Shawn Davis | Crossed Paths Photography

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Shawn Davis

Refugees in Transition

These images were taken between January and July 1999 in the refugee camps strung along the Sierra Leonean and Liberian borders with Guinea that are home to nearly 400,000 men, women and children who have fled from over a decade of civil war.

In April of 1999 there was a rebel attack on the town of Voinjama in Liberia's northern Lofa Country. Approximately 7,500 individuals fled across the border to safety in neighboring Guinea. As a Crisis Corps Volunteer with the United Nations World Food Program, I was sent to the border that week with one of my colleagues where we spent a week managing the emergency food distribution along the border and participating in the establishment of a new camp named "Daro."

Two days after the initial influx of refugees I left the border area and took a tour through the new camp. I was amazed at how quickly they had restructured their lives, recreating the basic framework of community that rooted them and kept them from losing themselves in despair. There was an entire row of makeshift barbers who were set up at one end of the camp busy shaving and trimming. The women hairdressers had organized braiding sessions in another area. Card games were being played out on tables made from the empty boxes that had held the Humanitarian Daily Rations—the Meals Ready to Eat that served as their first meals at the border. Old men and women cooled themselves with hand-held fans made from the boxes. It was certainly not life as usual, but it was life. And despite the horrors they had witnessed and the hardships they were about to face, they were living.