Friday, August 26, 2011
Every day two to three thousand families come to this distribution centre to get a week's worth of food supplies. It's one of several in the area. But aid workers from this Turkish charity say their resources are stretched by the sheer weight of numbers, and they can only provide these families with just enough to survive.
This is Dadaab refugee camp on the Kenyan-Somali border. It was designed to hold 90 thousand people. Today it's home to almost half a million.
More than a thousand refugees arrive here every day from Somalia, crossing several hundred kilometres of barren and dusty wasteland on a perilous journey that can take weeks on foot, and which some do not survive.
The world community has pledged hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, and aid agencies from countries such as Iran and Turkey have already shipped thousands of tonnes of aid directly into Somalia.
But aid workers on the ground here in Dadaab fear that this refugee camp, now the biggest in the world, is being forgotten, and they're pleading with the world community for help.