Presto: You’re an IDP

by John Filiatreau

This tale is intended to help readers imagine the kind of dislocation experienced by hundreds of thousands of Indonesian IDPs.

One day a gang of bearded men comes in the night and burns down your house and barn and hacks your elderly mother to death.

Next day you learn that you must immediately leave your tobacco farm in Kentucky and move to Maine and support your family by working in the only industry there, the fishery. "You have become an internally displaced person (IDP)."

You don't know anyone in Maine. You think the people there talk funny; and you're pretty sure they'll think you talk funny. You're also pretty sure they'll feel that any job you take is one taken from them.

You don't know from ships. You don't have the right clothing for the deep of winter in coastal Maine. You don't have the right set of mind to gut fish for a living.

You don't have any choice.

You will live with your wife and three children in a square wooden cell eight feet on a side, cheek-by-jowl with a dozen other families living in identical rooms. You'll have to build it yourself, on publicly-owned or unclaimed land.

If you need food, or medical assistance, or counseling, you must go hat-in-hand to charities and ask for help. You might get some financial assistance from the government, but then again you might not. If you do, it might be next month or four years from now.

If you go back to Kentucky, the people who burned down your house might come in the night to cut your throat. The fire destroyed every document you had that proved you own that little farm. Another family lives there now.

Despite your best efforts, your children will be much more likely than other American youngsters to die in infancy; to be malnourished; to suffer from water-borne diseases and “illnesses of poverty”; to drop out of school; to learn to use a rifle before learning to use a pencil; to be fearful of men with beards.