“How is Hassan?” a young Yemeni woman I’ll call Heba asked me coyly, interrupting a conversation about the hardships she and other Yemeni refugees had experienced since the pandemic outbreak.Footnote 1 It was December 2021, during my first visit to the refugee camp in nearly two years. I was eager to learn about the impact of the coronavirus on my interlocutors’ daily lives, their economic well-being, and their migratory plans. As in many communities the world over, some believed Covid-19 was a conspiracy, a distant threat, or a “Christian”/[alien] disease. Others described how “everyone” in the camp and at home in Yemen had suffered its symptoms. But amid our discussions of these and other grave developments, several Yemeni refugees I had come to know asked me explicitly about the NYU Abu Dhabi undergraduate students I had brought to the camp four years earlier. And how is Marwan? And the one from El Salvador? And the one who played sports with the kids? Heba and her friend Najma continued, trying to remember various students’ names, reminiscing about the ones they had found especially attractive, sweet, or dynamic.

“Do you think it was beneficial that I brought the students to the camp? Or was it pointless?” I asked Heba. Even before and during these immersive course trips, I had worried about the ethics and implications of bringing privileged undergraduates to a refugee camp in Djibouti. Would our visit cause undue harm, or be considered voyeuristic? Would the benefits to my students far outweigh any potential benefits to refugees in the camp? Now, with the pandemic having disrupted all forms of global travel, the extraordinary mobility that had formerly been afforded to me and my students seemed almost grotesque.

“On the contrary,” Heba insisted, “they lit up the camp!”

Heba and Najma proceeded to tell me how they continue to think and talk about individual students, how much they had enjoyed the students’ visits, and how few visitors they have received in the time of Covid-19. Not even humanitarian organizations visit the camp now, they said, except for a few Korean Christian missionaries who have come once or twice.

“It’s as if the world forgot about us,” Najma said.

It was with such global forgetting—or inattention—in mind that I had designed a course titled, “The Other Crisis: Displacement and Migration across the Red Sea.” Conceived as a critique of the English-language media’s focus on the “European migrant crisis” of 2015/2016, “the other crisis” aimed to draw my students’ attention to migration to and from the Arabian Peninsula, where NYU Abu Dhabi is located. This was not simply a matter of “local” concern. Notably, in both 2018 and 2019, when I taught the course, the number of migrants and asylum seekers crossing the Red Sea to Yemen exceeded the number of migrants and asylum seekers crossing the Mediterranean Sea to Europe.Footnote 2 The majority of these migrants were Ethiopians and Somalis smuggled into and through Yemen en route to Saudi Arabia in search of work. At the same time, thousands of Yemenis and African refugees in Yemen were fleeing the war-torn country to seek refuge in, or transit through, the Horn of Africa. The most vulnerable of these Yemenis ended up in the Markazi refugee camp in Obock, northern Djibouti—within kilometers of the port and landings from where the Ethiopian migrants embark on their sea crossings to Yemen.Footnote 3

Having conducted preliminary ethnographic research with Somali refugees in Yemen in the early 2000s, I became alarmed by the news of Yemenis seeking refuge in the Horn of Africa following the outbreak of the Yemen war in 2015. A year later, I began visiting Markazi regularly to interview the refugees from Yemen. At the outset, and with the support of the Akkasah Center for Photography at NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), I collaborated with the photographer Nadia Benchallal to document the Yemeni refugees’ experience visually as well as ethnographically.Footnote 4 During our first visits, Nadia walked from tent to tent, organizing and taking family portraits while I conducted interviews. Often, we worked side by side, Nadia gathering the household together for a portrait before or after I asked its members about their life histories and migratory pathways. Together, we explained the academic nature and intent of the project; we also explained, repeatedly, that neither of us had ties to any government or resettlement program, and that our project would not help them directly. Many refugees we spoke to expressed their own frustration at the lack of sustained global media attention to Yemen, agreeing with journalists and human rights organizations who characterized the war and humanitarian crisis in Yemen as “the world’s forgotten war.” Therefore, our project to document the camp was comprehended and even welcomed by most of the people we encountered. It may have helped that we strove to give each household a large, laminated print of their portrait during our subsequent visits to the camp, failing to do so only in cases when the families had moved elsewhere. Some of these prints are still displayed in their homes today.

It also helped that we soon extended the collaborative scope of the project by inviting nine individuals to document their day-to-day camp life and experiences over the course of a year.Footnote 5 Aiming for a representative group, we gave compact cameras to at least one woman and one man from each of the camp’s four residential sections, and to individuals from various geographical areas and socioeconomic backgrounds. Initially, our desire for diversity and inclusion created misunderstandings, for many other refugees requested cameras and challenged the basis of our selection. For example, several section leaders and even the Djiboutian guards questioned why we had given cameras to a supposedly delinquent young man and other overtly marginalized individuals, instead of to them. In order to protect the photographers as much as the project, we warned our collaborators that this should not be an exposé of camp corruption, but a narrative of their daily lives. In January, March, and October 2017, Nadia held workshops in which she gave the group basic training in photography while also meeting individually with participants to encourage them to develop a particular focus: a visual voice. Thus, as the project advanced, it became clear to the participants and the rest of the refugees that the cameras were not simply a gift, but also a responsibility. This very visible collaboration—manifest in the first exhibit of participants’ work in the camp, open to all the refugees, before a public exhibition—underscored our documentary and educational objectives (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1
A photograph of a workshop on photography. A woman talks to the six participants.

Nadia Benchallal running a workshop on photography with the project participants. Obock, Djibouti. (Source: Nathalie Peutz, 2017)

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In this context, after the initial year of ethnographic fieldwork and photographic collaboration, it seemed feasible to bring undergraduate students to the camp. I am privileged to work at a university that offers its students a three-week January term dedicated to intensive, immersive, and experiential courses, many with a “regional seminar” component. I wanted to teach a course on forced migration and proposed that a ten-day visit to Djibouti (with seven full days in the camp) would allow us to explore the roots and development of this particular “crisis,” the centuries-long interconnections between communities straddling the Red Sea, and the politics and ethics of humanitarian interventions and visual documentation. When the course was approved, I was as nervous as I was excited. I had never before had the opportunity to integrate my teaching and research to this extent. It seemed clear that the students would benefit. Less certain was how these young students’ engagements and behaviors would affect the refugees, or even my own ongoing fieldwork.

The course was scheduled to meet three hours a day, with each day’s coursework being the equivalent of a week’s learning during a regular semester. During the first three days on campus in Abu Dhabi (four days in 2019), we prepared for the trip by reading and discussing historical and ethnographic literature on refugees and displacement in the twentieth-century Middle East, on historical connections between Yemen and the Horn of Africa, on the contemporary situation in Yemen, and on Djibouti as a migratory crossroads. A Public Information Officer for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Yemen met with our class virtually to give students an official overview of the humanitarian situation in Yemen. After these three or four days (“weeks”) of preparatory coursework, we flew to Djibouti city, where we met the director of Djibouti’s Office National d’Assistance aux Réfugiés et Sinistrés (ONARS) and received a short lecture about the establishment of this government refugee agency dating back to the country’s independence in 1977. This was followed by a historical walking tour of the city by a geography professor Dr. Moustapha Nour Ayeh from the University of Djibouti. The next day, we visited Ali Addeh, one of Djibouti’s oldest refugee camps, where the students were met by Somali, Ethiopian, and Eritrean refugees who each spoke about the conflicts in their respective countries.Footnote 6

Thus, on the sixth day (“week”) of the semester, we traveled north to Obock, where we stayed in a basic lodge and spent the following week visiting the Markazi camp every morning and afternoon. There, during a “typical” day, students learned about camp life in the mornings: meeting with UNHCR and ONARS officers, shadowing the refugee employees of humanitarian organizations, and assisting with food distribution, among other tasks. Each noon, we returned to our hotel for lunch, followed by a classroom-style academic seminar in which we discussed the assigned readings in light of our observations in the camp. Then, during the afternoon camp visits, the students offered their own lessons and activities, in return: teaching English and French, playing sports with teens and young children, teaching guitar scales, and engaging in crafts. These days ended with dinner at the hotel and a study period for reading and journaling—at least, in theory (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2
A photograph. A man assists a woman in learning. A boy and a girl sit beside the woman.

An NYUAD student from Egypt teaches English to young students. Obock, Djibouti. (Source: Nadia Benchallal, 2018)

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What really happened, both in 2018 and in 2019, is that the Yemeni refugees I had come to know insisted on inviting the students to their homes for lunches, dinners, and tea. They also organized and invited the students to various social events (some in 2018, some in 2019): a welcome party upon their arrival, a birthday party for one of their daughters, a henna party for the women, a beach day for the men, an outing to a nearby riverbed, and a dance party the night before our departure.

In other words, the refugees converted what I had planned as a fairly sober course (with far too much reading) into intimate, social encounters: ones in which the refugees were not the subjects of our lessons, but our teachers and hosts. Indeed, many of the refugees the students met embraced either or both of these roles. For example, a former activist in Yemen educated the students on the specific rights afforded to refugees by the 1951 Refugee Convention, while an elderly shopkeeper was keen to share his life story as a way of instructing young students how abruptly one’s life circumstances can change. Meanwhile, the women turned their monthly rice, oil, and sugar rations into veritable Yemeni feasts. (I insisted on paying our hosts for these meals, despite their repeated refusals.) If these class visits were productive, it was precisely because our hosts took charge of many, if not most, of our activities in the camp, transforming my students from would-be “voluntourists”—ostensibly “helping” the refugees—into teachable “guests” (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3
A photograph of the hospitality in the camp. Many people sit together on the floor and have food. A variety of food is placed before them.

Hospitality in the camp. Obock, Djibouti. (Source: Nathalie Peutz, 2019)

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Three and four years later, it was the Yemenis’ hospitality, graciousness, and dignity that seem to have stayed with my students the most. Shortly after my recent conversations with Heba and Najma—and having received an impromptu email from a former student describing her J-term course four years earlier as “one of the most unforgettable experiences of my life”—I reached out to the rest of my J-term 2018 and 2019 students, asking them to reflect on their Markazi visit. Of the fourteen students who responded (out of twenty-nine students in my two coursesFootnote 7), twelve recalled how generous and welcoming our hosts had been. Several mentioned specific incidents and individuals—for example, “I remember very clearly the face of the man with his own museum, the man who invited us to his house for tea and a welcome speech, the man with the guitar, the woman who did my beautiful henna, the birthday girl, the girl who built pebble houses with me on the dusty ground of the camp, the girl who raced me and hurt her toe, the boy who shared a chocolate cookie with me”—and cited the connections they made and maintained for some time via social media. At least one of the students remains in regular contact with two of the refugees they met four years ago (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4
A photograph of 5 people. Four of them have a guitar while two try to play it. A boy who does not have a guitar looks at others.

An NYUAD student from New Zealand being taught Arabic guitar scales. Obock, Djibouti. (Source: Nadia Benchallal, 2018)

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Many students noted how this course had altered their preconceived notions of refugees and their views on migration: “I think what has stayed with me the most is how complicated everything relating to refugees and forced migration is”; “what has stuck with me is not only the unfairness [of their situation], but just how easy it is for all of us to ignore suffering;” “I became especially sensitized to the narratives of a ‘deserving’ refugee, when people would justify why letting somebody in is okay while others is not, using meritocratic reasoning;” “I had studied migration a lot in high school but my understanding was dry and theoretical. Now I see migration as a basic right;” “I am now for open borders and global free movement of peoples.” Arguably—and as this very essay collection demonstrates—many of these “lessons” could be learned by other means, without having to bring already-privileged college students to a refugee camp. But what these intimate encounters brought home to my students was the recognition that “refugees”—like themselves—are not a homogenous group. “People differed in their hopes and desires and skills and personalities and stories as much as anyone else, anywhere else. It should not take a visit to a refugee camp for people to understand that there is no difference between refugees and everyone else, and rationally, I knew this before, but the experience in Markazi made the understanding visceral,” wrote one student. “I quickly realized that, like any other group of people, the residents of Markazi were quite internally diverse. People held vastly different values, education levels, degrees of religiosity, and conceptions of what it means to be a refugee. I realized that being a refugee is more of a descriptor of a state of a given individual at a given point in time, and not a defining feature of one’s identity,” wrote another. It was this simple realization—that “Arab and/or Muslim refugees” are not a monolithic group, as one student wrote—that softened my Turkish student’s self-described “biased” views on Syrian migrants in his country and that made my South Korean student “more emotionally involved when defending refugee resettlement in Korea, especially when Yemeni refugees came to Jeju Island in the summer of 2018.”Footnote 8

The exceptionally diverse backgrounds of NYU Abu Dhabi’s students brought additional moments of mutual recognition to the fore. (The twenty-nine students I brought to Markazi in 2018 and 2019 came from the following twenty-five countries: Afghanistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, China, Egypt, El Salvador, Finland, Hungary, India, Jordan, Lebanon, Malaysia, Morocco, Nepal, New Zealand, Pakistan, Philippines, Poland, Slovakia, South Korea, Thailand, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and Yemen.) Although a man who invited each cohort of students to his outdoor “sitting room” joked about hosting “the United Nations,” it was not just a matter of national diversity on display. One Yemeni man with roots in India took pleasure in speaking Hindi to my student from India. A Yemeni man from Aden was delighted to meet a young woman from Sarajevo, where he had studied architecture several decades ago. He spent the week practicing his Bosnian with her, nostalgically reliving his student days (Fig. 5).

Fig. 5
A photograph. An elderly man and a girl walk on sandy land and laugh at each other. 2 children are spotted behind them.

A Yemeni refugee from Aden and an NYUAD student from Bosnia connect through shared languages. Obock, Djibouti. (Source: Nadia Benchallal, 2018)

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Some students were able to see themselves in the refugees, much as some refugees were able to see themselves in the students. For students with migration backgrounds, the connections were even more immediate and profound. Zara, a Somali woman from Finland, was confronted with her own experience as a child of refugees:

Despite the fact that my parents were refugees, I was incredibly ignorant of the spectrum of experiences that refugees can face outside the context of my family and immediate community. Going to Markazi was a much-needed awakening for me. Taking this class helped me to understand that a lot of migration policies thinly veil the host country’s xenophobia and/or are really exploitative and add to the disenfranchisement of migrants…. For almost a year after leaving Djibouti, I could not speak to anyone about the people I met there and the things I learned without crying. I was incredibly emotionally worn out by the end of the J-term class. I wish I had written more honestly [in my journals] about my internal struggle to negotiate my positionality as a Somali born to two refugee parents, coming to the camp from one of its major donor nations and conversing daily with people who look like me and have similar backgrounds, but starkly different positions.

Dina, a Yemeni woman who had grown up in the United Arab Emirates, wrote that the visit “forced me to face my own suppressed traumas, which I had actively avoided until then”:

Before going to Markazi and taking this course, I had very little knowledge about the political history of Yemen, despite being Yemeni myself. Growing up, the politics of Yemen were never openly discussed for fear of persecution. To me, Yemen and the Horn of Africa was a region where my father and his forefathers once lived. Many of my family members frequently told stories of their plight and journey back to Yemen from Somalia after the civil war broke out in the 1980s, but I had never paid their tales much attention, for that’s all they were to me: tales that were closer to fiction than they were to my reality of growing up in the UAE [United Arab Emirates]. In my efforts to integrate and belong into Emirati society, I had unconsciously set up a social distance to protect myself from associating myself with the term “refugee.” This distance which had shielded me for years was abruptly removed; I couldn’t escape myself in Markazi.

“Looking back on this now,” Dina continued, “I realize that [my visit to] Markazi was a turning point in my life that continues to shape my educational and professional trajectory.” The following year, Dina interned with an American Jewish NGO providing pro bono legal assistance to refugees in Lesvos, Greece. “Often, I found myself to be the only Arab volunteer in a space that was dominated by Western humanitarian workers and activists,” Dina wrote. “As I conducted preliminary screening interviews and prepared Arab, Afghan, and Somali refugees to undertake the eligibility interviews, my unmistakable Arab Muslim identity became a source of comfort to many.” Dina enrolled in courses on human rights law and international refugee law, eventually receiving her master’s degree in international relations. In addition to influencing her own career choices, the time she spent in the Markazi camp altered her self-perception. “Prior to Markazi, I was secretly ashamed of being Yemeni and believed it to be a misfortune of sorts. To be a Yemeni in the UAE (and the Gulf, even) was to be a second-class human being who is constantly viewed as ‘less than,’” Dina wrote.Footnote 9 “Now, I believe it to be my greatest asset as it has uniquely situated me as a multicultural mediator in every context.”

On our last full day in Djibouti in January 2018, we drove from Obock to Djibouti City, stopping for a quick dip in saline Lake Assal on our way south. Five of the photography project participants and some of their family members came with us, having received special permission to leave the camp. Together, we attended the opening night of an exhibit at the French Institute in Djibouti, featuring photographs taken by the refugees in Markazi. The French ambassador to Djibouti, various Djiboutian officials, and other dignitaries who attended the event mingled with the refugee-photographers, asking them about their work. On this evening, the students were peripheral, while the refugees were the honored guests. (A year later, a subset of these photographs was exhibited at Vassar College and Bennington College in partnership with the Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education. In 2020, three photographs taken by Khaled al-Maqtari, one of the project participants, were published in the multi-genre anthology, Voices on the Move: An Anthology by and about Refugees, edited by Domnica Radulescu and Roxana Cazan.)

Although the benefits of this and other kinds of experiential coursework to undergraduates are evident, it remains an open question—for me, and for the students—whether the refugees in Markazi “benefited” at all from these exchanges. Four years later, most of the refugees the students met are still stuck in the camp, feeling as hopeless and forgotten as ever. Many of my former students are aware of their extraordinary privilege, then and now. They still grapple, they say, with the “always already unequal relationship” between themselves and the camp refugees and with the fact that it was their “Bildung” that was front and center. “I became a better person, more humane, even more radical,” writes a student from Lebanon. “But what did they get in practice? I’m sure meeting was an enriching experience for them in various ways, but what I’m saying is this: I am a more sophisticated person and thinker thanks to this experience—i.e., there’s material gain for me (and us as students, researchers, etc.). But, for them, it’s hard to see how our visit changed anything.”

When I put the same question to the Yemeni man who had studied in Sarajevo, he specifically recalled the students from Bosnia, Poland, and Hungary. “I think the benefit was for them,” he said in English. “They got benefits from us, from our situation, but for us, we didn’t benefit.” But then he remembered the American who played football with the children: “When I saw that young American guy, I felt happy because he reminded me of that time of my youth, yes. That helped me. Nothing else.”

I then turned to ask the question of Heba’s sister, Munira, who had joined us. “Was there any benefit to you from this visit?” I asked.

“When they came here to visit, you mean?” Munira said. “We appreciate these actions. You understand? When someone visits the refugees… They would play football with the kids. They showed them things they didn’t know before.”

“Small things,” I suggested.

“For us, these were not small things,” Munira said. “[They were] big things! Small things, and big.”