Under the scorching sun in a displaced people’s camp in the Upper East Region, toddlers gather around a mortar and pestle, pounding what looks like the day’s lunch.
The four children occasionally stopped the pounding, dipped their hands in the mortar and licked their fingers. But a closer look revealed it was an empty mortar. In it was the whitish remains of whatever meal the family might have prepared the previous day or night.
This was the plight of displaced children at the Sapeliga camp in the Bawku West District of the Upper East Region. They were too young to explain their situation, so The Fourth Estate turned to a watchful teenager, Aliyata.
“We sometimes eat only once a day, which is insufficient for us,” she said.
With her bristled hair, cracked lips, and emaciated face, she appeared hungry at the time of The Fourth Estate’s visit.
The 14-year-old and her family fled to Ghana from Kaya, Burkina Faso’s fifth largest city, located in Sanmatenga Province after it was rocked by violent attacks. In the last five years, the West African country has been struggling to deal with extremists who continue to unleash violence in some parts of the country.
Aliyata and her family arrived in Ghana three years ago, but her education, and that of many other children in the camp, is on hold.
According to statistics from the Ghana Refugee Board, as of November 2022, there were about 2000 displaced persons from Burkina Faso in the Upper East Region of Ghana due to violent extremism in West Africa.
They are housed in six different camps, including Sapeliga, where Aliyata lives. In her new world where role models are almost non-existent, she wished she could go to school.
“I don’t want to go to Kaya again because of the fight,” she said.
She wanted a future that looked different from anything she was experiencing at the moment. She was not the only displaced teenager suffering from such a fate.
Aliyata has 11 siblings in the camp. Her father, Mady Bukhari, left Kaya, in a near-death situation. Two out of his ten children at the time were in school when extremists invaded the school, killed the teachers, and burnt down the school, he said. His children and many schoolchildren escaped. In the midst of the violence, he ensured that was the last time his children were ever going to be in that school.
Mady, together with his two wives and ten children, began their journey to nowhere. They had heard of Ghana but had no clue where it was. Cote d’Ivoire, the nearest French-speaking country was too far, he said. So, the only option was Ghana.
He drove the little children in a donkey-driven cart. Without water or food, they survived on the benevolence of people in the communities along their journey.
At the sight of a vehicle, they rushed for cover to remain unseen.
It was a 371-kilometre journey that took one month. They wandered and maneuvered their way through the plains of the Burkinabe savannah till they eventually got to Ghana.
At Sapeliga, the shadows of a big tree served as their home during the day. At night, they laid their mats on the floor, where the family of 13 slept. For seven days, their bed and home were under that tree, until the chief of the community and other supporters came to their aid. The chief provided a land while UNICEF provided structures to accommodate them.
The 41-year-old Mady has no intention of going back home.
He said he had found a comfort zone far away from the chaos in Kaya where the foundation of his economic existence had been threatened. In Ghana, he makes enough from his farm.
He sells some of the farm produce and sends part of the money to his family back in Burkina Faso. Through the venture, he earns enough to take care of his parents and siblings who joined him months after his journey to Ghana. Since that attack, Mady said he could not trace one of his younger sisters.
Hunger & violence
Unlike Mady, 61-year-old Ajara Bukari’s life hasn’t taken a good turn. As she sat in the only makeshift tent at the Yarigungu camp in the Bawku Municipal, surrounded by two older women and a young woman, her major headache was the next meal.
The double tragedy of being far away from home and jobless makes life extremely difficult for her and the other women.
On days they got to do manual jobs for people, they set off early morning to the field to work and raise money to fend for themselves and their families.
But this was not one of such days. As a Ghanaian married to a Burkinabe, she lived most of her life in Beriyale in Burkina Faso.
However, violent extremism drove her out of her home one night in June 2022.
She is constrained from going back to her hometown, in Bawku, also in the Upper East Region because of a chieftaincy dispute that has kept the town under curfew for months.
“We were in bed [in Burkina Faso] at midnight when we heard gunshots. I quickly grabbed the little children in the house and we started running to safety,” Ajara recalled.
That night’s attack left an indelible memory in Ajara’s mind. She continues to live in fear of the unknown. She knew a member of her community watch committee who was killed during the attack. That night, two men were murdered during the attack.
Bio (not his real name) is one of the survivors of that attack. He was one of the six community watchdog members trained and given guns to protect the community. However, that night, the guns they swore to protect their community with became the cause of death of his two colleagues.
Bio told The Fourth Estate they received intelligence about the attack a few days earlier but could not do anything to avert it. The two men who were killed had their guns taken from them. He believes they were attacked because of the guns.
Together with women and children, they all left for Bansi in the Binduri District, a community that shares a border with Ghana.
To survive, women in the various camps still travel to Burkina on foot to farm. This is in spite of the danger of drowning while crossing a nearby river.
“What will we eat? How can we eat if we do not go?” the former watchdog member asked.
It takes Aisha 15 minutes from her new home in Ghana, the Gentinga camp, to get to her farm in Burkina Faso, where she was harvesting okro with her children during The Fourth Estate’s visit.
She fled into Ghana from the Beri community, which is near the Burkina Faso-Ghana border. The community looked deserted when The Fourth Estate visited.
On the night of the attack that forced her to abandon her home, Aisha said all she heard were gunshots. She immediately packed a few clothes and left with her children for Ghana.
She did not care about the distance to her farm because she needed to eat and feed her children. Her husband had left for the Ashanti Region to find a job. She heard from him only once.
“He does not have a job yet, so he is unable to send enough money to cater for the home,” she said.
Ajara with other women in a tent at Yarigungu camp
BY Adwoa Adobea-Owusu