4Camp Time

Suffering and Care in a Time without Telos

Libraries and Gardens

Berihu

“A graduate is living for three years, useless. After graduation, I returned to where I was—just sleeping and sitting,” Berihu told us. He wore a sharp dress shirt and invited us to drink chilled soda in the shade of woven reed mats in front of a restaurant he had recently opened. After graduating at the top of his class through the university scholarship program two years earlier, he found himself back at the camp, subsisting on rations and incentive pay (about forty dollars a month) for his work as a volunteer teacher at the camp primary school. He lived at the far edge of the camp, where the dirt roads and houses were surrounded by a landscape of reddish earth, grasses, and grazing cattle. Berihu reflected on his struggle to remain hopeful while stuck at the camp facing an uncertain future. He described a period when he had stopped acting like a teacher. He would show up for class late, unbathed, in casual clothes. Teaching for incentive pay, he explained, “is killing time. It is all about how to kill time,” and that is “demoralizing.” After all, he says, “You need to eat to live, not live to eat.”

He eventually righted himself, thanks in no small part to caring for others and the land. In addition to his teaching position, he started working with other refugee college students to design education programs that would encourage youth to stay in school and avoid secondary migration. “If you support somebody, you feel proud,” he said, mentioning repeatedly, “It makes your mind rest.”

Berihu was also trying his hand at farming. He took us around the back to see his new garden. He had spent tremendous effort digging rocks out of the soil behind his house, and over the course of a week, he had excavated a pit filled with rocks, some as large as boulders. He was cheerful and undeterred by the momentous task and proud of the progress he had made. But he also said he was farming the land without permission and faced the risk of the camp administration pushing him out at any time. Similarly, when he expanded his home to build the restaurant, Administration for Refugee and Returnee Affairs (ARRA) representatives told him he could not continue, but he risked building it anyway. Although it was still just red earth and rock, Berihu told us the garden “is what makes his place special.” As we admired his work, a local Ethiopian man from a nearby village approached to ask for money for his sick child. Berihu pulled Ethiopian bills from his pocket without hesitation. Local people often asked him for help here, he explained, assuming because of his appearance that he was in a position to assist them.

But despite—or perhaps because of—his efforts to care for the land, the children in the refugee camp, and even his Ethiopian neighbors in the host community, Berihu was keenly aware of his precarious future. He told us that most refugees were reluctant to invest time and money into long-term projects because of instability and not knowing the future: “What refugees are feeling is we don’t know where we are. Will we go forwards or backwards? They are worrying about that, and since they are worrying, they don’t want to do anything. If I get out after one year, I will not see the profit from my business.”

Andebrhan

Andebrhan had been a science teacher before leaving Eritrea. His English was excellent, and he had hoped to pass the matriculation exam and attend a university in Ethiopia. He had a mother and younger sibling in Addis. They had avoided deportation during the border conflict because his mother was caring for his critically ill father. But Andebrhan had been deported as a child to Eritrea, where, like so many others, he was forced into military training and endless government service. When he returned to Ethiopia as a refugee, he stayed with his mother for a short time before returning to the camp in an attempt to continue his education and prepare for the matriculation exam. Andebrhan suffered from memories of the deportation and separation from his family, and his relationship with them was strained. Unfortunately, Andebrhan failed the matriculation exam and was told that he was not allowed to take it again, dashing his hopes.

Recognizing his skills, the local branch of an international nongovernmental organization (INGO) asked him to run a new camp library—a resource room with Ethiopian textbooks and some shelves of fiction written in English and Amharic. Andebrhan lived in a small room adjoining the library. He made us tea over a charcoal burner and told us about his daily work there, which began as early as 6:00 a.m. on days when the water was not working, because he would open the library for people to gather and kill time while they waited for the nearby tap to turn on. Andebrhan kept a meticulous log of books that were loaned out and a box of ration cards that were held until the books were returned. He had constructed an additional shelf for scrap materials and decorated the space with inspirational phrases in flowing English letters: “Trust yourself. You survived a lot, and you will survive whatever is coming.” Mostly, though, only a handful of people trickled in to borrow books throughout the day, and he faced long stretches of empty time. He seemed hopeful and determined, even though he was struggling with a recurrent bout of malaria and chronic pain in his leg from a botched injection he had received when he was serving in Eritrea, a time that he referred to repeatedly as “in my previous life.”

Fig. 4.1. Sign in refugee camp library. Photo by Amanda Poole.

Fig. 4.2. Sign in refugee camp library. Photo by Amanda Poole.

Fig. 4.3. Refugee camp library. Photo by Amanda Poole.

The present was also a challenge for Andebrhan. Working and living alone for two years at the library was difficult. He said he was lonely and could not stop himself from drinking. The low pay and lack of educational opportunities also got to him. Not knowing the incentive scale, the INGO that employed him had paid him well until other organizations learned about his salary; the INGO was then forced to reduce it by nearly half, which was demoralizing and made him feel like he was going backward. Andebrhan ended up getting fired from his position after he got drunk during work hours and talked poorly of the INGO’s partners—UNHCR and ARRA. He complained publicly that ARRA workers were paid so much more than refugees, and word got to the camp administrator, which looked bad for the INGO. Andebrhan said it was the stress that drove him to do it and that it was his own fault he lost what he called “a special job.”

Temporal Suffering and Caretaking

Both Berihu’s and Andebrhan’s experiences illuminate the intertwined relationship between what we call temporal caretaking and a kind of temporal suffering associated with living in the camp. What is special about Berihu’s garden and Andebrhan’s library is that they are places imbued with care. Caretaking clearly lent meaning to otherwise devastating circumstances; as Berihu noted, helping others “makes your mind rest.” But caretaking is also a constant reminder of the emptiness of time and of the interminable present that is the humanitarian condition. The small library that Andebrhan cared so much for became something that caused him harm, amplifying his isolation and sense of stagnation. The garden became a source of food and pride for Berihu, but at the same time, it served as a constant reminder of how he did not belong, had no control over the place where he was living, and his hard work could at any moment be rendered purposeless, draw attention to his illegal efforts, and cost him his business. Care for place is palliative but also amplifies the precarity and potential temporariness of any endeavor in the refugee camp.

In refugee studies, attachment to place is often investigated as an index of belonging. Place-making is seen as an agentive way that refugees connect to communities of asylum and resettlement (Brun 2001; Eckenwiler 2016; Hammond 2004; Vasey 2011). Therapeutic landscapes can become a source of healing in the context of resettled refugee youth (Sampson and Gifford 2010; Townsend and Pascal 2012) and other migrant communities negotiating the meaning of home and health (Dyck and Dossa 2007). There is a kind of future orientation in thinking about place as a crucible for healing past wounds, building something new, and moving forward and onward. Certainly, caring for these places served as a kind of balm for Andebrhan and Berihu, who spent their time in ways that avoided the grinding boredom of the camp—a boredom that eroded well-being, a sense of purpose, and hope. However, we argue that these acts of caretaking are more temporal than spatial and far more about the present than the future.

Refugees engage in processes of caretaking (for their community and for themselves) that might appear or be designed to produce a sense of belonging and permanence. However, when these forms of caretaking are examined through a temporal rather than a spatial lens, they are revealed to be inherently temporary. Rather than building enduring ties to place, they are focused on caring for the present. Temporal caretaking, we argue, is one way that refugees take agency over time—by giving meaning to the present in the context of permanent temporariness. Ultimately, however, these efforts at agency generate the very harm they are designed to alleviate.

The experience of indefinite temporariness is directly linked to forms of temporal suffering. Time often can be experienced as painful. Bruce O’Neill has argued that boredom is a “traumatized structure of feeling” (O’Neill 2014) endured by people living in conditions of deep material and social precarity. Similarly, the stress and despair accompanying empty time in the camps can be understood as a form of temporal suffering. Waiting is possibly one of the most troubling forms of temporal suffering for refugees, as it evokes ideas of progress and presupposes the notion that life will get better while enforcing a temporal and spatial containment in the endless present of the camp. Temporal suffering is an experience that is intimately intertwined with caretaking.¹

Refugees themselves clearly and consistently describe the chronic stress generated by life in the camp as traumatizing. This is partly what drives people to risk their lives in irregular migration but also what triggers malaise, depression, despair, and addiction. A growing body of research on the mental health of refugees shows that trauma results not just from preflight experiences; symptoms of trauma are also linked to postmigration stressors and worsen with the length of time that refugees spend in detention (Getnet et al. 2019; Miller and Rasmussen 2017). For Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia, a recent study suggests that symptoms of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder are closely related to the length of time spent in the camps. Berhanie Getnet, Girmay Medhin, and Ataley Alem (2019) speculate that this is caused by the persistence of stressors such as limited resources and meager support, the likelihood of being exposed to traumatic events in the camp, and a loss of hope, all of which erode coping strategies. Recovery and mental health are not simply an individual matter; they depend on environmental and social factors, and negative conditions can lead to worry, anxiety, and a sense of personal inadequacy. Similarly, Nancy Farwell found that the ability of Eritrean youth in the aftermath of the liberation struggle to heal and recover from trauma was directly linked to their access to economic necessities and social support (2001).

Temporal harm is traumatic because it links very real material precarity to the drudgery of the chronic present and the sense of time passing by. It is an experience of trauma that can be thought of not as the outcome of a dramatic singular event in the past but as a process that unfolds in particular contexts—“trauma-as-ongoing-lived-experience” (Lester 2013). In the anthropological literature, trauma is caused by events or situations that push people to the edge of their existence, stretching or tearing “the bonds that tether a person to the everyday world” (Lester 2013). A focus on trauma can help illuminate “the social and cultural processes through which some experiences are recognized as ‘traumatic’ and others are not, what this reveals about local understandings of moral responsibility, and the pathways by which recovery is imagined” (Lester 2013).² Temporal harm helps to illuminate how refugees are not defined by past trauma so much as they experience an unfolding trauma caused by humanitarian care/containment in the present.

People seek to find their footing, make their way back, and “retether” the world through practices that are culturally meaningful. There is agency here, not just victimhood. Indeed, in the context of “waiting” and painful boredom, people create culture, ideas germinate, and caretaking occurs (Janeja and Bandak 2018; Jeffrey 2010; Khosravi 2017). In the context of temporal suffering, refugees imagine pathways of recovery and retether the world through acts of caretaking for themselves and others. We argue here that these acts of caretaking are central to how refugees wait hopefully and take agency over time. In this chapter, we explore how time in the camps is traumatizing but then look at the agency and ambiguity of caretaking practices, focusing on small businesses, incentive work, child tutoring programs, and a grassroots mental health project. These practices do not supplant the unfolding trauma of temporal suffering, but they make the interminable present more livable.

As we develop these concepts, we refer to the stories of Andebrhan, Berihu, and other refugees, ultimately arguing that both the programming oriented at giving refugees something to do and their own efforts to improve their communities are palliative forms of time-making by which they resist and attempt to heal from temporal harm. Ultimately, however, even as temporal caretaking is essential for refugees’ well-being, it still operates as a facet of prolonged suffering.

Waiting

Berhane understood the political operation of waiting. One year after we met him, he was elected to the position of refugee camp coordinator in one of the camps in the Tigray region. He described this as a demanding position that placed him in the lower rungs of a long bureaucratic chain that other refugees had to pass through to access such resources as replacement ration cards and the pass permits allowing them to travel out of the camp. When he described his role, it was with a dry humor; he was a leader, yes—a leader in unpaid work. One of the afternoons we spent with him, this work entailed a visit to his office, a small room in a long structure built from corrugated metal. It contained two desks, thin wood benches, and dog-eared notebooks that recorded the activities of the office in precise writing in the Geez alphabet. Though he had only planned to stop in and leave quickly, when people noticed the door open, the line began—a long line. People arrived bearing papers with the ubiquitous series of stamps from one layer of authority to the next.

Berhane admitted that he hated his job and the incessant line of people seeking his signature. “It is very disturbing,” he said. “So many people cry.” He shared the story of a woman who had recently come to him in tears, asking for help after her rations were stolen in the night. He signed the request for replacement rations, but he knew that ARRA would do nothing to help her. Although he often felt upset, he explained that he had no power to help them—no power, he said, to even help himself. Pass permits were also restricted to those who “participate,” and they were doled out by neighborhood. It was often impossible, he said, for a married couple to get passes to travel together in this system. Although he signed these requests, they ultimately went to ARRA for approval, requiring another period of waiting for the permission to be approved or denied.

Bureaucracies of care relegate refugees to a painful position of waiting for things beyond their control. This is not unique to humanitarian aid. Making people wait is an exertion of power, an assertion that some people’s time is less valuable than others’ (Khosravi 2017). And keeping people waiting without losing hope has “been part of the mechanism of domination” (Khosravi 2017, 79), a technique of statecraft that produces dependent subjects, or what Javier Auyero refers to as “patients of the state” (Auyero 2012). Lines of migrants waiting, Shahram Khosravi argues, are a paradigm of our times, reminding people of their place in a racial hierarchy (2021).³ As such, waiting as a technology of power characterizes the management of refugees, even when it conscripts the refugees themselves into these bureaucratic positions, providing a semblance of local governance that operates to create more waiting. When migrants are kept waiting, their time is being wasted; in a sense, it is stolen in the way that “wastelands” were appropriated under older forms of colonialism (Khosravi 2019).

The bureaucracy of humanitarian care also consumes time and is one of the primary ways the “endless present” is constructed (Dunn 2017). These bureaucratic processes are designed around the assumption that refugees have a lot of time. However, waiting devours refugees’ ability to be in control of their own time. Getting the rations needed for survival can involve spending days each month waiting in line, with no provision for students who are frequently forced to miss class. Refugee students explain that the lengthy resettlement process through UNHCR involves “long lines” and “no consideration” for school schedules. “I am living alone,” one tenth-grade student remarked. “I have something to process with the UNHCR. No one will do this for me. I try to work, feed myself. And I spend five working days as a student.” Similar accounts emerge from those refugees in the out-of-camp program, most of whom describe the difficulties dealing with UNHCR, including long lines and a lack of respect. As one man noted, “Going one day, to be turned back and told to come the next day, and when you return, they turn you away again. They expect that refugees don’t have a life. But we are trying to build a life here.”

Refugees are ostensibly protected subjects but often lack the legal rights to movement and work that citizens have. In exchange, they are provided with aid, shelter, and care that are often inadequate, leaving them in overcrowded conditions, hungry, sick, and, in some cases, susceptible to violence (Agier 2011; Betts and Collier 2017). Humanitarianism thus holds refugees, who typically lack legal status and the right to work in their host country, in a condition of stasis—unprotected from precarity and constrained by the very machinery of humanitarianism that seeks to care for them. Elizabeth Cullen Dunn (2017) argues that the temporal harm experienced by displaced people in camps emerges from refugees being reduced to a technical problem to be addressed through bureaucratic control—an aspect of the depersonalizing and depoliticizing logic of humanitarianism. In the humanitarian logic of depoliticized care, the lack of respect for refugees’ time corresponds to a lack of appreciation for their complex and contextualized lives and futures (Brun 2016). Humanitarian aid keeps refugees alive, barely (Redfield 2005). Cuts in rations combined with inflation mean that refugees struggle to survive on their aid allotment and must constantly seek out means to supplement their income.

We can think of waiting as a mechanism through which structural forms of violence create uncertainty and precarity for refugees.⁴ They are stuck waiting for things they need to survive, not knowing when or if they will appear. As such, their dependent position is reinforced, as is their feeling of being temporary (guests rather than citizens). At the same time, it is important to keep in mind that structural violence is backed up by the brute threat of force by the state. As we described in the last chapter, when refugees organized to protest their conditions, they were quickly and violently subdued by Ethiopian military. Yet these more direct threats of violence are hidden by bureaucratized governance, which also renders the effects of this violence on refugees’ lives and well-being far less visible, as they are ostensibly “cared for” by actors and institutions in the constellation of the humanitarian aid industry.

Being Stuck While Time Moves On

There is a heavy silence around the topic of time in the refugee camps. During one of our early visits to the camps, we took refuge from a thunderstorm in the home of a woman named Trhas. We came to know her well over the course of three years, but that afternoon, we quickly learned that time was not a subject of small talk. We asked how long Trhas had been in the camp, and her reply was brusque: ten years, almost as long as the camp had existed. A heavy silence followed this statement, during which no one seemed to want to meet each other’s eyes. Trhas’s adopted niece hugged her legs against the cold and rocked back and forth in a thin sweatshirt. Trhas’s small children, born and growing up in the camp, snuggled close to her as the rain pounded the tin roof. Refugees do not come to camps to have children and settle down. But as they feel the pressure of time, many do have families. Growing children become an index of passing time.

While waiting for the rain to end, Jennifer, whose husband is Eritrean, pulled out her phone and shared pictures with Trhas. “Shukor,” Trhas muttered as she scrolled through pictures of children in America only a few years older than her own. “Ma’ar.” “Sugar” and “honey,” she said admiringly. Although sharing pictures was often a way to get to know each other, in this particular moment, seeing Trhas and her children, who were stuck in a refugee camp, gazing at the pictures of Jennifer’s half-Eritrean children, who were growing up in America, threw the constraints of the humanitarian condition into sharp relief. Some refugees called our attention to these constraints. While sharing lunch with another refugee, we noticed a small tricycle at the door to his house. Unthinkingly, Jennifer made what she thought was a rote comment on the boy’s new toy, saying, “What a lucky boy.”

“He is not lucky,” our host said sharply, “to grow up in a refugee camp.”

These anecdotes illuminate the problems with the present and its relationship with care in refugee life and particularly the camps. The condition of feeling stuck is not a simple or straightforward one. As Catherine Brun (2016) observes, there is always some movement in people’s lives. In the camp, children are born and grow. Resettlement opportunities trapped “in process” for years suddenly and fantastically appear. Some decide to leave illegally. Yet the never-ending present, a constant sense of precarity, and an enduring temporariness constitute defining features of what we call camp time.

Camp time, as we pointed out earlier, is produced by a particular teleological temporality oriented around the notion of progress and time marching incrementally forward. Within this configuration of space and time, space can be thought of as both enabling and preventing forward movement, indicative of the presence of progress or its absence. The camp is described as a space of constraint where refugees are held back. The hallmark of the camp is “empty time,” which is often described as a product of humanitarian care and control but is simultaneously experienced by refugees as a space-time that cuts them off from the future and from teleological notions of progress (Allan 2013; Dunn 2017). As Dunn notes, “Camps . . . are engines that produce longing, inactivity and anxiety”; they are spaces of “nothingness” that are “not just the result of violence, but also the result of care” (2017, 111). Empty time, during which refugees are kept busy with activities oriented toward their survival, converges with bureaucratic activities to serve as a constant reminder of refugees’ inability to have any control over the future.

For many refugees, empty time is painful because they are unable to assume social and familial responsibilities that would allow them to progress to adulthood. Young refugees grapple with the “intolerable pressure of having nothing to do” (Allan 2013) in spaces of long-term humanitarian confinement from which there is no clear pathway out. Empty time thus exists as a specter to be feared. Camp time can erode and absorb efforts to avoid it, particularly the longer people remain in the camp. As such, tending to the library or garden, running small businesses, and even the act of raising children come to be described as temporary ways that people care for themselves and survive in the face of the empty space-time of the camp.

The Trauma of the Empty Present

One of the primary symbols of empty time in the refugee camps in northern Ethiopia are youth who drop out of school and become idle, often drinking. On walks through the camp or while sitting at cafés, our interlocutors would almost always reference these young drinkers as being emblematic of being stuck. Aster, a young woman who left the camps shortly after arriving in the country, noted, “There are so many people who just sit around all the time drinking in the camp. Sometimes they fight.” Aster explained how the excess of time in the camp was distressing and dangerous and was something she was glad to leave behind when she joined extended family in Addis Ababa. Similarly, a long-term resident of Hitsats camp described new arrivals: “They are just enjoying in the bars. We were all like that at first.” However, he also described his fear of falling back into such behavior and said that people sometimes returned to the pattern of drinking all day if they heard bad news, if a business failed, or if the endless waiting just finally got to them. In Mai Aini, a long-term camp resident observed that all but a few of the young people were in bars instead of schools or even camp programs like sports or vocational training and attributed it to the temporality of the camp: “Being in the camp, idle, without any work, is the result of this harsh situation. We are spending our time waiting for changes. We are not able to create changes by ourselves. Everyone is waiting for changes.” In Hitsats camp, another man explained that the idleness and the loneliness were both oppressive. He shared a room with eight strangers from different parts of Eritrea. “They are drunkards,” he said. “Rather than studying or trying to develop themselves, they drink.” Another young woman, newly arrived to Hitsats camp, shared that the stress related to this empty time was keenly experienced by her roommates, who, unlike herself, did not have the option of living with family members in Addis or the preparation needed to attend college in Ethiopia. “They are emotional wrecks,” she shared.

The concern with slipping into empty time relates to the inability of individuals to remain hopeful in the face of precarity. Precarity may be caused by social abandonment, exclusion from work, or an inability to connect the present to a desired future (Allison 2016; Khosravi 2017). As such, precarity exists on material, social, and existential levels and entails the unequal distribution of vulnerability and hope. Precarity produces a gap between “a sense of the actual and a sense of the possible” (Treiber 2014, 132). For those displaced by conflict and living under protracted humanitarian care, precarity is not just uncertainty about the future; it amounts to what Dunn describes as an “existential instability”: “It is a risk that whatever fragile structures of meaning, whatever frail networks of sociality and sense that are built up, might be exploded in an instant” (Dunn 2017, 196). If we understand the fragility of sociality and indeed everything that refugees attempt to build in the camp, we can see why caretaking is only ever a temporary strategy.

Refugees often actively work to get unstuck but then experience the anxiety of falling back into a temporal stasis (Brun 2016). They experience this as a form of temporal suffering because they do not control their lives, mistrust entities that govern them, and fear for their survival (El-Shaarawi 2015). They are left to wait for the resources they need to survive without knowing if and when those resources will materialize. Our interviewees frequently voiced anxieties about further cuts to rations they depended on for survival and fears that relations between Ethiopia and Eritrea would shift, making them vulnerable to political violence.

Andebrhan, who we introduced at the beginning of this chapter, embodied the dangers of empty time as well as alcoholism. His efforts, like those of many of the young people in the camps, demonstrated how people attempt to care for the present by finding meaningful work, opening a business, or starting a family. These activities give people’s daily lives a veneer of normalcy in the face of the endless empty present, but none of it is permanent, and none of it actually creates an attachment to place in the way refugees imagine wanting to be attached to a place. The trauma of protracted time and displacement often overtakes efforts to give the present meaning.

The Fullness of Empty Time

Empty time, however, does not mean that refugees have nothing to do. Instead, time is experienced as oppressively consuming. In the camps in northern Ethiopia, the excess of empty time and the painful boredom of the camp were also linked to activities that usurped time without filling it meaningfully. Survival in the camp was tremendously time-consuming and often entailed waiting in long lines to collect water or rations or to acquire firewood. Brikti, a young woman who was enrolled in Hitsats camp as a ninth-grade student, explained, “For me, living with my parents, I don’t have a problem. But from my observation in the camp, people who live alone have to care for themselves.” She explained why it was difficult for people who don’t have families to attend school and complete chores. “Fetching water [before] going to school, [we need] to do all household activity first. When they come it is midday.” At other times, she explained, if the water supply is disrupted, students miss school altogether.

Brikti also pointed out the gendered nature of these tasks, explaining that it was more difficult for men, who were not used to cooking, a task that is often done by women. Young men who we interviewed frequently noted that mundane chores were a burden that ate away at their time and prevented them from attending classes regularly. In a focus group of refugee college graduates, all of them men, one joked that he had no time to do anything since he was cooking and doing work like a woman. As he made his point, he gestured toward the woman who had silently made us three rounds of coffee, served with sugar in small espresso cups, from a stool in the corner of the café. The gendered nature of domestic labor is meaningful in a cultural and historical context. The traditional subordinate role of women in Eritrean society was challenged during the independence struggle, when 30 percent of the guerrilla fighters were women. While the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), the leading guerrilla movement, promoted the status of women, it did not challenge the low status of their labor (Bernal 2000). Cooking and washing were assigned as punishments for male and female soldiers alike, and Eritrean women fighters struggled with a return to civilian life after the end of the conflict, when they were expected to resume these domestic tasks. While the endless lines for inadequate resources made daily tasks of survival more protracted and less predictable for everyone in the camps, it was a further burden because the camps were heavily populated by young people—mostly men—who had come without their families. These tasks were untethered from the work of creating sociality and family life and instead reinforced the endless time of living without progress in the present and with an uncertain future.

In the Georgian internally displaced person (IDP) camps researched by Dunn (2017), long-term IDPs came to attribute stress and trauma not to war but to the “daily, non-eventful conditions of life constructed by humanitarian aid” that they experienced as both constricting and degrading. She argues that camps are “a zone of temporal indistinction between permanence and transience that leaves displaced people in a state of waiting and stasis” (Dunn 2017, 111). This “chronic present,” she asserts, is not static and unchanging; “rather, it is characterized by a slow, grinding decline” (2017, 128). In Ethiopia, this facet of camp time was strongly present in stories of youth who felt the possibilities for their lives were slowly dying. One man, who had worked as an engineer and innovator in Eritrea before fleeing to Ethiopia, mused, “My golden years are passing here.”

This sense of decline is also illustrated by Semere’s story. When we met with Semere for tea at one of the camps, he had been living there for the past four years without options for employment, despite having graduated near the top of his class from a university in Ethiopia. He described spending his time “with routine, with daily actions.” He explained, “We have no future plan, because we are a refugee.” He associated empty time with a crisis of hope that could lead to migration and the risk of death: “We have hopes. But you know if you stay a long time in the camp, that hope may evacuate. We cannot give up. Life may change. The only hope we have is if we get a chance out of the camp, legally through the resettlement process or even illegally by crossing borders to other countries like Sudan. But as refugees inside the camp, you can do nothing. Our hope is finishing.”

What makes refugees temporally suffer in the camp is not just boredom or having nothing (or nothing meaningful) to do, it is the sense of time passing them by. Teleological notions of progress bring time in the space of the camp into relief. In the face of desires, expectations, and hopes for progress, time in the camp thickens, weighing down the efforts of refugees to move forward or even to stay afloat. As such, the temporality inherent in Habtom’s statement “We are like animals,” discussed in the introduction, is illuminated by what Dunn calls “the suspended temporality of absolute zero” (Habtom and Ruys 2017, 113) experienced as a dehumanizing state of enforced passivity in which the humanitarian condition only forestalls death. However, refugees take agency—they make time—even in the endless present.

Caretaking in the Endless Present

The activities that fill empty time illuminate a process we call temporal caretaking but also the problems with it. Caretaking efforts were always constrained in ways that made them temporary. They were constrained by the bureaucracies of care and the stilted economics of the camp, itself produced through humanitarian and Ethiopian regulations. Caretaking efforts were also constrained by humanitarian logics that seldom noticed what refugees themselves were doing to make their community better.

What does it mean to care for the present? Berihu, once again, provides us with an example. In the face of being stuck, Berihu turned things around by cultivating ways to spend his time meaningfully—starting a business, planting a crop, and working with children. He asserted: “If you saw where I was eight months ago. . . . Now, I feel proud. I have lifted one leg. If you come back again, I will be on two legs.” His hope, though, was always standing on precarious ground. He was constrained by the limitations he faced as a refugee living in a place of “permanent temporariness” (Bailey et al. 2002). Berihu had an interesting way of articulating the tensions between caretaking and the future: “Two hands are pulling each other. One says, ‘Go with your business. Make a profit. Marry.’ The other says, ‘Take care of your people. Help someone below you. Don’t think about money. It makes your mind rest. If you pass someone lying on the ground, you cannot leave them. You help them up.’”

We suggest that caretaking is deeply intertwined with the paradoxes of caring for a temporary place, the temporariness of which may be permanent. A recent shift to focusing on care in anthropology seeks to highlight the agency and creativity of marginalized people beyond a focus on suffering (Black 2018), as care can shift attention to shared responsibility and intersubjectivity (Raghuram et al. 2009) with the constitution of ethics in the context of everyday struggles and experiences (Mattingly 2014). Applying an ethics of care lens to humanitarianism in the context of protracted displacement, Brun (2016) argues that an ethics of care can potentially be transformative by working against the depersonalizing biopolitics of emergency care that forecloses the future by focusing on physical needs in the present. Brun advocates instead for an ethics of care, which entails a temporal shift: “When we care about an ‘Other,’ we acknowledge their future, their welfare and their ethical significance is bound up with our own future” (2016, 405). But Brun’s focus is on care of refugees by aid workers. Far less work has focused on care practices by refugees for each other (for a notable exception, see Carruth 2021). When we consider caretaking as an agentive practice enacted by refugee communities, we see that the future is not easily opened up. Indeed, we would argue that the limit of caretaking among refugees is that it does not have the capacity to create future possibilities. It is a practice oriented toward the present.

Care is always paradoxical. For example, the broad literature on neoliberal capitalism and care work (health care, teaching, eldercare, etc.) demonstrates how care is exploited while workers in such fields are disciplined and their labor simultaneously monetized and structured in ways that impede them from giving care without tremendous self-sacrifice (Abramovitz and Zelnick 2010; Pyle 2006). Another paradox of care, as Steven P. Black argues, is that the giving and refusal of care always go together and that “moral and ethical care is never devoid of issues of power and vulnerability” (2018, 80). This is an important point, but how do these power dynamics play out when refugees themselves (the “cared for” population) are the ones providing the care?

Many of these paradoxes are present in some form but appear differently when we consider the community care refugees provide. The problem here is less about the exploitation of care and more about the invisibility of care. It is also less about the refusal of care and more about the limits to the care refugees can provide to each other. As we have shown throughout this chapter, the efforts of what Berihu calls the first of two hands would inevitably and almost always be futile. Indeed, Berihu tried this strategy, but his business failed. Restlessly ambitious, he was still trying—with another business, a wife, and a growing family. But here we would like to call attention to the other hand: “Take care of your people. Help someone below you. Don’t think about money. It makes your mind rest.” We would like to particularly call attention to Berihu’s assertion that helping others is restful. What better way is there to describe the palliative nature of caretaking? At the same time, Berihu and so many others were always at risk of falling back into the despair generated by being stuck at the camp.

Many of these caretaking efforts are linked to INGO programs aimed at helping refugees integrate or at least stemming onward movement. Common wisdom in refugee camps is that vocational training, incentive work, recreational programs, and small business development will curb onward movement because they give refugees something meaningful to do and generate an attachment to a future in Ethiopia. However, we have argued throughout this chapter that caretaking is a fundamentally temporal strategy to make life in the endless present of the camp bearable.

As Michel Agier (2002) observes, people in camps often conduct lives as if they are in a town or city. But the camp is a temporary space, and people do not inhabit it as they please (Hyndman and Giles 2016). Earlier, we explored how time in the camp “thickens” and becomes downright sludge-like in response to two factors: teleological notions of progress and humanitarian/bureaucratic constraint in the space of the camp. In response, refugees attempt to fill the endless present with acts of caretaking for themselves and the places they inhabit, but these acts are not linked to progress and the notion that they are moving in meaningful ways toward some desired future. As we explore in the next section, caretaking includes such practices as starting a business with the awareness that there is no way it can be successful or planting a garden that the camp authorities may uproot. Caretaking also includes diligently caring for a library and keeping it open for long hours even though few visit, and participating in INGO vocational education programs knowing that the skills one learns have no use in camp life. Additionally, it includes starting groups that will improve life in the camp for a time but that receive no support from camp administration. While these processes of caretaking might create an illusion that refugees are integrating, adapting to their circumstances, and fitting in with local communities, caretaking is always talked about as an impermanent, imperfect, and unfinished process, often because humanitarian organizations, laws, and policies fail to provide the resources and support needed to make these activities sustainable. Caretaking is a temporal strategy of enforced presentism always limited by the sense of confinement created by bureaucratized care, both within and outside of the camp.

Jobs without Pay: Incentive Work as Caretaking

Incentive work is one way that refugees engage in time-making in the chronic present, revealing the ambiguity of time-making as both palliative and harmful. UNHCR and NGO partners engage refugees as “incentive workers” for service provision to displaced communities globally, both within and outside of camps. Incentive refers to the compensation that refugees receive and is used to distinguish their work from wage labor. Incentive work is often characterized as volunteering; it is “grounded in the idea that refugees should actively participate in efforts to support their own communities, which is seen to promote empowerment rather than dependencies” (UNHCR 2014, 1). Systems like incentive pay are often described by UNHCR and implementing partners as a means for refugees to participate in humanitarianism rather than merely being the beneficiaries of aid. Incentive positions with humanitarian organizations are also envisioned as part of a solution to secondary migration in that they not only provide opportunities for refugees in the camps but also mobilize refugees to work on projects designed to stem secondary migration (e.g., youth programming, counseling, and education). Ethiopia developed guidelines for incentive work in 2010 that standardized incentive pay levels across agencies and instituted a scale that allowed for some recognition of differential qualification. At the same time, these guidelines reinforced the goal of incentive pay as a means to promote volunteerism and community participation rather than as a form of salaried employment.

While Ethiopia had announced a plan to provide work permits to refugees, the formal labor market was (and largely remains) inaccessible, leaving those in the Tigray region dependent on an informal labor market that entailed few, low-paid, seasonal manual-labor jobs. The humanitarian aid ecosystem, on the other hand, generated numerous positions for skilled workers such as translators, teachers, and refugees working in various health care roles, including, as we later describe, psychosocial support and counseling. Due to the national policy on incentive work, the incentive pay was standardized across organizations, which included not only UNHCR but also Ethiopian institutions such as the Ministry of Education, Ethiopian NGOs such as the Development and Inter-Church Aid Commission (DICAC), and international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) such as the Danish Refugee Council, Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), International Rescue Committee (IRC), and Jesuit Refugee Services (JRS).

For some refugees, incentive work was viewed as a way to counter camp time; it offered a means to contribute to the community, develop professional skills, and connect to professionals from other parts of the world. Iyob is a case in point. He had lived in the camp for ten years and became an incentive worker for an INGO that provided psychosocial support and counseling for refugees. He was trained to work as a counselor, and he often spoke about the desire to help people in his community, making his work with the organization fulfilling. He also valued the relationships he formed with INGO workers. During the state of emergency that led up to the change in leadership in Ethiopia in early 2018, pass permits to travel out of the camp were suspended for refugees. When Iyob was recognized as Eritrean in a nearby town, he was taken to prison. The head of the INGO waited with him the entire time, making sure he was treated well and ultimately released.

Iyob’s ability to draw from his position to build professional relationships and work meaningfully on mental health care in the camps is counterposed to the experience of many of the other refugees we spoke to, like Berihu, who tended to describe incentive pay as primarily a means to “kill time.” It was also counterposed to the experience of Andebrhan, whose incentive work reinforced a sense of being othered and devalued and ultimately failed to fend off the despair and alcoholism generated by temporal harm in the camp.

Many similar critiques of incentive work originate with refugees like Berihu who graduated from college in Ethiopia only to find themselves barred from salaried employment. Humanitarian aid keeps refugees alive, barely. Cuts in rations combined with inflation mean that refugees struggle to survive on their aid allotment and must constantly seek out ways to supplement their income. However, incentive pay is far from sufficient. When this is described as something that refugees should value doing as volunteers, it comes to feel like the coerced and interminable national service work that Eritrean refugees experienced in Eritrea. One college graduate now working for incentive pay remarked, “We left our own homeland, where we were forced to work government jobs. Even an engineer there is forced to teach in a remote post. If the same thing is happening here, what is the difference? You have to have a future.” Incentive work was perceived to be part of the mechanics of aid that immobilized refugees in a chronic present. Indeed, many of the young men who had graduated and served as incentive workers felt that they were less visible to aid organizations and were less of a priority for resettlement. Gerie observed, “The government and UNHCR, they think that we will be OK. They don’t care about us. They don’t care about our lives. Some of us are leaders. Freely we are administering the camp. It is a benefit to the UNHCR and to the government to keep us here.”

It is no surprise, then, that there is a high turnover rate for refugees serving as teachers and other incentive workers in the camps. As the director of the primary school in one of the camps explained to us, each year they lose about half of their incentive teachers. Refugee teachers are in a particularly challenging role. Nearly every incentive teacher we spoke with mentioned the low pay as a problem, including Berihu, who, when we asked him why he had stopped dressing for class and showing up on time, explained, “What can you buy for nine hundred birr? Clothes?” However, the other most common complaint that teachers had was the lack of motivation among the refugee students; low pay for teachers and lack of motivation among students were explicitly connected. Although education was seen as key to deterring secondary migration, every camp primary and secondary school struggled with absenteeism, high dropout rates, and low enrollment. Volunteer teachers commonly expressed the feeling that they could be important role models for students, but they set a negative example instead; they urged their students to adopt an educational path toward a hopeful future, yet personally demonstrated the lack of a tether between the future and the camp. “Everybody has a responsibility to nurture children, as a society,” explained Berihu. “But they see the reality of what we are still.”

There are some alternatives to teaching for incentive pay. If incentive work is a way for refugees to kill time, working with children through grassroots initiatives can be a mechanism of time-making that taps into and reaffirms the will to spend time meaningfully and wait hopefully. Eventually Berihu left teaching, but he found other ways to care for the community. Outside the administrative structure of the education system, he worked with other university graduates to coordinate tutoring sessions for refugee students in the camp. One initiative lasted five months and involved tutoring students in grades six through eight. The program, called Save Eritrean Seeds, was formed around a vision of caring for youth and hoping that the future may be better. This is one example of what we think of as invisible caretaking, discussed later. Getting permission to run the Save Eritrean Seeds program required extensive efforts at navigating the humanitarian and governmental bureaucracy. It ran without support and with little acknowledgment, and yet to Berihu, it was preferable to working for incentive pay as a teacher.

Incentive work embodies the paradox of the refugee condition. Because they are receiving aid and protection, refugees may not work. They may do incentive work, which is conceptualized as a sort of volunteer work, for a small amount of pocket money. Yet aid is never enough to live on, forcing refugees to work at artificially depressed wages. Thus, humanitarian logics directly produce an economy of constraint. Many refugees still undertake incentive work—some for survival, others because it keeps them meaningfully busy—but it can never be equated with development or progress and only ever serves as a reminder of their relegation to the interminable present.

Businesses without Customers: Entrepreneurialism as Temporal Caretaking

Berihu’s business ultimately failed, as so many did. The loan proved too difficult to pay off. One year after taking out the loan, he and his business partner were forced to close the café. The restaurant was located at the edge of the camp, and the small generator had died. He explained, “There has been no change in my life for the past ten years. When I think about this, I feel like crying. The generator crashed, and you can’t do a business in the dark. It’s been more than two months without light. I am fighting. I am fighting not to fail.” A few months later, Berihu opened a new café, this one more strategically located toward the center of camp. Like the last restaurant, it may not work out, but it does do work in other ways.

For Berihu, the business provided an alternate way of spending his time. Rather than wallowing in the endless present of camp time, he was running a café, an activity that he linked to caring for family. In fact, he got married to a woman from his hometown and fostered a number of younger family members. In many ways, the café was restorative. It provided a fulcrum for sociality through meaningful labor, countering camp time and the oppressive nature of bureaucratic “care.” However, in the context of the precarity that refugees face, temporal harm and caretaking mutually constitute each other. Caretaking is therapeutic, but these activities are so often doomed to failure, which can ultimately come to amplify the stress of empty time. They accomplish palliative work but are prevented from being transformative by the possibility that all of this could change at any moment.

The precarity of caretaking, its intersection with temporal trauma, and its encounter with the paradox of permanent temporariness were apparent in the numerous stories we heard of businesses opened and closed and of those that limped along without much expectation that they would turn a profit. Hitsats camp, for instance, was replete with small shops attached to refugees’ houses. Idris’s shop was typical of these. He had recently sold it to a friend when he decided to go to university under the refugee college scholarship program, but he still lived adjacent to the small store when he returned to camp during school holidays. The shop had few items—juice, soda, soap, and cookies. There was also shade. Idris smiled warmly and pulled out a blanket to place on a concrete slab where he invited us to sit. He explained that he had started the shop after he arrived in the camp nearly three years earlier, leaving a wife and daughter in Eritrea.

“This shop was mine at first,” he said. “From the beginning, I was more clever.” In an effort to keep busy when he first arrived, he started the shop, took on a local leadership role, and volunteered as an incentive social worker for an NGO. Later, when he returned to camp for the long summer break from university, Idris struggled with boredom. When he reflected on the past in contrast to the present, he felt like his mind had gone dormant because of having too much time to worry. He also expressed that the shop had been more viable in the beginning, but too many shops had opened in recent years, leaving one for every three or four houses. For the most part, people shopped in the adjacent town of Hitsats, which had been booming since the camp was established. The refugees who owned small shops in the camp bought things in bulk from the town to resell, but overall, the camp economy was stagnant, and legal restrictions prevented refugees from working or opening up businesses outside of the camp.⁵ As another man joked when we passed by his small shop, where he was lounging with friends on a mat in the shade of an awning, “This is not a shop. This is a place to sleep.”

Joking aside, people congregated in these spaces, chatting, listening to radios, or playing the kirar, a stringed instrument. When the owners left, the shops were often sold or passed to friends or family. These shops were important as a form of temporal care that, like Berihu’s restaurant, meaningfully filled the present. Furthermore, these businesses were spaces of sociality that served as gathering points and markers of one’s role in the community. But there was no illusion that these endeavors would lead to progress. Refugees were keenly aware that, given the lack of customers who could afford to make purchases and the inability of shop owners to competitively price goods, camp businesses were structurally doomed to fail. They were thus nonteleological.

Vocational training and certificate programs also functioned as a form of temporal caretaking rather than as a way to help refugees feel settled or attached to a future. Numerous international NGOs coordinated vocational training and certificate programs in the camps that were often accompanied by assistance in establishing small businesses there. For example, the NRC operated a vocational training program in Hitsats camp that, according to a camp-based representative, trained around six hundred people a year, providing classes in food prep, furniture making, garment work, metal work, and information technology support. Yet there was little potential to sustainably add more of these businesses in the camp. Each time we visited Hitsats, we drove by the NRC market building designed for these refugee graduates—a large compound on the NGO side of the road across from the refugee residences. The individual stalls were almost always closed when we passed. Once, we managed to secure the promise of a tour, but the NGO worker never showed up. Although it seemed to be largely unused, the compound was an example of place-making in camp time. The NRC market compound, along with numerous other start-up businesses that were only occasionally occupied, bore the prominent logos of humanitarian aid organizations. Indeed, nearly every tree and latrine were marked this way, crediting the organization that contributed to its presence in the camp. Some signs were only in English, lacking a translation in the Geez alphabet that would be legible to Tigrigna or Amharic speakers. While these places offered some opportunity for refugees to spend time engaged in activities and avoid the boredom of camp, they also emphasized the role of international agencies as the place makers and the role of refugees as temporary residents in a space designed and controlled by others. This branding reproduced teleologies because these programs were supposed to move refugees in a progress-oriented direction. However, for refugees, the shuttered shops and branded trees were indicative of the time-space of the camp where they were stuck waiting in permanent temporariness.

Even when businesses succeeded, they reflected the profoundly temporal nature of these activities. Mai Aini camp, which was located farther from local towns and had a more settled population that included many family households, offered more lively market opportunities for refugee entrepreneurs. Trhas’ husband, Tsegay, was a successful businessman who earned a livelihood through his expertise in mechanics, cultivating a clientele of local Ethiopians. He slowly bought and rented out prime real estate in the camp along the main road in an informal housing economy that emerged over time with the expansion of the camp. He was always busy when we encountered him and worked long hours at his shop. Trhas was busy as well; she cared for their kids, fostered another teenager from their home village, and attended Bible classes at one of the churches in the camp. On one afternoon, we arrived to find the household turned upside down. They had received word that they would be resettled and should be prepared to leave at any moment. There was a palpable air of excitement in the house. Just two weeks had passed since they were notified. We return to their story in more detail in chapter 5 but mention it here to illustrate that all strategies in the camp, even if they do succeed in generating wealth, are made temporary by the assumption that at some point, the refugees will no longer be there; in other words, the permanent temporariness can be ruptured at any time.

Invisible Caretaking

Time-making as a therapeutic act also appears in the grassroots efforts of volunteers to address the needs of refugees suffering from severe mental illness. We learned about these organizations from Iyob, who we described earlier as a person who had worked with an international NGO on mental health care. Iyob had taken on numerous volunteer roles in the camp—both formally as an incentive worker and elected leader to the refugee camp council, and in various grassroots groups, most notably as one of the founders of a refugee-led organization that provides care to people with severe mental health problems.

Iyob extended his role as a psychosocial counselor beyond the incentive pay position. He worked to form a residential home for refugees in the camp who were suffering from severe mental health problems. Identifying a serious gap in care, Iyob explained, “They were sleeping in the street, beating people, hurting themselves.” Beyond some psychosocial counseling programs, there were few other mental health services available in the camp. In contrast to humanitarian organizations, which tend to stress the need for mental health services to address traumas endured in the past, Iyob described a growing crisis in the camps because of distress and hardship endured there in the present. “The number of mentally ill is increasing,” he explained when he gave us a tour of the compound—a cement block structure with a small ancient television playing in one of the residential rooms. “This comes from the harsh life here. That is why you will see more people when you come back.”

Iyob worked to solicit support, mostly from other refugees and also from the Orthodox church in the camp, to locate a compound where people could safely reside, be fed, and be cared for. The facility, known as Hawat (“brotherhood” in Tigrigna), housed seventeen people when we visited in 2018; they were cared for by refugee volunteers and funded by money collected by people in the camp. The facility was associated with the Orthodox church but served both Muslim and Christian refugees using a combination of psychological counseling, holy water and prayer, recreation, and general support from community volunteers. Although this facility was necessarily temporary in the context of the camp, and the volunteers would come and go, it provided a crucible for caretaking that redefined refugees as givers of care rather than mere recipients. At the same time, it pushed back against the bureaucracy of “care” that relegates refugees to a painful position of waiting for things beyond their control—a situation that exacerbates people’s stress in the camps and creates the conditions for temporal trauma.

Hawat provided a nexus for community members to care for a vulnerable population that was not being served by the humanitarian apparatus, but it also emphasized the gaps in care experienced by the refugee community and the precarity of life and well-being in the face of these gaps. “They just collected the people to live together without any support from the government or an NGO,” Iyob explained as he narrated the history of the facility. “Nobody supports them,” he insisted. He said that an international NGO provided one-day training on counseling for the volunteers working at Hawat, and the volunteers solicited the occasional assistance of an Ethiopian psychologist from a university in the regional capital, Mekelle. Still, they were reaching out to other organizations, hoping to secure water provision and assistance with clothing and equipment. But so far, these resources had not been channeled to grassroots efforts like Hawat. The number of refugees with severe mental health problems was growing, Iyob asserted, as was the length of time people lived in the compound, and the facility’s beds were already full.

Hawat is but the clearest example of several unrecognized efforts by refugees to take care of the camp. Alongside incentive work with no pay, small businesses with no customers, vocational training programs that led to no jobs, and NGO recreational programs—all of which filled the present but did not address the future—refugees found ways to make the present meaningful by doing things to care for the camp. They did so by taking in unaccompanied minors, tutoring younger children, and addressing community needs even in the absence of governmental or nongovernmental programming to assist them. These efforts were admirable, and refugees did feel good when participating in them, but without greater support, they were always only partial solutions. And like Trhas and Tsegay’s family, refugees at any moment might move on. Indeed, they hoped that they would, meaning that these efforts were never intended to be long-term strategies, but only temporary, palliative measures.

Caretaking as Place-Making or Time-Making?

Early in the book, we introduced the concept of time-making to temporalize place-making. In the context of refugee studies, place-making entails the processes through which refugees navigate belonging and establish homes, despite possibly feeling powerful connections to the homes they were displaced from (Denov and Akesson 2013; Eckenwiler 2016; Jean 2015; Rios and Watkins 2015). Place-making is closely related to the concept of place attachment, a process whereby people come to identify with particular places of resettlement (Boğaç 2009; Rishbeth and Powell 2013). Place attachment references psychological processes of group and individual identity formation as they are linked to meaningful social spaces (Giuliani 2017). Similarly, Laura C. Hammond uses the concept of emplacement to describe the ways resettled refugees transform an unfamiliar landscape into a home both materially and symbolically, replete with social relationships (2004). This research has helped denaturalize the links between people and place and consequently depathologize refugees as people defined by their displacement from a native homeland. It has also explored how refugees exert agency in forging new connections to places and people in the context of mobility (Brun 2001). Place-making is also considered central to healing via the creation of therapeutic landscapes (Bell et al. 2018; Doughty 2018; Gesler 1992; Sampson and Gifford 2010). However, in situations of deep and protracted precarity, such as refugees living in long-term emergency containment, temporality takes on critical importance. In these situations, the concept of therapeutic landscapes must foreground the temporal, rather than spatial, projects through which people care for themselves and others.

Consequently, we need a better theoretical lens to understand the temporality of place-making. This is critical because, without an assessment of time, spatial analyses risk obscuring the enduring precarity and forms of violence that confront refugees. Georgina Ramsay argues, “Displacement is also an existential condition that is realized through shifts in the temporalization of everyday life: that is, when the predictability of the present and the assumptions about the future are jeopardized and made precarious” (2019, 203). While displaced people are assumed to be able to rejoin society by constructing new lives and homes when they are resettled or encounter opportunities for local integration, they still face “regimes of temporal incommensurability” (Ramsay 2019, 203). Focusing on spatiality alone risks missing the agentive ways in which refugees care for themselves and each other, particularly in temporary places, in conditions of radical precarity, and in the face of profound structural barriers.

Place still matters. Indeed, without an analytical lens focused on place, the theoretical turn toward investigating temporalities of precarity can lead to research that describes what life is like when people are confronted with profound material and social insecurity but not how things came to be that way in particular times and places. However, place is always imbricated with time. When we center temporality in our analysis, we can better understand how activities like building a business, going to school, growing food, starting a tutoring program, or establishing a religious community are not necessarily indicative of place attachment and the desire to stay in Ethiopia. They are temporal acts through which, in the condition of endless waiting, refugees care for themselves and others and hold open the possibility of other futures.⁶ These are the methods by which refugees “reclaim waiting as a livable space” (Kallio et al. 2021, 4007).

This possibility of other futures—and the efforts to hold them open—is a critical aspect of temporal agency. Care for the present, as we described here, is similar to Kirsi Kallio, Isabel Meier, and Jouni Häkli’s concept of radical hope, which they define as the “ability to maintain a meaningful existence when a person’s life is at the brink of losing all meaning” (2021, 4008). Radical hope involves orienting oneself toward the present to detach from despondent futures and opens the possibility that people may take up the challenge of “making it through the day-to-day life that has become unlivable and by doing so deny[ing] the right of other actors to define the direction of their active presence” (Kallio et al. 2021, 4008). Radical hope illuminates how temporal agency may be hidden in activities that seem passive and mundane, like disengaging or withdrawing from organized activities and turning away from teleological linear temporalities. Yet the ambiguities of caring for the present in a temporary place make these projects unstable. Furthermore, as we explored earlier, while withdrawal, disengagement, and abandoning hopes for progress may be agentive acts of time-making, they are always intertwined with temporal suffering.

This focus on time-making can illuminate why top-down place-making initiatives do not necessarily succeed in attempts to curtail secondary migration. Outside of the ethnographic literature, place-making generally entails a design framework rather than a grassroots process. In the spheres of public and global health and urban planning, place-making is the purview of the policy and design experts, who configure places to cultivate certain kinds of desired social, economic, and (increasingly) ecological relations. For example, Lisa A. Eckenwiler (2016) lauds refugee management initiatives as shining examples of place-making in urban design and global health, because infrastructure is designed with humanitarian goals, such as reception centers that not only ensure shelter but also foster stability and integration. Projects designed to encourage refugees to stay in Ethiopia operate according to a similar ethos—crafting opportunities for livelihood and sociality that would foster integration and root people in place. But people are caring for temporary places. In doing so, they are engaging in profoundly temporal acts of caretaking that offer some respite from the kind of temporal incarceration of camp time. When we understand waiting as temporal suffering, we can better appreciate how people are also engaged in restorative projects of time-making.

Notes

1. We assert that temporal suffering is experienced as traumatic while recognizing that trauma is a loaded term in research with refugees. Didier Fassin (2012) cautions that humanitarian reason tends to reduce violence to trauma and translate complex social processes into a clinical language of suffering. Refugees come to be defined by their past trauma in ways that further categorize them as victims, stripped of history and agency. In the process, the structural causes of violence are obscured. Similarly, in work with war-displaced youth in postconflict Eritrea of the late 1990s, Farwell (2001) cautions that translating war experiences into biomedical categories through which we measure trauma often entails diagnosing individual distress, which can obscure the collective and temporal nature of trauma as it is experienced across families through generations. The concept of temporal suffering opens the possibility for emic depictions of trauma and healing that make space for these varying experiences.

2. Anthropological studies of trauma also help to complicate the notion that people are simply victims of trauma. As Rebecca Lester (2013) explains, trauma is a kind of experience that involves a rupture from everyday modes of human relationship and connection and a nonlinear process of recovery.

3. Khosravi (2021) draws from Frantz Fanon in his discussion of the racialization of time, arguing that colonial racism is built on the idea of the belatedness of non-Europeans: white time is thought of as civilized, modern, and neutral, while the racialized Other always arrives too late.

4. Khosravi (2021) describes waiting as a colonial technology that renders some people’s time as less valuable than others’, reminds people of their place in a racial hierarchy, and renders people’s time as wasted in a way that means it can be stolen. These violent processes play out in migrant experiences with deportation, detention, and the long, uncertain processes surrounding resettlement and local integration.

5. Indeed, urban refugees that we interviewed talked about innumerable failed businesses due to their vulnerability at the hands of legal restrictions and the challenges that accompany caring for sick and displaced family.

6. Karen Fog Olwig (2021) describes how asylum seekers refuse to live in a time of suspension waiting for the teleological end point of resettlement by keeping various end points open—for example, by entertaining ideas about varied future trajectories.