Dealing with learning uncertainties during COVID19 pandemic. Reflections of alone and unaccompanied refugee children in Uganda

Abstract

This paper explores how alone and unaccompanied refugee children in a Ugandan refugee settlement reflected and dealt with their learning uncertainties that emerged during the coronavirus pandemic in Uganda. Their earlier experiences of living as refugee children in Ugandan refugee settlements fueled additional uncertainties that were evoked by memories of lost and abandoned childhoods in South Sudan that provided a better life and a promising future to some. Having experienced over five years of their childhoods as refugees in Ugandan settlements, children demonstrated their resilience mechanisms. Notable among these was the ability to be absorbed into foster family systems, the manufacture of new relations and reconnection with learning through the Ugandan education system. With such levels of childhood resilience, refugee children revealed that once again they were able to build dreams of a greater life ahead of them, which they believed stretched beyond their refugee status. In the period right from the emergence of COVID19, refugee children found themselves yet again in the midst of uncertainties. Whilst children argued that learning through school gave them a sense of direction for their future, they found themselves out of school for almost two years. This positioned children in   situations where they had to once again negotiate past these uncertainties they were faced with. To these alone and unaccompanied refugee children, it was crucial to them to get past their learning uncertainties if they were to achieve their lives’ ambitions which from their reflections in this paper are mainly founded in schooling. From their experiences, children revealed different ways they negotiated their learning uncertainties including adapting to self-learning mechanisms, others anticipated that schools would reopen soon. And yet others believed that skipping a class or two was a way of recovering the lost school time due to lockdown measures.