Exercise books from Kakuma Museum Friedland receives a donation from Kenyan refugee camp

The new building of the Friedland Museum will open in spring 2025. The main theme will then be the present of flight and migration. The museum will also look at transit places around the world, such as the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya. Kakuma is one of the oldest, still existing and, with over 150,000 inhabitants, one of the largest refugee camps in the world. One section of the new permanent exhibition will provide insights into the camp and the lives of its inhabitants.

To this end, the museum contacted the Tolossa Asrat. The journalist, who also lives in the camp, is co-founder of the online newspaper Kanere, which reports on life and everyday life in the Kakuma camp. For the new permanent exhibition, he presented Kakuma to us from his perspective with photos of everyday scenes and places from the camp. In addition, he collected sound recordings with which he captured some exciting impressions of everyday life in Kakuma.

The Museum Friedland also cooperated with the association "Kakuma Refugee Camp/Don Bosco Kakuma Flüchtlingshilfe Ostafrika e.V.". This association is committed to improving the educational opportunities of children in the camp by supporting educational projects of local partners and offering private lessons in English, Kiswahili, mathematics, hygiene and religion for children from different nations and tribes with its project "Savio Club".

The cooperation provides yet another perspective on the Kakuma camp. The museum team was all the more pleased about a donation for the new permanent exhibition, which arrived in Friedland from Kakuma in January this year. The children in the Savio Clubs were introduced to the museum's project and donated exercise books to the new exhibition. In these notebooks, children had written down vocabulary and practised reading times. The covers of the exercise books were made from cardboard, among other things.

A selection of the exercise books and Tolossa Asrat's photos and sound recordings will be on view and heard in the new exhibition from 2025.