Refugees are easy to police, the Khwaja once said. The authorities know that fear and ignorance of our surroundings makes it cheaper and easier to keep us here. But one day, one of us will break this fear and ignorance and be free. When he said this, the Khwaja punched his fist in the air, as if breaking through invisible walls.

But was it freedom she was looking for? Saba could have been happy in the camp if there had been a school. Freedom, Saba realized now, meant different things to different people. The Khwaja wanted to read his newspaper, as he told her once, on the day of publication. With a cup of espresso, as I used to do in Asmara, he said, his voice rising to a high pitch.

Zahra wanted to help her mother with her quest to free a country, while Hagos didn’t need an independent country or a school or a job. He was as carefree in the camp as he was back home.

Saba looked around her. There was nothing. Not even evidence that the aid coordinator’s Land Rover had driven through here earlier in the morning, the marks of his car’s wheels on the sandy road wiped out. Which way was the way out? Saba wondered. She fixed her eyes on the dusty empty road ahead. Through this desiccated umbilical cord came the Englishman and his staff, came the lorries with sardines, oil and sugar. She stood on her toes, as if by doing so she would be able to see the rest of this country on the horizon. The country their lorry driver had sung about on their journey to the camp.

As Saba walked she imagined a lush village by the bend of the Nile. Tractors working the fields, hot loaves of bread sold from the back of bicycles, women in thobes standing in front of blackboards with chalk in their hands, students in school uniform hurrying through passageways full of life.

Saba’s legs felt light. She sprinted. The few trees populating the road at the beginning of the camp were behind her now. She tripped and fell on her knees, breathless and thirsty. This was not the way to freedom but to loss.

On her way back to the camp, Saba stopped by the large field at the south designated by the aid workers as the place for the future school. Unlike the open toilet, this field was left untouched. Nature lived freely here and grass grew stubbornly in this dry place, it expanded into the horizon and reached the height of her ribcage. Saba wondered how long it would take for a school to be built in this spot of land.

Things would have been different, she thought, if the authorities had built the camp near the city. Nearer to a school or a college or university. She remembered the moment on their journey to the camp when she thought that was the case, when their lorry had left the outskirts of the city which they had arrived at on camels, and Saba had seen tents on the side of the asphalt highway. Is this the refugee camp? she asked the driver.