600 refugees come from Bosnia and have lost their house and home-land. In lot of cases there is gnawing incertainty with people about the fate of familymembers and friends. Some of them were witness how they were killed. If coping takes place, it happens inside the barracks. It is well possible that a lot of people, now the war is still strongly going on, are not yet up to coping. In any case men and women, and also teenagers, are looking industriously for activities just in order to do something. Those possibilities are scarce. The women can be often found near the toilets to wash clothes and work indoors. Men chop a large part of the day wood, sit on benches and smoke cigarettes. For the rest the life in the camp consists of waiting. Waiting till the end of the war and till life-signs of family-members. Days are mostly the same and form an inevitable routine. Highlight of the day is the announcement –through the loudspeakers- who received post.

You hardly see young men in the camp. They fight in the Bosnian army or are situated in Serbian concentrationcamps. The men present are already old. The group of elderly people is substantial and there are separate bungalows for them. One house is often harbouring more families. The barracks have been built November 1992 –before the winter really started- in tearing rush by the Dutch Red Cross and a German building company. They are made from wood and chipboard. There were tents before. As volunteers we make use of the facilities of the refugees. We can’t thus avoid the dirty toilets, which can’t be flushed. Showers are cold and I eat meat from the soup kitchen. It occurs me that being vegetarian in such a situation is just only a luxury. But although one lives like a refugee in material respect, we feel sometimes like intruders. We know that we can return safely home any moment. The refugee can’t. That is the hard reality. It brings in moments, in which i strongly ask myself what i am actually doing in the camp. I can’t even speak with the refugees and even if I could, I wouldn’t probably understand what’s really going on with them. The refugees themselves however are happy with your presence.

The children, but likely even more their parents, are glad with the games being organized in the morning. The parents have more space then in the cramped houses. Moreover i get the idea that the children are often a millstone around the necks of their parents, who already have difficulties enough. There is not always the (positive) attention, which one expects. An average number of 30-35 children turn up at the morningactivities. The activities are not much else than in a regular Dutch holiday-camp: drawing, handicrafts, treasure hunts, circusactivities and several outside sports. But we watch out that we don’t bring a strong competition-element into the games. The children can be tough towards eachother and any lost can hit extra hard for the loser, after all they have gone through before. At the first view the children look normal. They can play carefreely and also concerning the aggression, which appear at the children, one can ask if it is not the usual aggression, which children have inside them. One can also encounter it for example in community-houses in Amsterdam.

Traumatic war experience

But there are most certainly indications for psychical mutilations. It can’t be hardly otherwise, after what they have gone through. Before i left i read an article in a Dutch regional newspaper, in which a psychologist concluded that seven among ten children in the area had to deal with post-traumatic stress syndrome. It is to be seen in the camp by intense changes of mood, which some children show. Agression can sometimes appear/come out expectedly and fiercely. There is a boy of eleven years old, who’s asking continously for attention and often gets it as well, as he became specialized in looking endearingly. Next he doesn’t know what to do with that attention. The boy then turns and get angry. In the second week i also find out what’s going on. When the boy is being expelled at night from English lesson, where he is not supposed to be, he starts to kick the door of the kanteen. I go outside and after an angry mood, a sweet one and again an angry he calms down at a bench. With hands and feet and a few words, I start to ask what the matter is. The boy starts to cry a little and makes clear that he saw with own eyes how his father was being killed by Serbian figthers. I stay sitting next to him for a while. The war, i realize clearly, is very closeby.

Other indicators of what’s going on, can be found back in drawings made by children. Some plainly show tanks and soldiers. A drawing which especially hit me is a drawing on which Bosnia-hercigovina has been written. Between the two words Sarajevo has been written, surrounded by a red bloodstain, which spurts in all directions. Most of the drawings show simple houses and trees. A just graduated development-psychologist from the Netherlands, which went into children-drawings during his study and is also member of our group of volunteers, states that older children usually do not make such drawings anymore. Those are ‘safe’ drawings, not too deep. Other drawing-styles, such as completely fill the paper and subjects which fly in the air, can also indicate an off-balance of children. Except with the English and German lessons Croatian volunteers are always present with our activities. They have the important task to translate and explain a game in detail. The language-problem is not solved with that. Sometimes there’s something happening in between, what is difficult to find out. Especially making the newspaper, where the teenagers are working on in subgroups, is complicated. Written language dominates the process here and sometimes we, foreign volunteers, don’t know what has been written.

Goodbye after four weeks

After two weeks of thaw, it is snowing again the last days. Children slide down the sloping paths with dinner-trays. At a bench two elderly men are talking with each other. After four weeks volunteering i got somehow attached to the life here. Besides all misery, of which i have seen or heard only a small part, also worthwile things happen. New contacts are being made. Adults sometimes invite each other to their barracks to drink coffee and exchange experiences. Children and teenagers can – while playing and giggling- have fun. As volunteer you are catalytic agent in these contacts. A young man in a wheelchair told me- he was one of the few who could speak fairly English- that he came out of an isolation. He helped us with the school and the newspaper. But the camp should not be here. Just before I leave the camp, I say goodbye to a beloved family. A woman says that I look like her son, who stay already 8 months in a concentration-camp. No sign of life, nothing. Each time she sees me, it hurts. I know nothing better to do to push her hand firmly to mine. She cries. On the way to carefree Amsterdam I am cursing once again and wholeheartedly the war.




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