Elysian Fields

Approaching Buhomba repatriate camp across the plain, its corrugated aluminium roofs shimmer as if a mirage. Waves of heat beat up off the earth, suspending children’s kites fashioned from string and straw and plastic bags that twist and glimmer. Sideways, paper-thin, the kites are invisible, secured by an unperceivable thread to the dust below. The tin roofs of the houses are tied down to boulders with bicycle chains. In a wasteland once the stronghold of rebels, these shacks are hidden from the rest of Burundi. In the world’s third poorest country, they are invisible to the rest of the world. Those who live in Buhomba hide from the sun in uniform grey mud houses. From the road, there is no one here.

The camp is home to 450 returned refugees who fled Burundi and the Hutu-Tutsi massacres of 1972 and 1993 and are now returned from Rwanda, Tanzania, Congo and Sudan, bringing children born abroad and memories of their families who died in this country. Having left Burundi so long ago, many no longer remember where their family was from; with no home to return to, they are herded into government-built camps. “At least in the refugee camps we had food,” says Alina, born in Congo to refugee parents. “Here, the government give each person 25kg of maize or peas, and that must last six months. We eat once a day, or sometimes go without. When once they forgot to send food, we marched on foot to the Ministry to demand it.” Without money to pay for books and uniforms, Alina’s children join her working in the fields of others rather than going to school. A day’s work can earn 500 Burundian francs (27 centimes), enough for a handful of tiny dried fish.

Tanzania’s forced closing of its refugee camps has pushed thousands of Burundians across the border to their homeland, to days spent in sun-beaten lines outside administrative offices seeking help to build homes. The roads are lined with bricks hewn out of the red earth; with no seeds to plant, people sell their land thirty centimetres at a time. Yet few can afford these luxuries, with many of the 700,000 new arrivals living in makeshift shacks of straw and ubiquitous UNICEF tarpaulins. Those in barren Buhomba, though their children gnaw leaves for sustenance, are the lucky ones.

Though the camp is surrounded by empty land, its inhabitants are forbidden from sowing the cassava or sweet potato that they tend in other people’s fields. Elizabeth looks out of the doorway of the house she shares with her eight children, her eyes following the straight line of houses to the wide and dust-covered plain that surrounds them. Hungrily, she watches its straws rustle. “To grow, that would be another life. The morning I have my own land, that will be another world.”

Text by Laura Gabrielle Dix, photographs taken in Buhomba, Burundi 2009

Buhomba repatriate camp. As recently as a year ago, this area was a rebel stronghold in which people from other areas of the country would not dare enter.

Born to refugee parents in Congo, Alina Nininahazwe left when war broke out there too in 2007. Not knowing whereabouts in Burundi her family came from, she and her three children now live in Buhomba camp.

Elizabeth left Burundi aged 9 to escape the massacres of Hutus by the Tutsi army in 1972, a time known as “ikiza”, “le fléau”. After four years in a transit camp where her husband died, Elizabeth has assumed the role of counsellor in Buhomba, settling disputes amongst the camp’s inhabitants.

Swaris Ndereyimana, 24, was born in a Tanzanian refugee camp. Returning to Burundi in 2004, her husband left her to marry another woman.

Janvier Harimenshi is the camp chief. Himself previously a refugee in Congo, two weeks after his arrival in Buhomba he was appointed due to his wisdom and calm ability for solving the camp’s many conflicts over food.

Sunzu Antisept continued to move from country to country after he fled Burundi in 1972. For the five years before his return to Burundi he lived in Sudan; now, with no family, he shares his single room with another repatriate.

Marie-Claire is pregnant with her second child, the first having been born in a transit camp when the family returned from Rwanda. By far the most prosperous in the camp, her family in Europe send a little money allowing her husband to study psychology at university in the capital, Bujumbura.

Immaculée (centre), her mother and children, who fled to Congo and then returned when her husband was killed there. Her son, Desirée, has mixed feelings about their return: “When we spoke of Burundi in Congo, I was happy; but when we came here, that happiness vanished.”

Zawadi Nyonzyme is 20 and has four children, one twin tied to her back whilst she feeds the other before swapping them around. Her husbands begs during the day so that in the evening they might buy a handful of dried fish for 200 FrB (12 cents). High inflation drives up prices of petrol every few months, leaving Burundians increasingly unable to afford adequate food.

Haboniman Shaban is 61 and takes care of the children whilst his wife, one of the camp’s fortunates who is still strong enough to work, labours in nearby villagers’ fields for payment of a few vegetables.

50-year-old Kira Ntaconiru looks after her 5 grandchildren after the deaths of their parents. Three of the children work each day in a stone mine to feed the family.

Generose Nibigara returned from Congo with her two children in 1994, working unpaid as a servant in houses before getting a place in the government-administered camp. Generose found elderly Februine Barakamfitiye in the forest having been robbed, and brought her back to her house where she now takes care of the children.

Estelle Ndayisaba escaped to Tanzania as a refugee in 1993, but when she returned in 1998 she found her former home occupied by another family, and herself with no means to get it back. With so many fleeing the violence of the early 90s, the Burundian government encouraged those remaining to take over abandoned houses in the south and east of the country. Many thousands of repatriates share Estelle’s situation.