Young refugees team up against drug abuse

The acronyms littered on walls and signposts bear testimony to the work NGOs and UN agencies have been doing to help make life livable for refugees in southern Guinea. From medical centres to latrines, from canteens to technical schools, most essential services were initiated by the humanitarian community. But the people spearheading the fight against drugs in Kountaya, one of the refugee camps in Albadaria, southern Guinea, are neither NGO officials nor UN staffers. Their Community Action Against Drug Abuse (CAADA), is an association formed by refugees themselves. “We found out that there was a gap NGOs weren’t paying much attention to: drug abuse,” says CAADA’s head, Chernoh Chargha. He and his peers, he adds, have more reasons than enough to become drug-fighters. “Drugs were one of the reasons why we are refugees,” he explains. Moreover, many of the young refugees brought the habit with them or turned to drugs because of the experiences they went through. There is no shortage of documentation on drug abuse by fighters in the civil wars that gripped Sierra Leone - up to last year - and Liberia. The atrocities they committed helped fuel some of the biggest population movements in West Africa since the Biafra War in Nigeria in 1967-1970. Hundreds of thousands of people fled Sierra Leone and Liberia. Once they crossed borders, it was almost like their previous lives had been blotted out. They were no longer teachers, cooks, engineers, farmers or nurses, just refugees. Chernoh told IRIN, his life before refugee status included working with Amnesty International and Prison Watch, plus a stint as a security investigator with Sierra Leone’s national diamond mining company. He was working as a psychosocial therapist in the eastern district of Kono, when Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels overran the area, forcing him to join the exodus. On arriving in Guinea in 1998, he said, he realized that drug abuse was a major problem in the camps, so he and some of his peers decided to do something about it. “We didn’t want to leave everything to the NGOs,” he said. “We wanted to do something for ourselves, so we formed an association to see how we could work with the community.” A consultative committee made up of religious leaders, women and other personalities helped guide the formation of the association, which now has 78 members, 48 male and 30 female. Six Guineans are among them, including Sassouboye Kamano, who was displaced by cross-border attacks on southern Guinea in late 200-early 2001. He was in Kissidougou, some 90 km away, when he heard of the work CAADA was doing and decided to come and join the group, he said. CAADA has been raising awareness about drug abuse - as well as STDs and HIV - through community discussions, role playing and peer counseling. Sensitisation starts with association members themselves. “To change ideas we have to change ourselves, so we started with ourselves and then went on to sensitise others,” Chernoh said. “Everything here is out of our own effort,” he said with a twinge of pride. “We done it all by ourselves.” But sustaining the effort would require assistance, he admits. They need help to buy equipment such as megaphones to get their message across to more people. Moreover, keeping young people away from drugs also requires giving them alternatives. Many of the young people in the camp come from the diamond mining district of Kono, “but there are no diamonds in the camp,” Chernoh said. The result, he added, was hundreds of idle youths extremely vulnerable to the temptations of marijuana, diazepam or glue, to name a few of the more common substances abused. One of the things CAADA did was to persuade some of the carpenters and tailors in the camp to take on youths as apprentices. However, the number of artisans who can ply their trade in the refugees camps is small, so the number of youths they can take on is limited. What CAADA would like, Chernoh says, is help in the form of income-generating projects for young people. Will their fight against drug abuse end when they and the other refugees pack up their belongings and join the convoys that have been taking their people back to Sierra Leone? The young psychosocial therapist doesn’t think so. “We already have two or three of our members who have gone back to Sierra Leone,” he says. “I also aim to see how we can continue our work there.”