By Juma Majanga, Nairobi based journalist
We meet Adieu Achul making soap at her home-based factory in the suburbs east of Nairobi. Her name meaning “a crying bird” in the Dinka dialect tells a horrifying story of her childhood even as she covers it with an infectious smile. As a child, Achul survived a gruesome village massacre that wiped out her entire family. Today she empowers other refugee girls and women.
“It is an incident I really don’t like talking about,” she points out and stops to fight back tears, “I was born in South Sudan during the 1990s civil war between the North and the South forces. One day the north forces attacked my Parian village and carried out a massacre killing everyone and burning down the houses, I was the sole survivor. The lady I call mum today was fleeing the war when she heard a child crying among the dead bodies, she came and pulled me from the bodies,” Achul narrates.
The Good Samaritan who rescued Adieu from dead bodies moved with her on a three months trekking journey to Kenya’s Dadaab refugee camp and become her adopting mother. The hardship of growing up in a refugee camp made Achul want to do something to change the plight of refugees. She underwent training in soap making and thereafter set up her business. The odds were against her but she worked hard to become an entrepreneur and activist for girls and women rights. She also collects donations for residents of the camp.
“I was lucky to have gotten scholarship throughout my education. I believe I’m still a refugee and anything I do will always help my community. Now that I’m in a position to be able to help my community, why would I not help them?”, she poses.
From her factory, Achul makes soaps, lotions, hair-oils and other detergents as well as facemasks. She works with humanitarian groups, like the U.N. refugee agency, to distribute the soap, face masks, food and other donated items to the most vulnerable and needy families among refugees as well as the hosts communities back at the Dadaab and Kakuma refugee camps in the remote northern Kenya.
“The refugees who approach us with brilliant ideas like Adieu had, that they want to help other refugees, and also the vulnerable host communities, then we must give them support. This is because funding for the humanitarian agencies is unfortunately reducing significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic”, explains Eujin Byun, the UNHCR Kenya spokesperson.
Having overcome many odds, Achul is completing her last year of studies for a Bachelor of Commerce degree at the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology in Kenya. Her first day on campus felt like being in heaven, she tells me. Achul had never before stepped out of the Dadaab refugee camp since entering it as a child.
The marvel of the city was like a new world to her. “I had never before seen a tall building and when I was taken to my apartments room, I had to be guided step by step on anything I did”, Achul recalls with laughter. She was frightened by elevators and didn’t know how to climb stairs. Today she runs mentorship programs for refugee girls and young women.
“I run two mentorship programs; one just to train them on basic entrepreneur skills and the second one is about mobilization on anything to do with education specifically, so that after their childbirth, they will choose either to go back to school or to have their own business,” the jovial Achul elaborates.
Kenya is one of Africa’s top refugee-hosting countries with more than a half-million refugees, mainly from neighboring Somalia and South Sudan. The government however wants to close the two major camps in the country, which together house more than 400,000 refugees and asylum-seekers.
Achul is worried about the fate of refugees if the camps close, saying many refugees know only the camps as their home and will have nowhere else to go.
“It is like taking a blind person to eighth floor of an apartment and leaving them there to find their way. What will they do?”, Achul posed.
The UNHCR’s Byun says she is urging Kenya to keep the camps open.
“We are living in the period that more than 80 million people are displaced all over the world, and this is the time that we need solidarity, more than ever,” Byun pleads.
While the refugees await Kenya’s final decision, refugee entrepreneurs like Achul are stepping forward to help the vulnerable in their community during a difficult and uncertain time.
