‘I’ve been a refugee ever since I was five’

At the age of five, Nimo Abdi Ali roamed the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia.

Her parents had just been killed in the civil unrest that began in 1991 while her brother and only sibling was nowhere to be found.

A girl she was with was raped and tortured by the unforgiving militants and left for dead.

Later, a middle-aged woman, who found her traumatised came to her rescue and travelled with her to Dadaab Refugee Camp.

Conflict in war-torn Somalia made it ungovernable, reducing it to unending explosions from grenades and gunshot sounds.

The streets were littered with bodies. Many Somalis came to Kenya for peace.

World Refugee Day

As the World Refugee Day was marked on Monday, Ms Ali, now a 25-year-old mother of two, is struggling to make ends meet and cater for the needs of her sons.

The Nation caught up with her on Monday at Nairobi’s Eastleigh, where she made an appeal for human rights groups to help her feed and educate her children.

“Life has never smiled at me before, though I believe I know the solution. If I could start a business of any kind, I would stop depending on people for handouts,” says Ms Ali, who lives in Kariobangi with a woman she met in Eastleigh.

The woman provides Ms Ali with a place to sleep and only an evening meal. She met the father of her first child at Dadaab, but the man ditched her after finding out that she was pregnant.

He went back to Somalia to look for his parents and relatives with whom he had lost contact.

“He had promised to marry me, but denied it as soon as he discovered I was pregnant. He went to Somalia and was killed there while trying to locate his family members,” Ms Ali said as she fought back tears.

Ms Ali delivered her baby and decided to move to the Kakuma Refugee Camp to find out if things would get any better. It is there that she committed herself to yet another relationship so that the man would provide for her.

Ms Ali got pregnant and again, she was left. She said: “I wanted a man who would take care of me and my child as I was desperate. We had no food and the rations could not sustain us.”

She exchanged her food ration card for money at the camp and travelled to Nairobi to seek work. She has been in the capital for a month and all her efforts to live a better life have been futile.

Ms Ali’s first born, Adam Abdi Mohammed, does not go to school and has to accompany his mother to beg food. Yet he smiles and looks hopefully into his mother’s eyes as she tells their story.

Her greatest fear is being attacked by gangs at night and she hopes neither her nor her children fall prey to thieves who are notorious in the streets of Nairobi.