Trips offer respite to Sahrawi refugee children

TINDOUF, Algeria — Born in a desert historically known as the devil’s garden, Sahrawi refugee children have little to enjoy in their camps. But thanks to a summer program called Vacations in Peace, the children can experience a very different world.

Since the mid-1980s, generations of Sahrawi children who grew up in refugee camps have benefited from the peace vacations in Spain. The annual summer program, sponsored by the group Friends of the Sahrawi People, has been providing a place where exiled Sahrawi children can live, temporarily, a normal childhood.

Moreover, it has helped strengthen ties between two societies with a shared history whose ramifications spill over into the present. When Spain left the Western Sahara without an internationally demanded referendum, Morocco seized the opportunity to lay claim over the territory, and Morocco controls it to this date. Sahrawis were then driven out to the Algerian desert, away from their home country and the beautiful coastline. If parents want their children to believe the stories of their homeland, they have no alternative but to send their children abroad.

Gabal Ali Raja is the mother of three children who have been part of the peace vacations program. She always shares how amazing the Dakhla seashore is in Western Sahara, but she cannot take them there. To reach the beach, Raja and her children would have to deal with a wall that spans 2,700 kilometers (nearly 1,700 miles), with more than 5 million land mines and 120,000 Moroccan soldiers on the other side. Instead, she will send them to host families in Spain.