The Long Haul

After I posted the picture last week of the refugee camp being laid out, my mom said to me that it was really interesting and that she had never really thought about how refugee camps are designed and laid out and built.  I hadn't thought of that before, either, but it is interesting to see.  I've seen this camp go from this:

To this just a couple of weeks later:

To this:

 And, on my last visit, this, populated and functioning:

It's a fascinating process to watch, and not something that many people, even in this line of work, ever see.  The other refugee camps--Hagadera, Ifo and Dagahaley--have all been around for 15 or 20 years and in many ways feel like established little (or not so little, each camp alone has more than 120,000 residents) villages. 

This got me thinking about how it might be to come back to Kambioos in 15 or 20 years and see it having evolved into its own established village, and what it would be like to think that I had been there to see the beginning of that.   But, I realized really quickly, that's quite a sobering thought because it assumes that in that period of time there will still be all those refugees there.  That issues in Somalia won't be sufficiently resolved that people will want to go back, even if new arrivals have slowed down.  That the international won't have come up with a better solution than a 20 square kilometer bushy, dusty plot in the remote desert of Kenya.  That the majority of people in the camp won't have figured out ways to make it elsewhere.

Maybe one or all of these things won't be true.  Maybe in 20 years, Kambioos will be back to what it was in the first picture, an ignored patch of bush used for grazing goats and camels.  But this seems unlikely given Somalia's past and climate change and politics. 

I don't have any answers to how to resolve the long term problems and issues facing Somalia and Somali refugees and really all refugees.  I don't actually think anybody does.  So I'll settle for thinking about what Kambioos being created offers now, and how important those things are...

Shelter for those who have walked so far for so long in search of food security,

reliable and high quality health care for anyone who needs it,

available adequate food,

clean water,

peace of mind that children won't go to bed hungry.

(All of the above pictures are taken in Kambioos except the World Food Program tents, which are in Hagadera.  All the food for Kambioos is being stored in Hagdera and trucked to the food distribution points in Kambioos right now, until WFP can get storage tents up in Kambioos.)

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!

EEE-EEE-EEE-EEE-EEE

In response to a number of increasingly loud complaints, I thought I should blog a bit.

In fairness to me, I've been working 14+ hour days, at the end of which sitting down at my computer and writing some more isn't at the top of my list.  That honor belongs to Season 4 of Mad Men.

To be honest, maybe what I mean by "increasingly loud complaints" is "I finished all of Season 4 of Mad Men and now I don't have anything else to do after work."

A brief update for those who don't know (and I'll try to go back and fill some of this in in the next few days):  I was in Kenya working on some monitoring and evaluation stuff, went to western Kenya for a few days for work, had an amazing safari and beach vacation with my wonderful boyfriend, and then was asked to be part of an emergency response team to Dadaab Refugee Camp in northeastern Kenya along the Kenya-Somalia border.

In case you haven't seen CNN (Sanjay Gupta AND Anderson Cooper have been here, it must be serious), The New York Times, etc., Dadaab has been around for 20 or so years and is the largest refugee camp in the world.  But starting a few months ago, as drought turned into famine in Somalia and the political turmoil and insecurity there prevented any significant amount of food or other aid from entering, Somali refugees have been pouring across the border into Kenya.  As many as 1,700 people a day have been showing up in Dadaab needing food, shelter, medical care and so much more.  This has, of course, put a strain on existing services in Dadaab, especially given that the people coming to Dadaab are in terrible shape--dehydrated, malnourished, unvaccinated, sick, broken-hearted.  There's a tremendous need for both money and people to implement new services to make sure that their needs are met.  That's why I'm here:  my organization is going to be providing the health and nutrition services in a new camp that that is opening up in the next few days to house all the new arrivals.

As you can imagine, things can get pretty heavy around here with all that's going on.  You see a lot of awful stuff, the days are long and there is tremendous work to be done which has to be done now.  Peoples' lives literally depend on you getting that work done.

Which is why I thought I would ease back into blogging by telling you about the bat that lives outside my window.

I should start by saying that I am tremendously lucky to have a room at all, and I'm not clear exactly how it happened.  Accommodation is a hot commodity in Dadaab right now, since new organizations (like mine) have come and existing organizations have brought more people.  There are significant security concerns (Al Shabaab, the same people making it impossible to deliver aid in Somalia) here, especially for Westerners, so everybody stays in a large United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) compound with a secured perimeter.  But this means that it can't just expand.  Instead, every new organization that comes is squeezing in, mostly by pitching tents everywhere.

I spent the first week I was here in a safari tent with a roommate and the next few weeks in a Coleman camping tent.  The camping tent was totally fine except for that there is a fierce wind here and there's no trees or anything to stop it, so when it hits the side of your tent, things can get ugly.  I literally had to get up in the middle of the night to restake it into the sand most nights (strangely, sand doesn't hold the tent stakes well in 30+ mile per hour winds).  But the area where our tents were got full and, with more people arriving to take our spot there the next day, I went in search of more space to pitch tents.  I ended up stumbling onto two rooms at another agency (plus room in the yard to pitch several tents as more of our staff come---I'm the sole representative of my organization right now, holding down the Dadaab fort).  As the only person here I've claimed one of the rooms as mine for now, but it's back to the tent as soon as other people come and this gets turned into an office.

So anyway.  I was (and still am) quite pleased with myself for tracking down these rooms.  But there's a downside.  There's a bat.  It lives in the tree right outside my room.  It makes a high pitched squealing noise for 5 seconds every 30 seconds all night every night.  At someone's suggestion (in full disclosure: this someone was a relatively high ranking employee of the American government, which may explain something, either about governance in America or about the suggestion, I'm not sure which), I've named it Hermione in an attempt to build a positive relationship with it and not want to kill it all night, every night.  It hasn't worked.

(Side note:  What has worked is my development of a pitch-perfect imitation of the bat's noise, which I unfortunately chose to demonstrate to a group of people at a goat grilling get together on Saturday.  Further side note: I had already disgraced myself at this gathering by being handed a prime little chunk of goat meat and promptly dropping it into the sand because it was scalding-straight-off-the-grill-finger-burning hot.  My apologies to all involved on both counts.) 

The first night I was convinced the bat was in the ceiling because a) the room reeked of bat guano (a distinct and awful smell) and b) the sound was so loud.  This was especially distressing to me because, as a public health nerd advocate I have a subscription to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report for a little light bedtime reading.  This esteemed journal recently had an excellent report of a man who was bit by a bat, thought nothing of it, and then died a slow and agonizing death of rabies 9 months later. 

After sleeping for a total for 47 seconds that first night, I was able to clear up that the bat was outside, and also move to the room next door (also rented by my organization) that seems to be upwind of the bat guano and smells delightfully fresh.  Now I'm just left to be haunted by Hermione's sweet bat song, serenading me to sleep each night, and, of course, to provide the entertainment at all events in Dadaab with my impersonation of Hermione (it's a real crowd pleaser).

On that note, Hermione has started in, so it's time for me to douse myself in mosquito spray and crawl under the mosquito net for another good night of sleep.  I promise I will write more tomorrow, as per popular demand (er, pending release of Man Men Season 5 or something...).