Nigeria Journal 2023 06 27: Ortese IDP Camp
Ah-boo-tay! Ah-boo-tay! Ah-boo-tay!
When I hear that it always makes me grin because I know when I look back over my shoulder there is going to be a clump of kids waving at me — and when I wave back they are going to shriek, and laugh, and jump up and down. Pure joy.
It means “white man”. The only other white guy working on our project is our German supply team manager. He hasn’t been to the camps yet, so that makes me pretty much the only Ah-boo-day these kids are going to see for now — it’s as close to being a celebrity as I ever expect to get.
My NGO is working in a number of IDP camps close to Makurdi. IDP — Internally Displaced Persons. If you are displaced by conflict and end up on the other side of an international border you are a “refugee” and aide is often provided by the UN. If you don’t cross a border, you are an IDP — and are dependent on the generosity and politics of your own country.
From what I understand, the people in these camps haven’t travelled far. Benue is known as the “Food Basket of the Nation”, it’s on the license plate — American style! One of our Land Cruisers was registered in Sokoto State, and I always get a chuckle from their license plate slogan which is “Seat of the Caliphate”. But not that Caliphate that has been in the news over the last few years — the Sokoto Caliphate lasted from 1804–1903.
Benue State is filled with farming villages. But it also visited by herdsmen who come down from the North in search of food for their herds in the dry season. The 2 populations have long had a tense coexistence, with a defacto understanding that the herdsman could graze on the farmland after harvest and before planting that started at the beginning of the rainy season. Population growth and the expanding Sahara Desert has made the situation more acute. After the Nigerian government passed an anti-grazing law in 2017, that made it illegal for herdsmen to graze on land they did not own, the region exploded in violence.
The IDP camps are filled with farming families that have fled their homes. Villages are burned, men are killed, women are raped. The survivors flee the countryside and the closest place of safety is along the highway from Abuja to Makurdi — where the police and military can run patrols and react to attacks. It’s also where we have access to provide our services. Our Land Cruisers set off every weekday morning packed with medical teams for the 2 largest camps; Ortese and Mbawa.
Our primary focus is healthcare; vaccinations, prescriptions, reproductive care, postnatal care, pediatrics, mental health, etc. Recently there have been a lot of snake bites and we’ve had 2 patients die in the last couple of weeks from venomous snakes. Serious cases of all types, births for example, are transported to a teaching hospital in town. And there is a lot of pediatrics because the camps are predominantly women and children. Men drift back into the countryside to tend the farmland or look for work in town or another part of Nigeria.
Since other basic needs are not being met, we also have become involved in providing those. We drilled a well at Mbawa, but have been unsuccessful in a few attempts at Ortese and are trucking in water from the river while we gather funds to try a deeper borehole. We have built latrines and showers. We are building shelters. In Ortese Camp the medical clinics are housed in tents that were erected a few years ago when the camp first formed and our organization launched an emergency response.
The rainy season has brought fierce thunderstorms with soaking rains and powerful winds. The old tents, after a couple of years under the Sun, are being shredded by the storms. Half of them were beyond repair. My team spent last week tearing those down and moving the other half to more sheltered locations — then covering them with plastic sheeting to keep the rain from pouring through the weakened material. It’s hardly a solution, and it is only a small improvement. Personally, it is profoundly demoralizing to see the condition of our clinic tents. Everything is soaked, warped, faded, torn, falling apart, and sinking into the mud.
It is not unusual when I am walking through the camp for a woman, usually an older woman — to place herself in my path and squat down, clasp her hands together and look up to me. The deep lines on her face seem earned not only through her years under the Sun, but through other hardships I can’t imagine. Speaking to me in Tiv, I don’t know what she is saying, but what I hear in her voice and see in her eyes is unsettlingly desperate. At first I thought it was an expression of thanks that our NGO is here. But recently I learned that there is anxiety in the camp about our plan to eventually transition responsibility for healthcare to the Nigerian Ministry of Health. People living there feel that our regular presence is vital to keeping the violence from the countryside at bay. Now I suspect they are not saying “Thank you, thank you, thank you for being here”, but rather the other side of the bargain “Please, please, please don’t go”.
My team is responsible for our facilities in the camps, but also maintaining our office and expat house. Back at expat house after work I’ll get “Hey, the minifridge in my room is broken”, or “My air conditioner has been making a rattling noise, can’t you get someone to look at that?”. There are moments when I am ready to snap.
My one solace is that there is an old school administration building in the camp that has always been intended as the permanent location for the clinic. After the damage from the storms we’ve changed priorities around and are pushing to get that done ASAP. Last week we got the roof patched and worked on quotes from local carpenters to convert 2 large rooms into 8 small ones that can house the medical work. Next week I need to get a contract in place and some of my guys will paint the interior. 2 weeks after that we should be able to move everything inside — inshallah.
When I was getting quotes for carpentry I took photos of all the walls where we will be repartitioning to make sure I had the dimensions and window/door locations right. It was only afterwards that I took a closer look at the drawings that the kids have been making on the blackboards.
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