There is no tinsel to be seen when walking past the 270,000 homes in Bidi Bidi. The neighbouring towns are lit up by Christmas lights but not Africa’s largest refugee settlement, in north-western Uganda, where the huts and shelters sprawl across over 250 square km (96.5 sq miles) of grassland and trees.
This Christmas Eve, residents wash clothes by the spring that slithers out of the bushes and spills across the rocky roads. Some of the huts have had a fresh coat of paint. The smell of freshly slashed grass mixes with that of butchered cows as those families who are able to buy meat in time to smoke and preserve it for Christmas.
Gertrude Awuru, 25, refuses to be part of the mad festive dash that has people lining up at the butchers’ stalls in the market. Born in Bidi Bidi, Awuru is part of a refugee generation in Uganda, which hosts over 1.5 million, the highest number in any African country.
“I do not know Christmas anywhere else. My parents were refugees and I was born here. I do not know when my parents moved to Uganda,” she says, raising her voice to be heard above the Ugandan and Nigerian music that her children are dancing to.
Three huts away, 19-year-old Grace Iya watches Awuru’s children dance as she breastfeeds her baby. Iya is from South Sudan but war forced her to leave, escaping with her neighbours into Uganda. There was no time to find her family.
“We heard gunshots. We saw people running and we ran too,” Iya says. She was only 13.
She left behind a home where at Christmas her uncle and father would invite lots of family and friends. Christmas in South Sudan came with a dress, new shoes and a new hairstyle.
“I still remember the dress my uncle bought for me during Christmas of 2015 – just before we ran to Uganda. It was green with some white that could disappear then appear,” she says.
As a child fleeing conflict, you do not really understand why you are sleeping in bushes or drinking from rivers instead of the pots you left behind, Iya explains. She thought she could go to a new school. Instead, when she got to Uganda, she was moved from neighbour to neighbour. While the Ugandan government offered refugees free education, there was no one to help feed or clothe her so she had no option.
“I had no choice and got married by 18,” she says. “And now it is Christmas and I have no special food, no new clothes or new hair.”
The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) distributed the month’s ration a week ago. With limited funding in the face of competing global crises, the agency has had to re-prioritise who it categorises as the most vulnerable refugees needing food assistance. WFP provides this category with 60% of the basic food they need to survive each month. Refugees deemed relatively less vulnerable receive a smaller percentage in rations and a few have been taken off food assistance altogether.
“I still receive food from WFP, but it is not enough. What I have now is little.”
Two girls join the children in Awuru’s compound. They have just had a bath and they walk carefully so that dust does not rise and stick on the petroleum jelly that glistens on their legs and face. Iya laughs at the futile exercise. The children dancing raise dust that no one can avoid.
“We know the food is not enough and on Christmas we must share what we have with the neighbours,” Awuru says. “My husband bought the chicken we are going to eat in June at 25,000 shillings (about £5). If he had waited for Christmas, it would have cost 40,000 shillings.” She chuckles at the idea that WFP food, comprising beans and maize, should be part of the Christmas menu.
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“We would not be able to survive and save money without the food from WFP. But today is Christmas and we shall only use the salt and cooking oil that they gave us. We shall keep the beans for after Christmas. We do not have new clothes or new hair, but we have our chicken.”
The precious brown and red cockerel looks a lot like the already slaughtered one Charity Poni is preparing for her four children five kilometres away in Zone one of the settlement. It is hard to imagine that this merry 32-year-old fled to Uganda in 2016 with a two-week-old baby that she kept alive on warm water because there was not enough food in the bush for her to produce breastmilk.
Over the smell of simmering chicken and spices, the memory of using her baby’s clothes as sanitary towels to hold postpartum blood is pushed away. As plates are set and the children wash their hands, there is no time to think about the discomfort of only being able to bathe when you reach a river. Or malnutrition and the long, hungry and dangerous journey on foot.
“Christmas is a time to forget all the stress,” says the woman who still dreams of one day returning to South Sudan and her career in the electricity sector. “The electricity company was destroyed during the war. But one day they will rebuild it and I will go home.”
For now, the most important thing is that on Christmas Day Mercy, Poni’s youngest child, gets her piece of chicken liver. And her elder two get the chicken thighs that they love. Poni’s husband is away working over Christmas, so she will eat the chicken back and gizzard usually reserved for the man of the house.
“Even if you do not have new clothes, Christmas is the day when you have to enjoy like everything is fine,” Poni says. “It is a bit sad because I know that I have meat to cook but some neighbours have nothing.”
Lumeri, a musician who wears geeky glasses and a single red star-shaped earring is responsible for dissipating all the stress in the settlement. He has set up his speakers and is hosting a Christmas show, mixing songs with messages about ration reductions and becoming self-reliant.
“I sing so that we can be happy, remember our culture, remain united and enjoy Christmas,” he says.