Families feel abandoned as they scavenge for food

• Children have turned to scavenging, while girls and women are trading sex for food.
• Men from the camp and from outside preying on girls because of their vulnerability
• Most families can only afford a cup of light porridge a day.
• Danger of contracting diseases at the camp as a result of overflowing toilets

And Mrs Esther Njeri Thairu, a mother of 12, said her children often went to bed on empty stomachs since the food she and her husband could afford was never enough. “With the meagre wages I get from working at a farm in Kiamunyi and Engachura, I can only afford to buy one-and-half kilogrammes of maize flour and several bunches of sukuma wiki,” she said.

On several occasions, she fails to get the causal jobs, so the family sleeps hungry.

Mrs Thairu, who has children aged between one and 18, all living in the same tent, said the last time she got food rations from the Government through the Kenya Red Cross was more than one month ago.

Asked why she was still living at the camp yet the Government was issuing money to refugees to return to their former homes, Mrs Thairu said she would never go back to Uasin Gishu District. She said she did not feel secure enough to return to the area, especially now that her would-be host had also been evicted.

She noted that the Sh10,000 the Government was giving families to leave the camp was way too little, and was not even enough to rent a house and feed her large family for a month.

“Look at the kind of a family I have. What can I do with Sh10, 000? How long will it last us before we become hopeless beggars?” she asked, and appealed to the Government to rethink its decision and fully compensate those who were still remaining at the camp so that they could restart their lives.

Every five years

She appealed to the Government to consider settling them elsewhere where they felt safe. “Some of the people here are tired of being attacked after every five years and their property is destroyed and their relatives killed. They do not want to return,” she said.

Another victim, Ms Sofia Kerubo, said she was on her way to the town centre to beg food at the market since her family was on the verge of starvation.

She said people were living in unhygienic conditions since even Nakuru council, which used to collect garbage, did not do so any more.

Overflowing toilets

Ms Kerubo spoke of overflowing toilets, adding, there was danger of contracting diseases at the camp.

Camp chairman Peter Kariuki Githinji said life was becoming unbearable, and that people had started dying due to water borne diseases. A man had died of diarrhoea last Saturday, he said, adding, most drainage tunnels had blocked as the council no longer offered services.

But provincial children’s officer Abdi Mohamed said children from the camps had not drifted into the streets. The children roaming the streets, he said, were from destitute families and broken homes.

The department had Sh2 million from CDF to renovate a children’s home on Nakuru-Eldoret highway, he said.