blueprints

The Three Goat Story | 137
three or four languages.) We smiled, we told jokes (which lost something in
translation), we listened: hope against hope. We were exploring together the
contours of the life of discovery.
* * *
The line outside the camps’ registration tent stretched as far as the eye
could see—individuals and families arriving from their war-torn country,
hungry, thirsty, exhausted, sometimes sick, often scared. Children sat on
their mother’s laps, waiting to be vaccinated, to have their eyes swabbed
with medicine. And then another line into a building, where there was
paperwork to be filled out and questions to answer. Religion. Nationality.
Languages. What are your main needs? What did you encounter along the
way? What made you flee your country? Please tick as appropriate:
� Lack of Food
� General Insecurity
� Family Members Killed
� Financial Difficulties
� Lack of Education
� Loss of Employment
Other (specify)____________________________
Other reasons included membership in a militia. These men were interviewed
separately from the rest of the population. Some have a lot of blood
on their hands, said a relief worker—which put into perspective the logistical
difficulties that we faced in conducting writing workshops.
First we needed permission from the UNHCR to work in the camps,
fly on its planes, stay in its compound, and use its security detail. Then we
had to gauge the risk of working in a volatile environment, with inadequate
communications and a lack of supplies—books, paper, pencils—that
belonged to an overall picture of dearth: the camps were short forty thousand
latrines, and there were not enough doctors, medical facilities, medicine,
schools, or teachers, to say nothing of clean water. No wonder the
humanitarians looked harried at the end of the day.
That night in the bar at the compound, I fell into conversation with the
press officer, who told me stories about snakes: how a refugee working in
the kitchen had killed a red spitting cobra and hung it outside the mess hall