Pictures of the Refugee Camp

I really wish I was able to share with you some better pictures. The landscape was very flat so it made it difficult to capture the magnitude of the place, and it was constant work so it was difficult to break away and take pictures. Mostly, however, it was hard to disengage emotionally and treat the situation as if I were a tourist.

Nevertheless, I was able to get a few pictures. They will give you an idea of what it was like.

My team (5 men) came down in two cars. We packed every inch of free space with plastic plates, cups and spoons, because that is what was most needed on site. We were able to bring down about 10,000 of each. We thought we were bringing a lot, but it only lasted for one day.

This is the tent that we used for cooking. We had another similar tent for food prep and a small tent for cutting meat. You can see a journalist in the picture filming what we were doing. The journalists were everywhere.

Those of us cooking and serving wore these yellow shirts. Here we are serving tea and a snack about midday. We then served a hot meal in the early evening.

These are the tents that the residents of the camp stayed in. The rectangular tents in the foreground were for supplies. The residents stayed in the semi-circular tents that make up the entire background of this shot. The number of tents changes from day to day, but there are easily 3-4 thousand of them. I saw about 6-8 people per tent.

This is what the tents look like before they are erected. In some ways they are exactly like a tent that you use for camping. They all came from UNHCR which is the refugee arm of the United Nations.

One of two (that I saw) water stations where residents were able to bathe. As you can imagine it was not easy to wash oneself in a mud puddle. People did a good job keeping clean from what I could see, but most were hoping to be evacuated back to their home country before needing a shower too badly.

This is a mobile hospital that the Tunisian military set up. It is made up of three trucks: triage, treatment and surgery.

This is the military headquarters portion of the camp. It is where our cooking tents were. It is also where they stored supplies that were brought in. What you are looking at is one shipment of bottled water. We received multiple shipments like this a day. This picture was taken early on in the crisis. After a few days, this entire area was completely full of donated food and water. Other than the tents, I never once saw any food, water or supplies that came from international aid agencies. It was 100% provided by people in Tunisia. Early on, some of the supplies were purchased by the military and shipped down, but the overwhelming amount of food and supplies comes from private individuals, extended families, neighborhoods, Tunisian business, schools and community groups. Everyday more and more cars, vans and trucks are driving down to the border to drop of supplies.

This is a line of residents waiting to get water. At the far left are a group of Tunisians who drove down with a truck load of water and passed it out to those who needed it. The military allowed volunteers do what they wanted and didn't prevent people from distributing anything as long as it didn't cause problems. Sometimes lines were small and orderly like this one, sometimes they were massive and chaotic. I just didn't have it in me to photograph the latter. There were plenty of Journalists on hand to do that.

This is what it looks like when men line up to receive food on a good day. This picture was taken when we distributed tea. There are about 300 people in line right now. When we distribute a hot meal in the evening the line is about 10 times this size.

The military cleared a section of land and brought in football (soccer) goals and a ball. At first the football pitch was crowed with men and filled with chaos. Then, one of the men from among our group of volunteers organized a game between Nigeria and Bangladesh. It was a perfect example of how a little bit of leadership and initiative from outside can provide enough organization to make a big difference to people who are desperate and scared. We also learned that Nigeria is much better at football than Bangladesh.

It is difficult to show the magnitude of the camp with a picture.
There was just no way to capture it all with a normal camera from ground level.
This panoramic shows about two-thirds of the camp.