Roger: a look back at the confinement at the Mon Refuge center in Togo

Here are a few lines on the experience of confinement at Mon Refuge

Last year for about two months, schools and all higher education institutions were closed because of Covid-19, in particular to prevent its spread in schools. And during this period, all children stayed at home.

In order to better control contacts with the outside world, all the young people from Djagblè's household were brought back to the Mon Refuge center with the exception of Joël who continued to go to his aluminum carpentry workshop. Schools were closed but not manual training workshops and markets.

For a month the road from Mon Refuge to Djagblè was barricaded by the military. And as a result, it was impossible to go and stock up on food at the Avèta market or in Lomé. I was forced to take detours via small bush paths to reach Avèta and Lomé. It felt like a war or a prison where you have to do gymnastics to find food.

The lockdown only concerned the period from 8am to 6am. This is the time period when no one was allowed to go out on the streets.

At Mon Refuge we cut off contact with the outside world. Only the staff team could go out to do shopping. We set up a hand washing point and made masks with tea towel papers for the children.

One of the difficulties was having the children at home all day long. Usually it's more from 12.30 p.m. This forced us to adapt by rotation since we were understaffed for a 24/24 control.

But the good side is that we took advantage of it to return to the fundamentals of group life, to work in the field instead of renting a tractor, to organize revisions in the hope of a resumption of classes this year, to discover that we have an open space to understand, to accept to step on each other's toes from time to time. It's true that it was complicated to manage the daily life but the experience of summer camps, where we have a larger group, helped us a lot.

Here, confinement rhymes with school closures and curfews, and so silence is not on the menu of discoveries at this time because 42 young people together all day long, they shout and run everywhere, they do stupid things. The smartest ones flee vigilance in the blink of an eye. We instead discover how to manage the excess of time and the boredom that creeps in from time to time.

We had been struggling to manage the catering for over a month but it is going much better.

This time of self-confinement is also experienced in fear of the risk that it will resume being so much in the same place. But we are aware that this is a moment that will pass but for now we keep smiling and the joy of living with a thought every day for all those who are affected by the virus.