When Abby Hardgrove was accepted into the child and family development graduate program she wasn’t sure what direction her research might take, but a book purchased to read at the beach provided the impetus for Hardgrove to travel half-way around the world and to begin learning the importance of faith for refugees who, in many cases, have lost everything else.
“Notes From My Travels,” the published journal of actress Angelina Jolie, documents her experiences visiting refugee camps as a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
“I bought it on a whim and thought it would be this Hollywood princess telling about visiting the little impoverished children,” Hardgrove recalls. “Instead, it really opened my eyes. I had no idea how many people, including children, were living as refugees; how many land mines are still out there; the medical situations faced by refugees.”
After beginning her classes, Hardgrove began “poking around” the UGA library, looking for research that focused on the lives of refugees.
“There’s been a lot of work on PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder) among refugees and a lot of anthropological and ethnographic research,” she says, “but I couldn’t find anything about the lived experiences of refugees day in and day out and what are their thoughts about who they are since they’ve become refugees.”
With the support of her major professor, Lynda Walters, Hardgrove began planning a research project to address those questions.
A major hurdle was identifying a camp for her research. Not only is safety a concern, refugee camps are frequently known as havens for rebel groups, but Hardgrove also needed support in identifying refugees to interview for her project.
She discovered Buduburam while researching camps on the United Nations website. Established 17 years ago to house those escaping the civil strife in Liberia, it housed 40,000 refugees at its peak. The recent calming of tensions in Liberia, however, has reduced Buduburam’s population to around 25,000.
At Walters’ suggestion, Hardgrove looked for UGA-sponsored study abroad programs to countries with refugee camps. She soon discovered that not only did UGA sponsor a study abroad program in Ghana, but co-director Alex Anderson, a FACS foods and nutrition faculty member, was very familiar with Buduburam—it’s located just down the road from where he attended high school in Ghana.
Anderson put Hardgrove in touch with the Rev. Jerry Kandea, who is both a refugee and a Methodist minister living in Buduburam. Kandea helped Hardgrove find people to interview and also provided her a place to stay during the nearly two weeks she was in the camp. To further defray the expenses of the project, Hardgrove received the Sharon Y. Nickols International Study Award.
Hardgrove began her research by talking with groups of refugee women and children.
“The focus groups gave me the opportunity to get a general sense of how things are and to test my questions,” she says. “The focus groups were a little more casual and there was more collective story telling that occurred. The individual interviews that I conducted later were more personal and could feel slow at times. I think I was asking them to think about things they had never thought about.”
Among the children she interviewed, Hardgrove found an acceptance of life in Buduburam. After all, most of these young people were born in the camp. It’s the only life they know.
But for their parents, life is hard and they don’t see that ever changing.
“I think every single person told me, ‘I have to pay for water; I have to pay to use the toilet,’” Hardgrove says.
Few of the adults have a regular source of income. Instead they “go around,” Hardgrove says, looking for work each day. However, there are the occasional entrepreneurs, like the woman who has obtained a freezer and makes ice to sell to her neighbors.
Hardgrove says few of those she interviewed have any hope of returning to their homes in Liberia.
“They may be afraid to go back or they may not see a way to go back,” she says. “For many of them, there’s nothing left for them in Liberia.”
Despite the daily hardships and lack of opportunities they face, Hardgrove says the people she interviewed remained focused on two areas: their children and God.
“They don’t see options beyond the future of their children,” she says. “They hope their children will get an education and move out of the refugee camp, if possible, to the U.S., the U.K. or Australia.”
Although children in Buduburam can attend classes either inside the camp or at nearby Ghanaian schools, education isn’t free. For most, the cost of uniforms and fees comes to about $90 annually. To help cover those costs, some of the refugees receive funds from a charitable organization overseen by Hardgrove’s host, Jerry Kandea.
Of all that she learned from the refugees in Buduburam and how they have managed to re-create their daily lives, Hardgrove says their belief that God is watching over them was perhaps the most surprising.
“To them, God is as present as the air they breathe in and out,” she says. “That wasn’t something that I asked about, they volunteered their belief that God was their helper. It was so common to walk down the street and hear, ‘God bless you.’”
Hardgrove says she never heard anyone blame or question God about their circumstances. Instead, God was viewed as a source of help.
“Isn’t that fascinating?” Hardgrove asks. “(To imagine) living hand to mouth in a place where people don’t like me, in a position where I can’t move, when I’ve watched my daughter raped in front of me. You get somebody like that who still will say, every time they’re asked about it, no matter how they’re asked about it, ‘It’s by the grace of God that I’m here. It’s by the grace of God that the children that I have are healthy. It’s because of God that I will eat later today.’”
Faith wasn’t among the ideas Hardgrove had planned to explore in her thesis, but the wealth of spontaneous comments made its inclusion essential. In fact, she is now considering studying the role of faith and religion as a part of her doctoral studies, which she’ll begin this fall at the University of Oxford, England.
“I want to look at two religious groups and compare them in refugee situations,” she says. “I wonder if we can look at, for example, Muslim refugees and how they’re making sense of their experience and then visit a refugee camp that is more Hindu, for example. The question is, how does religion set you up to deal with your experience?”
For the residents of Buduburam the answer is clear.
“I think faith is that kind of vehicle through which they can handle life,” Hardgrove says. “A woman in one interview said, ‘I know God will fight for me. I know God will fight for me. He will make a way.’”