Transit

We shared the IOM chartered plane out of Kigoma, Tanzania with about 25 refugees who were being resettled to Canada. They were Congolese, Burundian, Rwandan and none had ever been on a plane. I'd never been on a plane like this before, either. It was a 'face-me' plane, with two long benches along the edges, luggage at our feet, pilot on the other side of a curtain. These old Russian planes were the same kind that the Sudanese government used to drop bombs on the South.

The refugees were in their Sunday best. The man next to me buckled his seatbelt across his chest, like in a car. I handed out chewing gum I'd bought with my last Tanzanian shillings, gesturing that it would be good for the ears during the pressure change. Whenever there was turbulence, we laughed so that the refugees wouldn't be scared. Only one beautiful old woman, with tribal scarification marks down the center of her face, got sick. A coworker shared her Bopper game (a series of buttons light up and you have to repeat the pattern) with the men next to her, including one in a 2Pac t-shirt. They were happily distracted.

These refugees had stayed at the transit center where we worked, along with the refugees we had come to interview. They were given beds raised on wooden crates in a huge room without partitions. There must have been over 400 people in that warehouse. Six truckloads of Congolese also passed through on their way to being voluntarily repatriated. Refugees in three very different phases of refugeedom all under one roof.

Photos HERE (same link as to safari pictures).