Home

I've been in Wau Town for three months. I'm nomadic, so I'm used to referring to wherever I am sleeping that night as "home." But for the population here, many of whom have become displaced because of recent fighting, home was a house they built with their own hands, with hard-won possessions and family ties. Home was a place where their roots had grown. Now, many people huddle in a protection camp just outside of the UN base.

It was incredible to watch the camp be constructed. The area went from an open field to a city. Women dig post holes for the poles men bring back. Children scavenge bits of rope to tie a shelter together. A family builds a shelter, and gets on with life. People lounge in the shade, do laundry, prepare meals. Children run wild, exploring the many nooks, crannies, facets and forbidden zones of their new home.

These displaced people are already setting down roots. Two months in a place and their claims of ownership are shifting. What happens if another family wants to build a shelter right in front of their shelter? What are the claims of ownership of this land? Will one family say, "don't build there, that's our yard"? Do these people still claim their homes in town, as well as a small parcel inside the camp? Where do they come from? Where do their children come from? Where do they say that they live? I can see how conflicts come up when this question of territory and temporality is expanded to a country-wide scale.

Pithy travel quotes tell of going on a journey and never being able to go back, because even if you find your starting point again, you will have changed. How your place doesn't change but you do so that it's no longer comfortable. True--the journey leaves you homeless. Not homeless, because you can make a home, but origin-less, perhaps. No one has your story, no one has a shared history. The closest you get is someone with a similar Venn diagram of experiences, and you skip from overlapping area to overlapping area, finding a common history. Or the least disparate history. How do you answer where you are from, unless you start recounting a story of years spent on this continent, trip duration in this mountain range, wars survived in this country. The flag of your home becomes a patchwork quilt with some familiar landmarks, maybe a pattern or two emerging. No one else will fly this flag. Maybe patterns will echo each other, but if the journey is your home, then no one is from your village.