Review: "Without a Homeland" by Bobbie Lord

 

Without a Homeland by Bobbie Lord
Published February 2022 via Seascapes Press
★★★

Some twenty years ago, Bobbie Lord left for Albania to manage a refugee camp. It wasn't new work for her, but every situation and every culture is different, and not all challenges can be predicted.

Each latrine had two doors and a rudimentary stencil drawing of a man or a woman. Inside, the walls were rough to the touch. It was dark, and the air was stifling and hot. Footholds over the hole accommodated the stance of a man, but not that of women and children. (27)

Okay, that one is a challenge that could have been predicted—if even a single woman had been involved in the design of the latrines—but I do think that quotation illustrates some of the indignities of being a refugee: not enough to lost loved ones to war (or genocide); not enough to be driven out of your home, your town, your country; not enough to be forced to live in a constant state of uncertainty, without any choice in what you eat or when, or where you live or what health care you can get; not enough that it's suddenly no longer necessarily safe to take a shower (due to the risk of sexual assault)...but the fact that one of the most basic necessities of daily life, and something absolutely critical to a refugee camp, would be designed for—well, for the least vulnerable people in that camp, with no thought to the most vulnerable.

The book is somewhere between episodic and thematic. I'd have loved to see more development of some of the characters, though I imagine that would have been difficult more than twenty years after the fact. Perhaps most interesting is the fact that her time there included the formal end of the war—many of the people stuck in the refugee camp were able to go home, or to some version of home. To me that's intriguing just because I hear so often about refugee camps where people are stuck in limbo for years and years, with no resolution and no safe home to go to. Doesn't make the reality of returning to a war-torn home any easier, of course, but...interesting nonetheless.