The Stars At Night Are Big And Bright

Jeremy often says that if he ever gets tired of looking up at the night sky here, he’ll know its time to go home. Tonight the sky above is full of stars, the warm fire blazes next to me, and the melodies of The Weepies sing in my ears. Its a peaceful evening that almost makes me forget the day that preceded it. Most of the time its easy to forget that Meheba isn’t just like any other rural village in Zambia. Alas, sometimes the realities of living in a refugee camp catch up to you.

In my last post I mentioned that one of our staff members has been receiving death threats. As this is a staff member from one of Jeremy’s projects, he has been dealing mostly with the situation, and thus I’m including his account of the recent events:

This situation increased in its severity during the past two weeks and occupied a large amount of my time, energy and increased my stress level. Unfortunately, due to the public nature of this blog, I can not write details (especially since the police/UN investigation is ongoing) but I can say that the FORGE employee is still healthy and will hopefully be leaving Meheba soon. However, dealing with that situation became a rotten apple for me. I sat up at night stressing, neglected other projects making sure the proper authorities were notified, put dozens of miles on my bike riding around the camp, my music on too loud to motivate me to ride faster when I was exhausted. The thought that a coworker of mine could be killed was too much for me to handle, and it took all I had to keep myself together with all of the stress.

This staff member is awaiting resettlement, and should be leaving within the next few weeks, but the way resettlement works is that it could come at any time. There is no set date and you must be in the camp when the plane ticket comes. As such, leaving Meheba for safer streets is pretty much out of the question. Now, I guess its just a waiting game.