On the Road to the World’s Biggest Refugee Camp

The village of Modica sits at a crossroad, leading away from Garissa onto Dadaab. Its position is perhaps more elaborated by the fact that it is here that the tarmac road from Nairobi, Kenya’s capital city, ends; ushering in an endless stretch of unfriendly topography accentuated with harsh weather and an aura that serves as a complete opposite of any postcard image.

On a simmering Saturday afternoon, here in the semi-arid North Eastern Province in Kenya, Abdi Ahmed Abdi stretches his feeble limbs and looks out into the horizon, gazing into the distance. Here he lives with his 10 children and 2 wives in an aqal hori, an igloo-shaped, traditional house built from tree branches and covered with plastic bags.

He has no permanent job and the only source of income is from his wives who sell tea to truck drivers passing on the road. Abdi is a man roughed up by fate. His once sizeable capital of 200 sheep and goats has shrunk to a mere 50. His hopes are in a race against time; his remaining flock may not survive in the coming days.

On another side of this sleepy hamlet, Maryam Gure sweeps the floor of her modest abode. A chatty, talkative woman, she exudes a smile that sets forth an intimidating character as first impression but belies inspiration. Despite her weak body and the malnourished children clinging to her knees, she portrays a Herculean character: one that would do anything to make ends meet.

Maryam is one of several women who have not seen their husbands in months; some have been absent for close to a year, herding goats and camels and penning stories of survival in their own right. The women left behind have to contend with the harsh realities in this part of the world where word of famine or insufficiency sets off a spiralling cycle of inflation.

In Modica, a 20 litres of water costs KSh. 20, while a kilo of Ugali (maize meal) flour for KSh 80; relatively cheap for some people but prohibitively expensive for the likes of Maryam. She is raising 2 of her 3 children alongside some of her sister’s children. Child number 3 was sent off to live with his grandmother.

Save for a few bottles of camel milk that she sells at the local market, Maryam has no other regular income to sustain her family.

Approximately half an hour away from the sound of eerie silence and despondency in Modica is Garissa, the headquarters of the North Eastern Province. The town’s image is emphasized by rising towers, shopping centres and seemingly ubiquitous Toyota salon cars. It’s the biggest urban establishment between peaceful Nairobi and chaotic Mogadishu.

This town exemplifies a story of hunger and poverty on two sides of the border; a case study of how a biting drought and an ensuing famine coalesced to create a humanitarian disaster in both Kenya and Somalia. Garissa gives every visitor the last toast of comfort before they head out to Dadaab – considered the world’s biggest refugee camp, run by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees.

Once in Garissa, you will be forgiven to think that you are in any city in Somalia – be it Bosaso, Hargeisa or even war-torn Mogadishu. This is of course with the exception of the occasional Swahili billboards, and the Kenyan Army officers constantly patrolling the town. The town combines potholed roads and sand-filled edges, the occasional acacia dotting the landscape and cattle roaming the roads fronting a direct challenge to all other road users. After every few kilometres rudimentary graffiti decorates walls and rocks with chants such as “Allah is Great,” and “Praise Be to Allah.” Faith, it seems, has kept this outpost going.

Children here are familiar with outsiders flashing cameras and asking questions. From the United States to the United Kingdom, and from Turkey to South Africa, non-governmental organizations have set camp filling up luxurious hotels such as Almond Resort and Nomad Palace Hotel. They drive in SUVs and as if to signal the volatility of the region’s security, the cars have a ‘No Gun’ sign on the sides.

The United Nations declared the region a Level 4 security zone, meaning that there is the possibility of a significant threat. The International Police (Interpol) thinks otherwise and recently recognized Garissa as the most peaceful urban area in East and Central Africa.

Abject poverty:

When the holy month of Ramadan arrived in early August, Maryam was a true testament of the extent of patience and resilience expected of every Muslim. Almost 1.5 billion Muslims around the world fast from dawn to dusk, while engaging in supplication. It’s a month of purification, connection with the inner self, but more importantly, it is a month where faithful get to feel the pang of hunger and feel the plight of the underprivileged.

The famine however compounds her case. When dusk sets in and Muslims break their fast with a meal, Maryam says that if she was lucky, she “will find some porridge at times, but if there is nothing, then, there is nothing.”

Just next door, her neighbour was badly bitten by a hyena as she went to fetch wood for her children.

Her relatives who live next to her have nothing. “The husband, the wife and the children are all huddled together inside there,” she says, pointing at another thatched house the size of a 1000-litre water tank.

Asking for permission, she leads us into the shelter that barely has a breathing space to spare for the family crowded inside. The narrative is the same; a story of insufficiency coupled with geographical obscurity that has stretched human suffering beyond ordinary imagination.

Though rarely noticeable, a feeling of unease is prevalent in this area. Aid organizations, many say, have prioritized their assistance to refugees trekking from Somalia to Dadaab. Many have adopted Garissa as a launching pad for their operations which target immigrant communities fleeing war and famine in Somalia while ignoring the residents who have been struck by the famine in equal fashion.

“The fact that the NGOs and agencies are helping the refugees and not the local communities is not acceptable,” Idriss Sahal Kowlon, a Program Officer with the Kenya Livestock Marketing Council in Garissa, says. “This is like forfeiting a life for another life,” he emphatically adds.

Maryam wonders why the Kenyan government isn’t doing enough to help the people affected by the drought in the region. “We are pastoralists. Borders do not define who we are,” she says. “A person says he belongs to a country when that country is ready to help and protect its people. From what we are experiencing now, a refugee in Dadaab is better off than I am.”

Aid agencies contend that that the Kenyan government should be able to respond to the needs of its people, rather than await international aid programs to cater for its drought-stricken citizens.

For instance, though the Livestock Marketing Council was established to source better markets for the pastoralists’ livestock, they seem to be out of options considering the situation on the ground. Every day, tens of cows die in the Garissa market, says Abdullahi Nur Hassan, Secretary of the District Livestock Marketing Council. The laboriously-breathing, bony mammals lie dejectedly in the market while their owners hover around them till they breathe their last.

As Hassan takes us round, a woman carrying her baby intently follows what he says. She herself has walked the distance from Wajir to Garissa, witnessing her cows die one after the other. Today, she is smiling, for the district council has provided the remaining 8 out of 52 cows some graze.

“I am 60 years old,” says Hassan, “and I think this is the worst drought that has hit this area ever. No rain has come in 4 years,” he adds.

The Road to Dadaab:

IT IS 7AM IN THE MORNING and the road to Dadaab is nothing but an unremarkable practical lesson in geography. The sun is radiating through the clouds that hang low in the sky signalling to a horizon that offers nothing but dryness and aridity.

Except for a pastoralist herding his camel in the wild, or a loner walking resignedly in the desert, the only other people you meet for over 90 KMs to Dadaab are the residents of the small towns of Hagarbur and Sareedo. Ostriches, giraffes, and impalas occasionally cross your way, stare into the vehicle before hurriedly running into the wild.

The world’s biggest refugee camp disappoints the imagination anyone who expect wholesale squalor from the first sight. The expansive UN compound sits to the right of the township flanked by a guest house, a police station, a mini market, a livestock market, and a football field.

Hennaed ladies wearing brightly-coloured clothes walk around the area and young men lounge idly in front of verandas. Motorcycles are a business venture here, ferrying people from point to another.

Once beyond the town centre one is hit hard by the reality. The biggest famine in 60 years, the worst to hit Somalia in 20 years, the first famine of the 21st century, and the results of a culmination of over 4 years of no rain and harsh climate has marked its spot in the Horn of Africa. Destitution and despair are not only words in the dictionary here; they are actual verbs that carry the full strength of their meaning.

It is an imagined haven for hundreds of thousands out of insecurity and poverty, but it is at the same time hell on earth. It is indeed a patent position for the reality of a drought that has captured the imagination of the world.

Everywhere you turn to, there is a barbed wire, a marked metallic fence, or even tree stems put against each other to mark off or separate an area or location. That is what Dadaab has stood for in the last 20 years: a refugee camp built first to bring in the flowing number of refugees fleeing the war-torn nation of Somalia.

The refugee camps around the town are mainly three: Ifo, Dagahley and Hagardera. They now host three times the size that they were built for, and the mass exodus of the estimated 3.7 million people who have been affected by the drought in south-central Somalia is not helping at all.

We meet groups after groups of people who are coming back from receiving their bi-weekly ration of food. Women in jilbab – the all-covering Muslim headgear – huddle together carrying plastic bags while carrying their children on the back. They all face down as they carry their rations, looking tired and exhausted. When a car approaches, they stand aside, watch as it passes, and move on with their lives after that.

For a society that values self-sufficiency, self-respect and independence, life under the care of UN agencies and international non-governmental organizations comes as a rude shock. Here, lines stretch just for the new arrivals to register and then receive rations of food. Glassy-eyed children cling to their mothers, while some sleep dangling from their backs as the elderly shout to get the best and most for their children.

We head to the outskirts of Ifo Camp, where camps have been set up for those who arrived just months ago. From the onset, hardship and adversity seem to be synonymous with the situation on the ground.

Mohamed Adan Hassan left his home in south central Somalia in pursuit for a better alternative. The orange-bearded man with frail eyes left Somalia with his wife, Fatuma Mahamud and daughter Nuurto Mohamed Adan, all of whom have 19 children in total.

Along the way, he was arrested by al-Shabab militants who accused him of “moving to the land of infidels.” They ordered him to take back the children to where they came from, but he refused, which led to his detention. “After a while, they just released me,” he said.

When asked whether he has heard about the news of al-Shabab conceding defeat in Mogadishu the day before, he looks astonished. “Have they?” he asks. “They have been spreading harm. They have been waging a useless war.”

Insecurity in the camp, he says, is also a major concern among the residents. “There are thieves carrying pangas around,” Hassan says. He says that it’s even dangerous to send youngsters to collect wood. “It is very cold around here at night,” he says. “But it is dangerous out there. There are mobs who beat up the children and molest the young girls. It is very sad.”

Diseases are rampant inside the camp. Though there are a number of clinics and hospitals run by organizations like Doctors without Borders and the German aid agency gif, the influx of refugees from Somalia is too large to handle or manage outbreaks.

Hawa Mohamed Adan huddles with eight of her children in a tent plastered with the UNHCR logo. The slender mother, who left two of her children in Somalia, says she is now heartbroken by the dire conditions in the camp. “The children suffer from a bad cough,” she says. “There is a clinic here, but the lines are normally very very long. By the time any care is provided, we are very tired.”

The eight children also have ripe blisters all over their faces and bodies, and their heads seem far too large for their bodies. “They have also been having a running stomach,” she says.

Faith and prayer:

Amidst all this desperation and suffering, the fire of hope and faith keeps the Somalis on both sides of the border going.

Every day, when the sun sets into the horizon, it casts a gloomy reminder of the situation on the ground: of the glassy-eyed, malnourished children who might not leave for another day; or the families who might not have a meal to eat.

In Dadaab, Hassan brushes his hand over his children and grandchildren’s hair. “We are waiting for help from Allah” he says. “Only Allah.”

Back in Garissa, Abdi Ahmed says he wants to one day “live a good life,” “have more children,” “educate all of them,” and protests that as a Kenyan, he “will never register as a refugee in the Dadaab camps.”

His neighbour, Maryam Gure, asserts that it is just a matter of time. “It will be all over,” she says. “Inshallah,” God-willing, “it will.”

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