My first time at Latitude, in fact my first time at any festival. It was overwhelming - so much to do and see, and so many other people there.
There is a lot to say about it, but I'd like to reflect on one particular aspect. It brought to mind very powerfully the years I spent working in refugee camps.
Except of course that there are huge differences in my experience as one of 35,000 campers at Latitude, and that of a refugee - even in a much smaller camp.
At Latitude, I was a single mother responsible for my daughter and two other teenage girls. Unlike refugees, we were there because we wanted to; we had paid to be there so we felt we had the right to expect a certain standard of basic services (water, toilets, washing facilities, food availability, security); and we knew it would only last for 4 days.
Even so, I found meeting all the basic necessities took up a surprising amount of time and energy - walking to and from the washing/toilet areas and queuing for food and water. The proximity of other people was unsettling. We could hear every conversation including whispers in the next door tents. We dreaded another family arriving and setting up their tent in the tiny area that we'd left between us and the next tent, where we could sit, cook and eat.
It struck me that we were very exposed to the huge range of different standards of behaviour, noise, littering, and social interaction which are normal everywhere. In our communities and homes, we are protected by solid walls, customs, and our networks of neighbours. But here, there was little we could do if another family chose to stay up and chat late into the night, if a group of teenagers spent 4 days piling rubbish around their tents which then blew into ours, or if hundreds of people chose to use the path past our tent as a short-cut to the toilets.
But my bigges
t worry was the safety of the three 14 year old girls entrusted to me. Our elaborate system of walkie-talkies, phone-ins, meeting-up times, curfew time, and always-stay-together-all-the-time, was fragile. As the week-end wore on, the girls spent more time out of my direct range, and at the same time the batteries on our gadgets failed one after the other, we had to improvise, and we were lulled into a feeling that everything was 'cool'. We were shocked to hear the news that an 18 year old woman was raped on the Friday, and another on Saturday.So what would I do differently if I was working once more in a refugee camp? Firstly I'd make much more effort to think of people as individuals not just as an amorphous mass of refugees, even women/men/young/old are just labels that hide a huge diversity of needs and capacities. Secondly, I'd be far more aware of how vulnerable women and girls are, and I'd design every aspect of camp life around reducing that vulnerability. I'd also make sure there were different channels open to refugees for asserting their rights and reporting abuses or crimes. And I'd be far more understanding of the fatigue and stress involved in the daily struggle to meet basic needs. Its surprising that it's taken me so long for these ideas to crystallize, and all because of a festival.
