Helplessness.

What a concept—my inner American riots at the thought of it.

Yet helplessness, dependence, and lack of autonomy seems to be a central underpinning to life here. The rhythm of the refugee is integrally linked to outside forces—remote agreements made in the United Nations, the fickle forces of nature, the arrival of the next shipment of emergency rations.

Being thrust into this rhythm for the past four weeks has certainly been a foreign experience for me. Although I’ve travelled most of my life and lived outside the US before, I was still raised with much of the American mentality—one of independence and an almost idolatrous faith in the power of the Choice. Yet here I am, in the land of the Choice-less, among people who live, to a great extent, the lives they are forced to, not the lives that they desire.

My Saharawi family recently received several kilos of flour from the World Food Programme. Thus, we have been eating plain white bread twice a day for the past week—because that’s what they were handed. Before that, we had been given beans, so my creative Saharawi mom served those up in whatever form she could concoct. Because here, we take what we’re given and we try and imagine it’s what we want.

Yes, we aren’t starving, although 1 in 3 children here are malnourished. Yes, there are makeshift roofs over our heads, but they crumble and dissolve when the rain falls. It’s humbling and sobering and occasionally enraging, living here, in the land of the anti-Choice.