Canadian-funded camps are over-whelmed by refugees, who are physically and mentally scarred by a war-stricken country

"Somalis, the ones who are in the camps, are probably in the most difficult and harsh conditions that a human being could imagine," said Karin Michnick of Toronto, a resettlement officer in Kenya for the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR).

Fleeing fierce battles between Islamic militias and government and Ethiopian troops, more than 3,000 Somalis crossed the border to the three sprawling camps in Dadaab, Kenya, in June alone, pushing camp numbers to more than 202,000, the UN said.

In the camps, CARE Canada operates education, water and sanitation with funding from the

Karin Michnick of Toronto poses for a photograph in Dadaab, Kenya. Michnick, a resettlement officer for the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), helps Somali refugees emigrate from the camps in Kenya. Ethan Baron / Canwest News Service

Many of the refugees bear grievous wounds suffered in the crossfire before fleeing their Horn of Africa country.

"It is the worst place in the world," said Hawo Amin Mohamed, 51, her lower leg badly twisted and scarred from an artillery blast last year that killed her husband and three of their four children in Mogadishu, Somalia's capital. Mohamed lifts a sheet off her neighbour, revealing recent, untreated third-degree burns covering the woman from face to feet.

Medical clinics at the camps are "very, very substandard," said Erin Ajygin, a resettlement worker with the UN agency whose eyes are still sensitive to dust and sun after she was nearly blinded by a spitting cobra in April.

"You walk into them and you can't imagine that they perform surgery there."

Half the camp population is under 18, and twice-monthly rations of oil, corn meal and beans are "not enough to sustain a growing child," said Michnick, a former decision-maker for the Immigration and Refugee Board in Toronto and Montreal.

"There are critical levels of malnutrition," she said.

Skyrocketing fuel prices threaten to bring more misery to Dadaab. The cost of diesel, used to pump drinking water, and bring in food and supplies, has risen nearly 40 per cent since the UNHCR's yearly Dadaab budget was set.

"It is affecting us in a massive way," said Anne Campbell, head of camp operations for the UNHCR.

"We may have to reduce the number of shelters. We'll take a look and see where we can cut."

Arriving refugees are allotted sticks, and sometimes tarps, to build shelters, and tens of thousands of crude, dome-shaped homes sit on dusty red sand beneath thorn trees. In some areas, tin-roofed mud huts have been built, but in others, new arrivals must erect their shelters on a treeless plain of flat sand, because refugees are overflowing the existing space.

Hagadera camp, with its 82,000 residents, and Ifo camp, with 72,000, are packed, and Campbell figures about 20,000 more refugees can be squeezed among the 49,000 in Dagahaley camp. Others take a bleaker outlook.

"We're full now," Ajygin said.

With the increasing density comes rising tension among the refugees.

"Many of them are traumatized, and in overcrowded situations, and so they react against each other," Michnick said.

Kenyans living in the area complain angrily to the government that refugees are encroaching on their land, Michnick added.

The vast majority of the Somali refugees in Dadaab have no intention of returning to Somalia unless an unlikely peace arrives in their country. But nearly every family has a member who has gone back, to look for loved ones, or check on their land, or look for lost livestock, Ajygin said. About half the time, the outcome is fatal, she said.

"You'll say, 'Where's your brother?' and they'll say, 'He went back to Somalia. We heard on the radio that he'd been killed,'" Ajygin said.

Each camp has schools, but elementary instructors are not trained teachers, and even in the secondary schools, there is only one book for every 10 children, and classes can reach 90 pupils in size.

"There is so little future here," said Agnieszka Korus, a senior program manager for CARE Kenya.

Although murder is rare, women constantly face the threat of sexual violence.

"There is a certain amount of rape that happens," Campbell said. "Women, when they go out to collect firewood, they can be attacked."

Many rapes go unreported, and women who do report attacks usually won't identify the perpetrator, Campbell said.

Some of the women who have come by foot from Somalia were raped along the way, and some of the walking refugees have been attacked by hyenas, Ajygin said.

Most of the recent arrivals are former urban dwellers from the Mogadishu area, and possessed the $70 necessary for truck transport. Refugees have lived in Dadaab since 1991.

"It's still operating as if it's an emergency, and it shouldn't be," Michnick said. "Part of the problem is the influx is so high."

Slowly, refugees are being approved for emigration, many to the U.S., some to Canada. The U.S. has committed to taking 6,000 Somali refugees this year, and has brought in about 2,500 so far. The UNHCR administers the application process for emigration, putting those refugees first who have been in Dadaab the longest, or have pressing medical needs.

Coming to Canada to chase a dream

They have known little but deprivation, trauma and loss, these 100,000 children of the Dadaab refugee camps in Kenya. Although they depend on the outside world to survive, most know virtually nothing of life beyond the confines of their camp. A lucky few escape, some by emigration, a smaller number through dedication to scholastic achievement:

Nova Scotia scholarship

Halima Ahmed Abdille was only two when a bomb set off by bandits tore through the truck in which she was fleeing Somalia with her family. Her father lost a middle finger in the explosion and several people in the vehicle were killed.

And Abdille, now 20, also cannot remember the gunman's bullet that hit the jerry can of water she and her mother had collected just before finally escaping Somalia.

She is a child of war, with the face of an angel, and she's coming to Canada this year.

"I will be leaving my family here in the camp and I will be starting a new life," said Abdille, who lives in Dadaab's Ifo camp with her parents, four sisters and brother.

She has won a scholarship to Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax and is slated to start a four-year program this fall.

Abdille plans to focus on biochemistry and one day work as a laboratory scientist.

"It is my favourite field of study," she said. "I want to excel at that."

Though she will miss her family, Abdille is looking forward to the end of her 18 years in the refugee camp. She and her parents and siblings live in mud huts inside a compound surrounded by a rough brush fence covered in tattered sheets. They have one plastic chair.

"It was very harsh," she said, "those years that we have spent here. The basic needs were even difficult to find."

For her father Ahmed Abdille Abdi, his daughter's good fortune is a mixed blessing.

"Parents like to have their children with them all the time, to be together," said Abdi, 85. "Or to be in a better place, and to be happy."

B.C. scholarship

Marwo Aden Dubow was six years old in 1991 when civil war erupted in Somalia.

"We fled to escape the bullets and the fighting, the killing," said Dubow, 23, who lives in the full-to-bursting Hagadera camp at Dadaab. "I was small, but I remember. I remember my father was killed, and my mother was killed."

With her two sisters and young brother, Dubow made her way toward Kenya, by vehicle when possible, otherwise on foot.

"There was no water, there was no food," Dubow said.

Now, she is poised to fly to Canada next month, to attend the University of Victoria, on a scholarship from the World University Service of Canada and the U.K.-based Windle Trust.

Dubow plans to study international relations, and obtain a master's degree, then work with an agency aiding refugees.

"I know what it is like to be a refugee," she said.

And she intends to work to promote education of Somali girls and women, who are often encouraged or forced to marry instead of continuing school.

"I am going to remove all of those barriers if possible," Dubow said.

Victoria, she expects, will present many surprises.

"Snow, I have never seen," she said. "I have only heard about it."

Ontario scholarship

This fall, a young Somali woman get off a plane in Toronto and walk into a brand-new world. She will ride an escalator for the first time, perhaps buy food or drinks from a vending machine. And she will step into the library at the University of Toronto, and be surrounded by more books than she has ever seen.

Muno Mohamed Osman, 20, escaped exploding violence in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1991, travelling to the Dadaab refugee camps in Kenya with her parents, two brothers and two sisters.

Since finishing secondary school in the Hagadera camp at Dadaab, she has been a teacher in her former elementary school there, instructing pupils in English and Islamic studies.

"Schooling here is hard, because there's always a scarcity of everything: teachers, books," Osman said.

Hardships of refugee life compound the woes of students and teachers.

"Sometimes the food that's given us is not enough, and it finishes before the next distribution comes," Osman said.

She has hopes of becoming a novelist, and plans to study literature at the U of T, which she is attending on a scholarship from the World University Service of Canada and the U.K.-based Windle Trust.

"I am very much looking forward to getting education," Osman said, "and working if it is possible, to help my family back here."

SOURCE: CanWest,  July 4, 2008

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nargale @ 7/6/2008 2:28 PM EST  Sucaad!!!No idid`t watch that single thing,but i watched an Idian move called "COOLIE"and it can be very usefull to you!!!soo if your plan is to go to Kandahar&Waziristan,why do you tell people to go back somalia&help their country?and let me correct you about that part of the world,as you seem to be misinformed,Girls are killed upone birth&before-since techNO allows that today.Women are outnumberd seven to one&dont marry according to choice,but class!!and since when an Indian price went so high?But iam not here to dicourage you,actually i might be some help,"China has reported five million extra men,Therefore-Go China please"where women worth everything!!Its also unfair to take it out at me,every time he frustrates you!!!aaaaahua hua hua huaa!!!