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From Refugee Camp to MHC: Studying A World and a Lake Away

By Mieke H. Bomann

This article originally appeared in the spring 2007 Quarterly.

From her bedroom window in MacGregor Hall, Senia Bachir-Abderahman ’10 has a beautiful view of Upper Lake and the forest that surrounds it. The college’s rural quality was enticing to this North African for whom woods and lakes had been, for the most part, the stuff of dreams.

The desert landscape of southwest Algeria where Senia grew up is not only treeless and arid but nearly devoid of sand. The bare rock and small-stone terrain is inhospitable to all but the most hardened of life forms. Nevertheless, some 200,000 refugees from neighboring Western Sahara have subsisted there since the mid-1970s. Senia’s family was among them.

The desert camp is virtually unknown to outsiders. Sheltering mainly women and children—most men join the Polisario Front to fight for Western Sahara’s self-determination—the camp is utterly dependent on humanitarian aid. When her MHC peers as children were playing with fashionable Barbie dolls, Senia was making her own dolls out of camel bones.

But because she made good grades in school—she attended boarding school in northern Algeria beginning at age eight—Senia was sent to summer camps in France and Spain by international donor agencies. When she was fifteen, she attended the United World College in Norway, situated in a rural area ringed by fjords. Despite her initial dislocation and with only a limited knowledge of English, Senia began to feel more comfortable within a month. (This was especially true after she held a question-and-answer session regarding her hijab—she was the first at the school to wear the headscarf favored by some Muslims.)

Senia has never been to Western Sahara but has lived and breathed both the anger and hope of the diaspora in Algeria. She plans, as her mother does, to one day make her way to that nation first burdened by colonialism, then partition, and currently a stalled self-determination referendum. “My aim of study abroad is to bring back something to my people,” she explains. A biology major, her current plans are to become a physician, like her father.

Until then, Senia plans to further investigate the pleasures of water. During January term, she set sail with professor Chris Pyle on a schooner in the Lesser Antilles. Then it was back to her lakeside home on campus, and the oceans of dishes she faces as a student worker in dining services.