“Remember us”
World Vision UK Chief Executive, Justin Byworth, is in the Horn of Africa, where drought is endangering the lives of some 13 million people.
An overwhelming day in Dadaab, the world’s largest refugee camp, finding both tragedy and a resilient spirit amongst the nearly half a million Somali people there.
Amidst this mass of human suffering and humanitarian response, the stories of individual children, women and men still reach through powerfully. The first person I spoke to this morning, at a distribution of World Vision family kits, was Fatuma. She told me how she had walked for a week with her five children to get here just three weeks ago. The journey took a tragic toll. Her five-year-old daughter Amina had measles and in the chaos and confusion of those first few days waiting to be registered and housed in Dadaab, Amina died. With countless such stories here it’s understandable that relief workers here monitor ‘mortality rates’ with a red flag if they exceed two per 10,000 per day. That is still nearly 100 like Amina dying each day.
Fatuma, 32, and her daughter, Absa, two
It’s hard to know what to think, say or do in the midst of this. Yet Fatuma is determined to make a life for herself and her remaining four children, as she told me with her youngest girl, two-year-old Absa, on her hip, opening up the kit of cooking pots, soap, buckets, blankets and mosquito net with real excitement at the prospect of making a new home. I helped her carry this to the bus outside the registration area to take her there, and later we went to see the tents that World Vision and ShelterBox supporters have helped us provide to give 5,000 families like Fatuma’s a home.
Dadaab is a vast spread of tents and makeshift shelters amidst clouds of dust and thorn trees blowing in the wind. There are over 430,000 refugees surviving here and with over a thousand more arriving each day it’s an almost impossible task to meet this scale of human need.
A ShelterBox tent that can house a family
Dadaab has been here for 20 years or so, but has doubled in size over the last year due to the famine and war in Somalia. As we drove for 20 minutes through one small part of Dadaab to the newly expanded Ifo camp we past thousands upon thousands of domed tents and shelters – it’s easy to see that this is now one of the largest cities in Kenya.
This demands, and is getting, a huge international response, with an array of organisations working together tirelessly to set up and manage the camps, provide food, water, shelter, health, education and more. I met with UNHCR (the United Nations High Commission for Refugees), the World Food Programme, the Kenyan government’s Department for Refugee Affairs, and saw many other agencies at work. Clement, who works with one of World Vision’s partners in Dadaab, the Lutheran World Service, told me that “working here, a month feels like a year”. I can easily believe it. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. As my friend Steve, who’s worked with World Vision in emergencies for 20 years, said: “None of us have”.
Dadaab refugee camp, where World Vision has set up 5,000 emergency tents
My next stop is into Somalia itself. Despite the horror of famine and war there, the Somali people seem to have an unquenchable spirit, as one woman who’d had her home in Mogadishu burned down told me today: “I’m appealing to the whole world to remember us and help us. We really love our country and I will be one of the first to go back once we have peace and no more famine”.
