Say this city has ten million souls,

Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:

Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.

Once we had a country and we thought it fair,

Look in the atlas and you’ll find it there:

We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.

W. H. Auden, Refugee Blues

This book by Deborah Ellis (Oxford University Press, 2003) dedicated to “children lost and wandering far from their homes” is written for a noble cause. The royalties are intended to be donated to a non-profit organization, Street Kids International, concerned with providing assistance to street children.

The story is that of an Afghan girl, Shauzia, who flees her country as the result of bombing by Americans. She finds herself in Widow’s Compound, a refugee camp in Pakistan, which looks after widows and their children. It is also a secret women’s organization operating in Afghanistan where the Taliban is still in power.

Shauzia’s most precious possession is a photo of a lavender field in France. Her mind is full of dreams. Her only desire is to reach France with Jasper, her dog. She passes through Peshawar in Pakistan and notices no sign of bombing as she had known in her own country; here some women are wearing the burqa, others are not, without being beaten up. She meets a university-educated woman begging.

She finds odd jobs after passing herself off as a boy, having cut her hair short. She struggles against all kinds of difficulties in order to survive. She is picked up by Tom and Barbara who are in Pakistan from the US on a two-year contract. They give her shelter, warmth and a new life. Here she is in better hygienic conditions. The wealth of the home reminds her of a time when her family was perfectly happy, before the bombs started falling, “the memory seeming to her like another person’s life, not her own.”

She learns that Mrs Waera, in charge of the compound, has decided to return secretly to Afghanistan with a few nurses to help the wounded. Shauzia is in a dilemma: either move on to France or accompany the volunteers to Afghanistan where she can assist as a nurse. She gives the dog over to a friend, expecting that the latter will succeed in reaching France or another destination, far from the chaos, the confusion and the absurdity reigning in her own country.

<B>Refugee camp</B>

The author gives us a vivid picture of daily life in a refugee camp – scrounging parties are organized to pick up bits of boards or pipe, crying and whining, mosquitoes and bugs around, the stink of open sewers, fleas, people fighting to obtain flour because of hunger, a woman having acid thrown in her face by a man simply because she was teaching his daughter to read.

It seems clear that “farm animals are treated better” than human beings who do not even know what tomorrow will be made of, who have no idea what home means. They are cut off from their roots and they belong to no place.

Jasper, Shauzia’s dog, is a true friend in a cruel world. It keeps her company and, whenever the girl talks to it, we get to know much about her thoughts, her dreams and her ambitions as well as her emotional state. Jasper represents affection. Shauzia whispers words in English to Jasper till she is more at ease to say them aloud to others. It is a source of happiness.

One hilarious moment is, in the absence of Tom and Barbara, Shauzia opening the gate to certain needy people and giving everybody various things from the house, which she calls “a walled-in paradise”. When Tom and Barbara arrive and see the mess, Shauzia naively explains that she is just sharing as they had themselves shared with her.

One thought-provoking point is Barbara deciding to send Shauzia back to the camp but proposing to keep the dog and to give it a home. “After all, what sort of life will he have in the camp?” asks Barbara. It seems dogs are luckier than human beings. And more important.

The language is simple and the book should appeal to lower secondary students. It also provides food for thought. Today, there are numerous people roaming about in the hope of a better future in other countries than their own. They are striving for greener pastures but not always successfully.

The real tragedy is that, in spite of having a country of one’s own, one finds oneself homeless, rejected and aimless for no fault of one’s own. And, of course, it is not a question of one particular country – refugees are a worldwide problem.

The book is especially about the stupidity and the futility of war where innocent citizens are made to pay a heavy price. It is about children lamentably missing what is most precious to them: their childhood.

<B>Suresh RAMPHUL</B>