Antonia Kamore, IRC community health program officer in Dadaab, vaccinating a young refugee against measles. Photo: Peter Biro/IRC
Hagadera, Dadaab Refugee Camp, Kenya — Our car is skidding across the deep sand tracks that cut through Hagadera, one of three sites that make up the sprawling Dadaab refugee camp near the Kenya-Somalia border. More than 1,300 refugees, fleeing drought and famine in southern Somalia, are arriving every day in the already overcrowded camp. Under such conditions infectious disease can spread quickly.
This morning, I’m traveling with an IRC medical team that is vaccinating refugee children against polio and measles, part of a mass immunization campaign that aid groups are conducting in Dadaab. All told, some 120,000 refugee children under the age of five will be inoculated over the next five days, a quarter of them by the IRC’s medical teams.
“The Somali refugees are malnourished and very weak,” says Antonia Kamore, the IRC’s community health program officer, who is sitting beside me. “This makes them even more susceptible to disease.”
Dadaab hosts four times the population it was built for and is the largest refugee camp in the world. Almost 400,000 people live here, in tents or crude shelters made from sticks and torn blankets and surrounded by smoldering garbage dumps. Outside this city of refugees a barren landscape of sand and bush stretches to the horizon. Occasionally a small camel caravan enters the camp to deliver supplies.
Two children stand in front of their makeshift shelter on the outskirts of Dadaab refugee camp. Photo: Peter Biro/IRC
As we drive to Dadaab’s outskirts, where thousands of newly-arrived refugees live, we pass a large crowd of destitute people lining up at Hagadera’s reception center, waiting to be admitted to the camp. At the center, the IRC and other aid groups provide food, health screenings and medical referrals to the refugees, many of whom have walked for weeks across the desert to get here.
Many Somalis have never been vaccinated against any disease—in 2009 only 24 percent of children were immunized against measles and only 28 percent against polio, according to UNICEF. And decades of civil war and instability have crippled Somalia’s health care system.
Our four-wheel-drive grinds to a halt under a large acacia tree that provides a semblance of shelter from the scorching sun. Parents and their children quickly gather. Many of the children show clear signs of malnutrition. As the medical team gets to work, babies scream as they struggle frantically to avoid a jab from the needle.
Nearby, I meet Dahiro Ibrahim Ahmed, 29. She arrived in Hagadera two days ago after leaving her home in Dinsor, a town in the Lower Juba region of Southern Somalia.
Dahiro Ibrahim Ahmed, 29, walked for 20 days with her eight children to reach Dadaab. Photo: Peter Biro/IRC
“We had 30 cows at home,” she says, squatting in a hut crudely fashioned from tree branches, thorny shrubs and strips of cloth. “One after one, the cattle died and we had nothing to eat. I have seen many seasons without rain, but this is the worst drought I can remember.”
Dahiro and her family joined a large group of villagers for the three-week trek across the Somali desert. Along the way she gave birth to Saadia, now 10 days old. Like many of the refugees here, Dahiro arrived in Dadaab with nothing except the clothes she was wearing when she left her home.
“Some of those traveling with me had their valuables stolen by armed men who stopped us along the way. But I had nothing they could steal,” she said.
Dahiro can’t even guess what the future will bring. The most important thing now, she says, is to make sure that her children can eat and that they don’t get sick.
With the flow of refugees out of southern Somalia showing no signs of abating, the humanitarian community has a huge task ahead.
This post was originally posted by our affliliate organization, The International Rescue Committee.