UNICEF Australia Chief Executive Norman Gillespie writes from Dadaab, the largest refugee camp in Kenya.
15 October 2011
©UNICEF
Today we traversed desert bush for six hours to get to Riba, just 60 metrre from the Somali border to a watering hole (a bore drilled by UNICEF) to meet the few remaining nomadic tribesmen. It was an extraordinary scene with a few hundred camels. But the tragedy was there should have been 5000.
The plight of the half million refugees in Kenya is desperate. They are stateless and with little hope of ever being repatriated to another country. One young local aid worker was exasperated that children born in the camps on Kenyan soil are considered stateless. We cannot turn our backs on this situation. We must continue to not only save the lives of fleeing Somalis (80 per cent being women and children) but care for them and offer support. We also can't allow the pastoralists of Northern Kenya to simply disappear.
14 October 2011
Today we visited a UNICEF/Save the Children innovative program for women with babies under one year old. It was a class in nutrition using fresh vegetables and fruit. This was then followed by distribution of vouchers for 1000 shillings per month (about 10 dollars) to be exchanged for fresh food from appointed traders.
©UNICEF
After this, perhaps the most extraordinary and privileged experience, was to visit the makeshift huts of nomadic pastoralists who for centuries had practised a way of life based on animal husbandry. But here they were forced to abandon this life because after three years of no rain they had lost their entire stocks of animals, goats and cattle. They had heard there was a water hole nearby that was being bored near a school, and planned to settle beside it.
Norman speaks to nomadic pastoralists who have lost their entire livelihoods after three years of no rain. ©UNICEF
I'll end with a visit we made to a remarkable child friendly space in one of the camps. It was amazing, much more than just a safe area. It was an Early Learning Centre, an unlikely garden, a psychological counselling service, a school, a community centre. But in everything the children's voices were central, in a place where they are otherwise powerless. The supervisor was a remarkable spirit and it is he who has created this place, this sanctuary.
13 October 2011
Dadaab is not a camp – it’s a township which houses the greatest concentration of refugee camps, five in all and quite separate.
We saw where Somalians arrive for 24-hours of transition – a humane period of peace and security and care before proceeding to registration. It is here that doctors from Medecins Sans Frontiers carry out a quick visibility check for malnutrition and complications. We saw a tent with two children awaiting their mother who was in the hospital.
It is an arid, barren, desperate landscape where the pastoralists I was privileged to spend time with, had not seen rain for three years. There are no green leaves for animals to eat. There are few animals, though plenty of carcasses along the road. Large scavenger birds, a cross between pelicans and vultures hang around ominously. Each morning we look up and see dark clouds looking as if they are pregnant with rain. But no rain comes.
Above: Nafidha and her son Mohamed. ©UNICEF
We visited a stabilisation centre (a ward for severely malnourished children). The ward was supposed to have 22 beds, yet 39 were crammed, the situation getting worse with new influxes from the camps themselves. The centre had 14 arrivals yesterday, five more today. I was able to speak through an interpreter to 23-year-old Nafidha whose son Mohamed was one year old and very ill.
He was suffering vomiting and diarrhoea and she walked three days towards the border only to be attacked and robbed of all her supplies. She had to return from where she started to get some food and off she went again, determined to bring her son to Dadaab for treatment and a better life away from the terrors of Al-Shabaab. Mohamed was close to death when she finally arrived four days ago. He immediately was put on a drip and began therapeutic feeding every three hours. Mohamed was off the drip when I saw him and even though his little head flopped to the side and his body was listless, I was told he will survive.
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