‘I was forced to leave my twin sons in the jungle’

It is 10 o’clock in the morning and the punishing sun of Kenya’s northeast is already at it, baking the vast expanse that is this semi-arid frontier in a heat wave that saps energy from every living thing in sight.

Gusts of warm wind sweep through the hostile landscape, leaving in their wake mushroom-shaped clouds of dust and, as a result, tearing eyes.

Standing forlorn, almost forgotten, in this remote part of the world is the biggest refugee camp on earth, Dadaab, home to hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing even more hostile climes back home.

If this disaster of an existence is a refuge to them, nothing can even begin to describe the magnitude of the suffering they ran away from in Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia and other countries to the north of Kenya.

Life in Dadaab has been described variously as evidence of the worst humanitarian disaster ever.

Last week, a UN agency chief touring the camp admitted that he had never, in his many visits to different disaster zones, “seen people in this kind of desperate situation”.

But United Nations Higher Commissioner for Refugees’ Antonio Guterres probably lacked better words — harsher adjectives — to describe the cruelty of life here.

And he was not alone in that dilemma. Oxfam goodwill ambassador Kristin Davis, she of the Sex and the City fame, only managed to say she felt “shocked” to see what these people have gone through during an earlier visit.

But ‘shocked’ was not enough a word to express the emotions burning inside her chest on seeing the vagaries of Dadaab, and so she broke down.

Prime Minister Raila Odinga, one of the most steely men in Kenya’s political landscape, did a good job to keep the tears away during his visit to the camp last Thursday, but his eyes welled with emotion nonetheless at the sight of emaciated men, women and children who, after walking hundreds of kilometres through the harshest of terrain, arrived in Dadaab only to join a long queue of exiles, seated or half-asleep under the scorching sun because they are too weak to stand, waiting to be admitted as refugees.

Mr Odinga immediately ordered the re-opening of Kenya’s border with Somalia and that of the Ifo II camp, but, although that could be a respite to many here, it is likely to turn into a small stop-gap measure as thousands trickle in fleeing the war and hunger in Somalia.

Dadaab to them is the Promised Land, a remote city complete with sandy tracks for streets and bush vines for houses.

And this never-ending influx is pushing locals to the limit. “They have settled as far away as Kumahumato Division (outside the camp area).

Now we don’t know where our goats will browse,” laments Ali Mohammed, a resident at Dagahaley, one of Dadaab’s encampments.

Ali Mohammed’s concerns, however, may sound petty to Hassan Nur, a 57-year-old who arrived here 10 days ago with his wife Khadijah.

It is easy to spot Nur among the surging crowd of hungry mothers suckling malnourished children, lost children, widows and widowers because of the calmness with which he approaches issues.

The old man, now walking with the posture of an 80-year-old, says he trekked the 450 kilometres from Dinsur in the Bay region of Baidoa, Somalia, because he valued his life and family more than anything else.

He was a rich man back in Somalia, the proud owner of a herd of camels that he abandoned for peace.

Now all he owns is a sooty kettle, two pairs of old bathroom slippers, a stainless steel mug, a sack that is his mattress, a donkey and a couple of yellow water cans.

Nur has worn the same macawis — a type of kitenge cloth wrapped around the waist by Somali men — for a month now, and it is beginning to look more like a rag than a piece of clothing.

His wife Khadija no longer complains about chest pains because “I have grown used to that”. She wheezed throughout the journey to Kenya, and now she feels relieved that they made it, dirt-poor though they are now.

“We carried along our only remaining portion of sorghum and set off on foot. We knew we would die if we didn’t get up,” says her husband Nur.

Joining them on the flight of faith were two of their six children. The other four, Nur says, were old enough to weigh the situation for themselves. They opted to stick it out in Somalia, and Nur says he doesn’t know whether they are still alive or dead.

Being a refugee demands that one subscribes to the rule of the jungle, and for Muslims, that means becoming an infidel of sorts.

Nuriyo Aden, a 40-year-old mother of five, fled with her two children; Mahid Aden, 7; and Asha Mohid, 3. Asha, her eyes receding into tiny, malnourished sockets, is no longer veiled as most Somali girls would, and her mother, though disapproving of that, says there is nothing she can do to honour her religious duty.

She doesn’t remember where her husband is. “Perhaps he died,” she says, then, after a long silence during which she stares into nothingness, adds: “But I don’t know.”

Dadaab lies only 100 kilometres from the Kenya-Somalia border at Liboi, but the jungle is unforgiving and painfully thorny.

With old gully tracks serving as uncertain routes to freedom, the journey from the border takes four days on foot.

Some of the refugees here have come from as far away as Kismayu in Jubbada, trekking nearly 400 kilometres across Somalia, skirting bandits along the way, enduring blisters and massive headaches under the hot sun, and dodging bullets and death from exhaustion.

“We begged for food from those we met on the way, and at times other refugees gave us part of what they had,” explains Nuriyo on how they survived.

Some lose direction once on Kenyan territory and wander aimlessly until they die of starvation or exhaustion, says Nur Mohammed, a representative of Kenyans living around Dadaab.

Only the strong live to tell their stories, and mothers have been known to abandon their dying children rather than bear the burden of carrying them in this pilgrimage of hope.

Zamzam Farah is one of those mothers. After carrying her four-year-old twin sons and an infant for hundreds of kilometres, she became so exhausted that she could not bear it any more.

With no one to help her, she was faced with the option of dying of exhaustion together with her three children, leaving the infant in the bush and carrying the heavier twins, or leaving the twins and soldiering on with the infant. She opted to leave the twins, both too weak to walk, in the bush.

On arrival at Dadaab, and with the horror of having abandoned her two children in the forest still tormenting her, she was forced to join a queue at the refugee reception centre in Dagahaley, where she was issued with an identification number before joining the growing number of people the world is doing too little too late to recognise.

But there is hope for them. Where the global community cannot help, Hassan Ahmed Khalif steps in. He is in charge of donations sent in from a mosque in Garissa and spends his days handing out slippers, T-shirts, burqas, foodstuff... name it... to the refugees.

Deep in the sea of eager hands jostling for the handouts is Nur, who is lucky enough to get a change clothes.

Hardened silence

But nothing, not even a change of his waist cloth, could bring joy to Burduni Ali. His only surviving child after the long walk from Somalia is too malnourished that doctors advise admission to hospital.

Burduni watches in hardened silence as his son fights for dear life. But the boy is too weak and it does not take long before doctors announce the battle lost.

The boy is no more. Burduni has lost the last of his family. Sitting there next to him, father cannot believe that son is dead, that he will never wake up in the morning to watch the little boy chase a polythene ball, or help him pluck out a greying shaft of beard. Burduni is alone. A loner in a foreign land.

There are five health posts within the camp and every one of them is full of skinny children with wrinkled skins and pale eyes. At the main hospital, even more children lie on rickety beds as nurses feed them with therapeutic milk.

“The milk provides them with the nutrients they need to recover their strength,” says Alexandre Izart, a Hospital Field Coordinator with MSF.

But some cannot even stomach it. As soon as they swallow it, the little ones spew it out. Their systems are too malnourished, too weak to take the milk, and so nurses resort to administer the milk nasally.

Leave for home

As one leaves the camp, one wonders whether Nur and wife will one day leave Kenya for home, or whether they will spend their sunset days in this horrid environment.

That question, however, is answered by Mahmoud Gulled, the refugee representative for Block N in Ifo.

“We have had challenges here,” he says, “but at least we get constant supply of food rations and our children get medical attention. This place is peaceful.”

Gulled is in charge of about 400 families, and does not plan to return to Somalia any time soon.

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