Diplomatic plates on the car and “pick up”-food from a french style bakery in the posh part of town. Equiped, with camera, a somewhat naive mindset and the sandwich i mentioned I came along for a ride out to a camp for Ossetian refugees. SIDA, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, is funding part of this camp and they were invited to see a small football cup organized by the mighty energetic souls at the regional football association.
On a small field, the size of a basketball field, divided in three along the long side, three teams of 8-12 year old were playing at the same time. Energy and happiness, mixed with a dose of anger over some foul play filled the air. We had a tour of a school they built about a year ago and it was already cracking up since the builders did not let the concrete dry out enough. Same goes for the mostpart of the 2400 dwellings in the camp and people are not quite fit to do much. There are no jobs and the men and women gets depressed, more so the men it seems and when alcohol gets involved thing start to rott from within. It might seem worse to me due to the cultural role of alcohol but clearly these people are very unhappy. For many of them it is the second time they are displaced one of the SIDA workers tells me.
It is a mean feeling to look out over the field of identical houses stretching for hundreds of meters in each direction. The drive back to Tblisi is one filled with reflections over the dilemma of displaced people from all over the world. One of the more traveled SIDA men tells me about the camps in Lebanon, outside Beirut where people have been living since 1948, still holdning on to the key to the house they once left behind. Still hoping to go back one day.
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