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Côte d'Ivoire/Liberia: Ivorian children rejoin their families
17-01-2012 Photo gallery
Liberia still hosts some 100,000 Ivorian refugees who fled the post-electoral violence after December 2010. As the situation in Côte d'Ivoire stabilizes, people are gradually returning. ICRC communication delegate Noora Kero travelled from Liberia to Côte d'Ivoire with seven refugee children who were on their way to rejoin their families. The children had become separated from their parents when they fled to Liberia. The ICRC and the Liberian Red Cross have registered close to 600 children and young people and traced their parents in Côte d'Ivoire. Now, they are bringing them home. Our photo diary traces Céléstine and Mohammed’s emotional journey from a Liberian refugee camp to their village in Côte d'Ivoire.
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By mid-December 2011, their number had risen to 103. Every time Timo visits the camp, the children want to hold his hand and follow him around.
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They found their way to a refugee camp in Liberia where they have spent over six months. The Red Cross Tracing Network has found their families and both the children and the parents have agreed that the ICRC can bring the children home.
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After more than six months in the camp, she still has no news about her husband. Céléstine tells me how grateful they are to be taken care of by her. She feels Henriette is like her mother; "Henriette even looks like my mother," she says.
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Céléstine's mother is dead and Mohammed's mother left with a new husband when the boy was three years old. "As a woman, you take care of any children as if they were your own," she says.
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Already a Red Cross volunteer back home in Côte d'Ivoire, he's one of the Red Cross tracing volunteers in Bahn camp who facilitate refugees' phone calls to their families, collect Red Cross messages and help the ICRC register the children. Alphonse has the great advantage that he speaks the local languages, and can act as an interpreter between ICRC staff and refugees who speak neither French nor English.
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Last night, Céléstine had her hair braided, and Henriette and all the children ate a meal of rice together. The ICRC has provided them with travel documents and some basic items for the journey from Liberia to Côte d'Ivoire.
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Mohammed is standing next to the person who has been looking after him at the camp, looking confused. As Henriette orginally comes from another village in Côte d'Ivoire, she may never see "her" children again.
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Few words are exchanged and it is hard to imagine what they are thinking. When they last saw their house it had been looted. A few kilometres before the village, they start to recognize their surroundings. Six hours after the children left Bahn, excitement mounts.
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Céléstine's father gives his daughter and grandson a big hug, followed by an aunt, other relatives and people from the village.
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Mohammed had looked confused the day before, but now he is relaxed and smiling, happy to be back with his family in the house he and his father share with Céléstine and her father. We ask the whole family to pose for one last photo and wish them well. ICRC staff working in Côte d’Ivoire will visit them in a month's time to check that the children are settling back into their families.
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Côte d'Ivoire: lost children return home
