The Situation for Refugees in South Africa

A couple of events shook me a bit this week and I thought I might take an opportunity to share them with you. Coming from a country where multiculturalism is a national policy and where we have strong immigration and refugee laws its easy to take for granted that most people who newly arrive in Canada will have enough food water and shelter, have legal protection and are more often than not welcomed into the communities where they settle.
In other countries, such as South Africa, the situation is quite different. Refugees often leave desperate situations to arrive in other countries where they are not welcome and don't necessarily have access to the necessities of life. There is a high level of documented xenophobia in SA particularly toward people arriving from other African states. Nothing makes this more clear than the xenophobic attacks aimed at making it clear to the many Congolese, Zimbabweains, Nigerians along with others that they are not welcome.
I witnessed the impact of some of this hate and lack of access to resources earlier this week. On Monday while waiting to meet with members of the Congolese civil society community in Pretoria a little and her mother walked into the office I was sitting in and the little girl looked up at her mother and asked whether it was okay for them to speak French there. Her mom replied yes but said she wasn't sure if I would understand and I replied that I would. So the little girl came and talked to me for a while and then went off to play with the secretary. Her mom then came and sat with me and I asked what her daughter's name was. She told me it was Devine (pronounced in French) but that she insisted on being called Divine (in English) so that no one would know that she was French and by proxy, Congolese.
The next day I went to the church mission which services refugees which I mentioned before. When we arrived there were three women sitting outside the mission door with a baby. After I had been there for about an hour the woman holding the baby said that her baby wanted to play with me. She then told me she had arrived from Zimbabwe 6 months earlier and given birth to her daughter Holly 3 months later. She also explained that her husband had run off and they were left alone. While I played with the baby, the ladies approached the on-duty minister for food. The sad fact was that the mission had so many clients that day that they had run out of food. He did however manage to find a piece of bread for one of the women who needed to take medication she was on (which was later explained to me later as likely being for HIV/AIDS) with food. Finding little assistance from a Mission already stretched to its limits, the mom put Holly back on her back, and walked away.