The space is busy, filled with movement and activity, but there’s something missing. As I watch, I realise what it is. There’s very little noise. In a community centre like this back in Britain, filled with so many women and children, the sounds of chatter and laughter and kids at play would echo from the rafters. But here the atmosphere is oddly subdued. Children sit on the floor with paper and crayons, silently drawing pictures, each contained within their own bubble of wariness. They glance up at regular intervals, watching the room with big, dark eyes. I catch the attention of one little girl and smile encouragingly at her but she avoids my gaze and there is no answering smile in response, just a carefully blank look that renders her thoughts inscrutable. I guess it’s a form of self-preservation, but it’s one no child should have to learn to cultivate.
The women huddle in small groups, talking softly together or simply sitting and staring into space.
‘Where do they all live?’
Madame Habib shrugs. ‘The lucky ones share rooms in the bidonville that we passed on our way here.’ It’s not a word I’m familiar with and she notices my look of bewilderment.
‘A bidonville is the word for a slum – you saw those shacks? Well, they are made of scraps of rubbish, bits and pieces of whatever can be found. A bidon is a tin can or an oil drum, so it literally means a tin-can-town. But not all the women and children here are fortunate enough to have the shelter of a shack to sleep in. Some camp out on the beach or in the sand dunes. Some are working in brothels and will sleep there. We can only provide a safe place and a meal for them during the daytime here. Their nights are filled with dangers.’
When I squat down alongside some of the children, the sour, stale smell of the fear that they wear on their skin is pungent in my nostrils. I look at their pictures. At first glance, they look like the kind of thing any child in my primary school classes back home would draw – stick families standing in front of houses with a scribble of blue sky overhead and a big yellow sun in one corner. But then I look more closely and the blood freezes in my veins, despite the stuffy heat of the room. The houses are burning. The people are bleeding and broken. There are soldiers with guns and knives. The colours the children have used are brutal – violent red, a blaze of orange, the black of despair, muddy brown. The pastel pink and pale blue crayons have scarcely been touched, their points still neat, whereas the darker shades are worn to stubs.
The little girl who’d looked up at me before reaches out and hands me her piece of paper. She still doesn’t smile, but she does meet my eyes at last and I sense that she’s offering me a gift, the only thing she has to give. I take it carefully and try not to flinch at the image of a body in pieces beneath a tree. She’s drawn herself, too, a smaller figure with close-cropped hair, running away, her mouth open in a scream. She watches me carefully again, those big dark eyes taking everything in. And then, very gently, she reaches out a finger and touches my hand where the skin has cracked open in the crevices between my fingers. She looks at me enquiringly for a moment and then pulls back the sleeve of the dirt-smeared T-shirt she wears. At the top of her arm, near her shoulder, is a ragged scar, pink and raw-looking against the dark mahogany of her own flesh.
I reach out my own hand and touch it very gently too, wishing I could heal it, as well as the invisible wounds that scar her mind. She seems to know what I’m thinking because, at last, her solemn little face relaxes into a smile, as if she’s accepted that we have a common bond. And then she slips her hand into mine and pulls me to my feet, leading me over to a cardboard box of picture books. She lets go long enough to pull a battered copy of French fables from the pile and gives it to me so that I understand I am to read to her, even though she’s still not uttered a single word. We sit, cross-legged, on the cement floor, and I begin to turn the pages. My accent is terrible and I stumble over many of the words, but the little girl doesn’t seem to mind. One by one, some of the other children draw closer until I’m surrounded. When I glance up, they are still watching me carefully, but here and there there’s a flicker of amusement in their eyes. Whether it’s at my attempts to read in French or at something in the story, I’m not sure. But I don’t care. That tiny glimpse of an emotion – of any sort of positive feeling – means the world to me. So I carry on and hold up the dog-eared pages every now and then to show them the pictures. They nod politely, sagely considering the cautionary tale of the lazy grasshopper and the hard-working ant, and when I reach the end of that story the little girl reaches over and turns the page for me to begin the next one.