Dowa Refugee Camp

The only interesting thing I've done lately is go and visit a refugee camp yesterday. It is a permanent camp, so no tents etc, and it mostly looks like a village, but it was still interesting. 

WUSC has a program where they get university students in Canada to fund raise to support Refugee students to study in Canada. We met with some of the potential candidates for Sept 2009 and answered some of their questions about university life in Canada. Then they took us on a tour of the camp. 

I was walking with a 20 year old guy named Patrick who is from Rwanda. His family fled the genocide in 1994 and then were later forcibly repatriated. His mom is an artist and author and wrote a book about the genocide in their local language that eventually made her a target, and people were trying to kill her (I guess there is a lot of violence from people afraid of being pinpointed as contributors to the genocide). In attempts to kill her, they killed Patrick's brother and sister instead, so they fled to Malawi 3 years ago and have been living in the camp. He is hoping to go to Canada to study film so he can make better African movies, and thank god for that because African movies are notoriously bad!