Happy World Humanitarian Day!

Yesterday was World Humanitarian Day, a "celebration of people helping people" as well as to remember those people who have lost their lives working for humanitarian causes.

This year's particular focus was the crisis in the horn of Africa, and the UN used the day to encourage donors to "give, and give more" to famine relief.  More than $1 billion US is still needed to meet basic needs in Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti, including to 300,000 severely malnourished children in imminent risk of death.



A lot of these children are ending up in Dadaab where there are a lot of humanitarian workers providing some really remarkable care to these kids.

To my lovely Lutheran family members in particular: the last picture is people from the Lutheran World Federation, which is surveying and demarcating plots for the new refugee camp in Dadaab, Kambioos.  Kambioos will house 90,000 mostly new arrivals from Somalia (for reference, 91,304 refugees have arrived since the beginning of June alone).  The land for this camp, 20 square meters, is remote and very bushy and has to be surveyed, demarcated, cleared, and tents pitched before people can be assigned a plot and moved in.  Latrines must be dug, boreholes for clean water drilled, health clinics and schools established and so much more, but none of this can be done until LWF goes through, and they've been doing an awesome job in a really challenging situation (extremely hot, Ramadan means the laborers will only work during the morning, a somewhat hostile and demanding host community, thick and thorny bush [every time I've been out to Kambioos I've left with at least one bleeding scratch].  My organization will providing health and nutrition services to the camp, but we couldn't set up our clinics without the work LWF is doing, and they couldn't do it without the donations people around the world have made to them, so thanks to everyone who has!