BBCIt's morning at a makeshift camp on the remote British island of Diego Garcia, and Shanthi's husband has just woken up to find their young children peering through the security fence.
As the kids watch an officer and a guard dog patrol the secret island, home to a strategy A British-American military base in the middle of the Indian OceanThey made a stark remark: “Even dogs have more freedom than us.”
“When I heard that, I felt very sad,” he says.
It was a scene that depicted their family's predicament – they were Stranded in a mysterious military castle Coincidentally, he had a son and a daughter, ages five and nine, to raise.
Trying to find normalcy in the small camp where they resided under constant surveillance, the family found ways to entertain themselves, study, grow food, and celebrate special occasions.
Shanthi, a pseudonym, says they paid $5,000 (£3,900) in savings and gave all her gold jewelery to smugglers to make an ambitious journey to Canada, more than 12,000km away, with dozens of other Sri Lankan Tamils.
They all said they had fled persecution in Sri Lanka and India, some because of their links to former Tamil Tiger rebels who were defeated in the civil war that ended in 2009.
The fishing boat they were on leaked amid rough seas, prompting the Royal Navy to rescue them and transfer them in October 2021 to Diego Garcia, where they were placed in a fenced migrant camp. Shanthi remembers her son asking her if they had made it to Canada.
Her young children received no formal education on the island during their first six months there, so, as a trained teacher, Shanthi began giving English lessons to children at the camp.
“We started with the basics — the alphabet, nouns, verbs, and the present continuous,” she says.
Shanthi's husband later built a writing desk out of wooden planks so that the children could do their homework in the tent.
The children soon began complaining of boredom in the evenings, so Shanthi – who had trained in the classical Indian dance Bharatanatyam – began giving dance lessons as well, playing music downloaded from her phone.
Three years after the family first arrived at the camp, they were finally sent to the UK this week as part of what the government decided It was described as a “one-off” case for the benefit of their well-being.
“It was like an open prison,” Shanthi, who is in her early 30s, said in an interview on the outskirts of London. “We were not allowed to go out. We only lived under a fence and in a tent.”
“Every day our lives were the same.”
She adds: It was like living “in a cage.”
As guards watched, and military planes occasionally flew overhead, Shanti and the other Tamils approached the British forces on the island with a letter requesting that they be sent to a safe country. This was the first time that asylum applications were submitted in the region.
This sparked a A long legal battle 6,000 miles away in the UKWhile the matter was taking its course, Shanthi and the others remained stuck there, taking matters into her own hands.
While the Tamils were not allowed to cook their own food, the camp was full of coconut trees, and Shanthi and others used their husks to arrange the plantations in which they grew their vegetables – chili peppers, garlic and cucumbers.
“Sometimes they would give us hot red peppers, so we would dry them in the sun, collect the seeds, and then plant them. Sometimes in salads, we would get cucumbers, so we would collect the seeds and keep them in the sunlight, and after they dried, we would plant them.” Grow,” she says.
Every day, they made sambol – a popular Sri Lankan side dish – by mashing coconut and chili peppers.
They struggled to eat the American food provided to them by the base, and would put vegetables in hot water with garlic and chili peppers to try to make a curry.
With limited access to clothing, especially for the 16 children in the camp, Shanthi and other women sewed dresses from bed sheets. Come Christmas, they turned tissue paper into flowers, and cut moon and star shapes from food containers to decorate a tree.
Relations with the guards watching over them were often tense, but on Diwali, “an officer with a good heart brought us biryani,” says Shanthi. On another occasion, a guard brought a cake for her son, who was counting down the days until his birthday.
But as time passed, Shanthi says, feelings of helplessness increased.
Life at the camp was supposed to be lived in a bubble, as news of the major wars raging in Ukraine and the Middle East filtered in from the guards monitoring the migrants, but they were turned away from the base and consumed by their lives.
Access to the island, part of the Chagos Archipelago, is severely restricted. It has officially had no resident population since the early 1970s when the UK evacuated all the people living there so it could develop the strategic base.
“From day one until we left, we lived every day with mice,” Shanthi says. “Sometimes the mice would bite our children – their legs, fingers and hands. They would steal our food. At night they would sometimes crawl on top of our blankets and heads.”
Giant coconut crabs and tropical fire ants will also crawl into the camp.
During storms, rainwater would flow through holes in the tents, which were previously used for Covid patients in the pandemic.
When UN investigators visited the camp late last year, children told them they dreamed of going for a walk, riding a bike or eating ice cream.
Earlier this year, a medical official described the camp as having a “full-blown crisis”, with mass self-harm and incidents of suicide attempts.
“My daughter was watching everything that was happening. She was like, ‘Mom, they hurt themselves. Should I cut myself?” “So I would say, 'No, no, you can't do anything, I'll protect you.' Come listen to some music, come take some paper and just draw.”
She and her husband sob when they talk about the two times their daughter hurt herself.
“Both times I felt very bad and couldn't understand it,” says Shanthi. “When I did, she told me that she did it because she hoped that if her parents and brother died, they would go to a safe third country.”
There were also cases and allegations of sexual assault and harassment inside the camp by other migrants, including against children.
“We suffered a lot over three years,” says Shanthi. “I don’t know how we survived.”
Throughout the Tamils' presence on the island, the British authorities admitted that it was not a suitable place for them, and said that they were looking for long-term solutions. The government said the group's welfare and safety was the “top priority”.
Shanthi says the happiest moment in the camp came recently when officials announced they were being transferred to the UK, where they would be given the right to stay for six months. Shanthi says no one slept in the camp that night.
Upon arriving in the UK, Shanthi says she went “cold” – and felt like she was waking up from a coma. You've forgotten how to download apps, send WhatsApp messages or pay in stores.
Her children talk about starting school, making friends and riding a double-decker bus.
But the family's long-term future remains uncertain. They have now applied for asylum in the UK in the hope of staying. If they do not succeed, they will likely be sent back to Sri Lanka.
The UK agreed earlier this year to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius in a historic move. Under the agreement, which has not yet been signed, Diego Garcia will continue to operate as a British-American military base, but Mauritius will bear responsibility for any future migrant arrivals.
Shanthi brought with her a shell from Diego Garcia to remember her time there. One day, she plans to put it on a chain and wear it around her neck.
Additional reporting by Swaminathan Natarajan.
