The plight — and the hope — of Somali refugees in Kenya
March 8, 2007
I couldn't help but feel gratitude at the sheer freedom of movement: we were flying out of the Dadaab refugee camps in northeast Kenya on a United Nations flight, heading to a hotel in Nairobi.
Soon I could choose a dinner of something other than the rice and beans we'd eaten two times a day for six days in the compound for CARE staff. I knew there would be no bats at my door that night, or crickets, toads and geckos sharing my room.
I had been to Dadaab with the CBC's Africa correspondent, David McGuffin, and cameraman/editor Mike Heenan to produce stories for The National. Now I felt relief at leaving.
But Dadaab had not left me.
The refugee life at Dadaab
Truck brings water to new arrivals at Dadaab refugee camp, Kenya (Photo: Danae Pauli) |
Named after the Kenyan village of Dadaab, the three refugee camps are located in one of the harshest areas of Kenya, 80 kilometres from the border with Somalia.
There are 175,000 refugees in the three camps, the vast majority Somali. Thirty thousand have arrived within the past year, fleeing the most recent rounds of fighting in their homeland.
The aid agencies travel the long packed-sand trails between the camps in convoys to protect themselves against bandits. The region is hot and dry except when there is flooding, as there was last fall. Nothing much grows in the sand.
So the refugees rely on the shipments of food from the UN's World Food Program. It's sorghum porridge two times a day for many of the families without relatives abroad — or without a family member employed by one of the aid agencies.
The lucky ones with money in their pockets can buy sugar, pasta and vegetables in markets that have sprung up in the camps. But even those lucky ones live in a world rife with malaria, tuberculosis and, more recently, the Ebola-like Rift Valley fever.
And they sit caught between two worlds.
A woman's story
In our first days, we met Kadijo Ali Adan, a recent arrival from Somalia who had lost her husband in fighting between Islamic militia and the warlords in her city of Kismayo.
She told us a harrowing story of fleeing with her children to the safety of a transit camp inside the Kenyan border — only to be turned back by the Kenyan authorities.
Kadijo Ali Adan and her youngest daughter, the girl who was lost in the bushes (Photo: Danae Pauli) |
Just inside Somalia, she and her children were caught in an air strike. Her 14-year-old daughter died and another daughter, a three-year-old, was lost in the bushes for four nights.
With the help of people she knew in Dadaab, she brought what was left of her family across the border at night and made it to the safety of the camp.
A young man's story
Soon after, we talked to Dini Saiad Ali, a young man who has lived in the camps since the 1991 civil war in Somalia.
He did well in the primary and secondary schooling provided by the Kenyan government but now has nothing to do.
He has not been picked for resettlement, has not found a job with one of the aid agencies and fears he will never be able to go back to Somalia.
"You just get on the mat and think over and over you have nothing to do," he said. "You are a refugee."
For every Kadijo, for every Dini, there were hundreds more people with tales of frustration and suffering. For every interview we taped, there were people handing us notes or pleading through translators for their stories to be heard.
As Mohammed Qazilbash of CARE Canada told us before we went into Dadaab, it's a place that makes you realize how arbitrary life is, a place that makes you wonder why one person is stuck there with nothing when another lives a comfortable life in Canada.
Osman's story
Dadaab refugee camp (Photo: Danae Pauli) |
Of all the people we met, I will be haunted longest by a young man named Abdi Osman Aden, a tall, thin 22-year-old with a friendly smile and the marks of some childhood disease on his forehead.
Osman is fortunate to have one of the cherished jobs in the camps. He works as an interpreter for CARE and makes about $55 a month.
Osman became part of our team as we moved around the camps. He was bright, helpful and quick to understand what we needed.
Whenever we did an interview, crowds would build up around us. Osman became the crowd control expert, waving his long thin arms to tell people to stand back, yelling in Somali at the children who tried to cross the line of the camera frame.
Osman also tried to help us carry the gear but he struggled with the weight of the tripod in a way that no well-fed 22-year-old in Canada would.
Osman helped us find the characters we needed to tell their stories, never once pushing his own.
He told David what they said as he interviewed them and then later sat with me at a screening machine while I tried to get exact translations.
Front row, from left: Mike Heenan, Danae Pauli (CARE), Abdi Osman Aden, David McGuffin, Debi Goodwin (Photo: Danae Pauli) |
We discussed the philosophy of translation, the need to get the spirit of the clip, the need to make it sound natural in English.
He grew excited as we worked, energized by the occupation of his mind. "This is what I want to do," he said. "I want to be a journalist. This is what I want to do."
On the day we left, after I had paid Osman for his days with us, I told him he didn't have to stay in the small CARE compound while we waited for the convoy that would take us back to the main compound.
But he did stay and he eventually talked to me about his own situation: the unaffordable cost of sugar in the market, his mother who needed a special diet after years of poor nutrition, his hope that he would get out of the camp somehow.
There was a little polite hinting that maybe there was a way he could get to Canada — but he didn't push and I gave him no false hope.
I watched him sink lower in his chair as the rest of us talked about what we would do the next day, the day after we left Dadaab.
And so it was Osman I thought of as we flew away from the camp, a young man with so much potential and no place to use it.
Source: CBC, Mar 08, 2007