Dia-Logos Podcast - Ep 12 - Radical Obedience: Serving Inside Malawi’s Dzaleka Refugee Camp

Nico, you've shared some of the numbers of people in the refugee camps from all different places.

That seems like the need is absolutely massive.

Just share some of those numbers with us.

Our listeners can just get an idea of really how busy, how full, and let's be honest, overpopulated these camps can get.

Yes, I think one of the things, just to give a very brief background to Tzaleka, Tzaleka was a prison back in 1994, a political prison, and it's still a local village as well.

So it was designed for about 4,000 people.

And with all the wars that took place in what we call the Great Lakes area, and the people, the majority of them coming from the DRC, we are currently sitting in a space where, well, the numbers differ, depends on which website you go.

But I think we can estimate that there's about 67,000 people, which is currently in the camp in a place designed for 4,000 people.

So the challenges that we have, like you said, you know, in the camp is we don't have any refuse system.

We don't have any stormwater systems and also running water.

There's barely no running water and the electricity is only available at certain places and the people in the camps stay very close to each other.

So you can just imagine the kind of social pressure apart from the physical pressure that there is.

And it's really, really tough to stay there so close to your neighbors from different countries.

So like you have mentioned, out of that 67,000, the majority of them comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is North Kifu and South Kifu, where the wars are currently raging, the civil wars and also between the warlords.

And then we've got some people from Burundi, Rwanda, which some of them come from the genocide era.

We

have Somalians.

Somalians and South Sudan people.

And then some little people from Eritrea.

Ethiopia.

And a lot of Ethiopians left.

So staying together, there's not only physical and economic challenges, but the social challenges, the differences.

Between the cultures, you know, if you take, for example, only in the DRC, there's over a hundred different spoken Swahili ethnic groups.

And they are differing, their communities and their social lives differ from one another.

So it's really challenging for them to live in an environment like that.