RESPECT Welcomes Buduburam Refugee Camp in Ghana
Anthony Barlee
Without doubt, the most effective way for a refugee organisation to gain credibility with new communities is by communicating through people who have experienced displacement for themselves.
Anthony Barlee, who is currently helping introduce RESPECT to the Buduburam refugee camp in Ghana, is just such a person.
Born in the Liberian capital Monrovia in 1977, Anthony has first hand experience of the challenges that refugees and asylum seekers face in western Africa, having spent time in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Ivory Coast before arriving in Ghana in 1995 to seek asylum and further his education in the Community Refugee School at the Buduburam camp.
During his ten years at Buduburam Anthony has been closely involved with youth and student activities and has been particularly interested in subjects such as HIV/AIDS education, Primary Health care and sanitation, as well as working on pen pal projects for students who are interested in the internet.
He currently acts as director for follow-up for the World Bible School sub-office on the camp, is an administrative assistant for the Womankind Association and is also a teacher at the Dominion Christian Academy.
Anthony said that he heard about RESPECT's work through Brother Francis Opoku in Northern Ghana, who put RESPECT President Marc Schaeffer in touch with him to discuss including the Buduburam camp in RESPECT's pen pal scheme.
"It has been my prayer and vision to connect refugee schools with sister schools in the world ...so that non-refugee school students can be able to communicate with refugee school students through pen-pals," said Anthony, who has just started working with Marc on the project.
He believes that the pen pal scheme will provide an opportunity for students in the camp to create friendships with young people in other countries and allow them to talk about their thoughts on refugee issues, their culture, what it means to be a refugee and what they hope to do next when their situation improves.
However, the continuing security issues that refugees face even once they are in a camp was brought home to Anthony during an incident last year in which he says his house was deliberately set on fire and destroyed - a house he and his family had only built a year previously.
"[T]he room's back window was broken into and gasoline sprayed into the room and set on fire," said Anthony, describing the attack last September. "There was no evidence of the person that did the act and we do not know why this was done... It was through the love of God that I and my wife were out of the house."
Yet Anthony says that this incident has only made him more determined to help address the challenges facing those living in the camps.
"We lost everything in that fire when the house got burned. [But]since then I have decided, along with my wife, to dedicate the rest of our lives to serving refugees."