Imagine that you're just 18, alone and friendless in an alien country. Your family is dead - you witnessed their murders two years ago, but managed to escape abroad. Living alone in a tiny bedsit, you're now struggling to put your life in order. You're attending a local school and in a few weeks' time you're scheduled to sit major exams - the foreign equivalent of Junior or Leaving Cert.
You're trying to study, but are never quite sure whether you will be able to sit the exams after all. Your application for refugee status may be turned down any day now and you'll be forced to move on. You've already been refused asylum once and your case is on appeal. You don't dare believe that you will be allowed to stay. What will you do? Where in the world will you go? You've no one to turn to for help.
"On the 15th March, 1997, rebels came to my house," says 18-year-old Landu Kulabutulu, who comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly Zaire. "They burst open the door and murdered my parents and raped my sister. I escaped through the window and ran to the church. The priest helped me to escape from the country."
Landu is now an asylum seeker in Ireland. At home, he was studying to be a motor mechanic, but here in Dublin, he's attending school and working for his Junior Cert exams. He's taking English, maths, French, music, religion and art. His mother tongue is Lingala - he knows only one person who speaks the dialect in Ireland - and his second language is French. His English, he admits, is relatively poor. "I understand English and I'm getting better at speaking it - my teacher says I'm improving," he says.
Last year, Landu suffered a racist attack. He was beaten up by a gang and had to have sixteen stitches in his head. Nonetheless, he firmly believes that there are "many good people in Ireland". Everybody at his school, St Joseph's CBS, Fairview, Dublin, "is very good, very helpful", he says. Teachers in Zaire are much more dictatorial than they are in Ireland. "They hit you with canes if you don't behave. Here teachers are very friendly - if people are talking they just say `please, be quiet'."
If Landu is granted refugee status, he would like to go to English classes for sixth months and then go to college to train to be a mechanic. Meanwhile, he is struggling with his Junior Cert. Does he study? "How can I study?" he asks. "I've too much to think about. I have too many problems. I've lost my parents. I don't think my life is worth living. It wouldn't matter if I was dead."
We're sitting in the basement offices of the Irish Refugee Council, Lower Dominick St, Dublin. Alongside us, Robert, an 18-year-old Liberian, is both poring over a physics'text book and intermittently contributing to the conversation. He nods sympathetically at Landu's outburst. "We need to know our lives are going to be all right," he says. "If I can't stay in Ireland, I don't know where I can go."
Robert was a witness to his father's murder when he was nine. Parentless, he tagged on to a group of people who travelled to Ghana to escape the civil strife in Liberia. Two years ago, he stowed away on a ship and ended up in Ireland. He started in fifth year at St Paul's CBS, North Brunswick Street, Dublin, in September 1997. "In the beginning, I found it hard to understand. I took notes and went home and read them and then I could understand," he recalls. This year, Robert hopes to sit the Leaving Cert Vocational exams. He's taking English, maths, physics, Italian, business organisation and art along with the link modules. At junior school in Ghana, he studied engineering and science. He likes technical subjects best, he says. In a perfect world, he'd like to become a marine engineer.
He did "OK" in the mocks, but, in reality, was disappointed with his results. "If I'm still here next year, I'd like to do them again," he comments. Like Landu, he finds getting down to study difficult. He, too, lives alone in a city centre bedsit. "I'm trying to study and work from 8pm to midnight most nights. But after school, I have to go shopping, cook and eat and do my homework. It takes a lot of time." He's clearly envious of other youngsters who have their meals handed to them. Without all the other pressures in his life, he'd be enjoying the study, he says. His constant frustration, though, is the thought that maybe it's all just a waste of time and that by the start of the exams, he'll be - God knows where. According to the Refugee Council, there are 32 separated children - that is unaccompanied minors who are seeking asylum - in Ireland. They come from a range of countries, including a number of African states,
Kosovo and Rumania. The youngest is 13. They are entitled to the full benefits of an Irish child, including free education, until they are 18. Unless they achieve refugee status, both Robert and Landu, who have turned 18, will be ineligible to receive education after this academic year.
"The children come from zones of extreme conflict," notes Sarah MacNiece, who is assistant co-ordinator of the Irish Refugee Council's legal unit. "Many have lost their parents or principal care-givers. The biggest problem facing this group of children is that they are completely alone, she says.
"Nobody is assigned to them to provide guidance or support. They have no legal guardians. Some of them go through legal procedures without the benefit of a guardian. They're interviewed alone by the Department of Justice. No legal representation is given to them when they come into the country."
The Irish Refugee Council is participating in the Irish arm of a Save the Children and UNHCR sponsored project entitled Separated Children in Europe. A report is to be produced on the issues facing separated children in Ireland including health, education, resettlement and interim and long term care.
Both Landu and Robert were educated in Catholic schools in Africa. There's more than a little irony in the fact that a number of young Africans seeking asylum in Ireland have come here largely as a result of their links with Irish missionaries. Many of them are Catholics or were educated in Catholic schools and have sought the help of local priests to escape. Ireland is proud of the work of its missionaries abroad, yet is prepared to do little in the way of offering a helping hand to young people seeking refuge here.
Many of the people, who are forced to seek asylum abroad, spend their lives wishing they were back at home with the families and friends they've left behind. These separated children, however, have no family or friends at home. Ireland is all they've got.
