Day one

The emotions are more that I thought I would feel while interviewing potetional candidates for resettlement. They file in as families who are seeking peace and finality, a new start, a place to call home. They are looking for a way out, and many of them are doing so in ways that are not entirely honest, and in ways that are glaring with a mix of desperation and hope. And I sit before them with my pen in my hand and my interpreter at my side and wonder exactly how I got here and what this summer will hold.

We went to the one of the three camps today for the first time. We've been in Kenya a week, Dadaab since yesterday, and all three of us are still raring to go. We are beginning to see, in only the first day, the kind of worn down, tired looked of the permannent UNHCR staff, many of whom are finishing their tours and are on their way out. For us, this is all new, all exciting and we are blissfully ignorant of what we are to confront in the next 6 weeks.

There are three camps that comprise the Dadaab (Duh-dobb) refugee camp area. Ifo (ee-fo), Dagahaley, and Hagadera. Ifo is the closest, about 5k away and Dagahaley is the farthest at roughly 15k out. There was a national holiday today, so most of the UN staff were off, but Kevin wanted to get us out there, and none of us wanted to sit around for the whole day, so we took off at about 7:45am for Dagahaely.

The "roads" to the camps are washed out river beds. There is simply and expanse of red sand and sage brush as far as you can see, with water towers that were installed by CARE or UNHCR dotting the landscape calling out to the camps that they hydrate and feed. It takes about 25 minutes to get to the Dagahaely (Daga) and the route is eerily empty. In Mali, I remember no matter how far away you were from "civilization", if you were just outside Bamako or 100k into the bush, there would always be herders and nomads wandering around. Here, it is deserted with few people spotting the landscape.

We travel with police escorts, one truck in the front and one in the back. They are filled with Kenyan police who sport AK-47s and headwraps and drive like maniacs through the desert. I have to wonder if I actually feel more or less safe with them at our helm.

The camps all have satellite UNHCR offices where we do our interviewing during the day. They are generally at the entrance to all the camps, and not within the heart of them. We arrived today to talk a little bit about what it was we were going to be doing, see the camp, and dive into some cases. What we are doing is working on a resettlement project that is focusing on disabled refugees and survivors of violence who are facing particular protection probelms and targeted violence within the camps as a result of the their disabilities. My job, along with the other two interns, will be to interview the families who are seeking resettlement as the first phase of this project. we are doing the preliminary interviews, getting the information, family history, composition, background on the disability, affects of the disability in the camp and making preliminary recommendations as to whether the families qualify for resettlement under this specific program, which would lead to other interviews and possibily resettlement. I know, it sounds as though I weild an undue amount of power for someone who just arrived, knows peripheral information about the different groups we are working with, and who has no experience with this kind of thing, but there are many checks in place and lots of reviews of our forms and recommendations and whatnot.

Kevin has been remarkable with all of our questions and concerns and giving us the background information on what exactly is going on in the camp. Between the three camps there are 150,000 refugees, many of whom have been here since the early '90s when the fighing first broke out. A frustrating component to all of this is the continuation of eruptions of violence which sends more and more Somalis over the boarder every week. It is hard to see the impact of the work when it seems that every time some leave the camp for resettlement, more and more come in.

I asked Kevin yesterday how long this is sustainable. The UN and CARE have been here from the beginning, first in crude tents with few solutions and now with entire compounds and staffs and airconditioned offices complete with satellite internet and television. This operation is clearly not temporary, and it seems that sooner or later there will be more crises, more populations who are fresher and who need more urgent aid. The money is finite in the UN as we are all becoming well aware, but the answer was more than I expected. As Kevin explained it, the UNHCR is a protection agency, it is not an agency of immigration that can pull out whenever they feel they have filled their quota. As such, the UNHCR will remain here as long as there is a credible threat and well founded fear that should the population return to their homes, the violence will begin again and they will not be safe. With the situation in Mogadishu and the rest of Somalia what is still is, it looks like by the time the UNHCR leaves Dadaab there will be a Safeway supermarkert, motel 8, and Blockbuster set up as well.

Kevin began the day with some briefings, and immediately sent two of the interns out into the camp with an interpreter and driver to see the grounds, leaving Steph and me to observe the first interview that Kevin was going to conduct. The families being interviewed are held in an area outside of the immediate office where they are frisked for potential weapons and asked to wait. It takes about an hour to do an interview, longer for us since we are starting out, and we had 8 families to get through in 5 hours. kevin took us outside to the pen and located the family we would be interviewing. We needed to make sure the entire family was present and that the individual who claimed to have the disability was actually disabled. It's difficult in situations like this when the families are large and complicated, many wives, tons of children, and lots of fraud. One of the main things that we need to be congnizant of is the reality of trafficking and the ease with which refugees are willing to sell off one child for lots of cash and absorb another child into their family whose family would not necessarily qualify for resettlement. Desperation creates remakarkable choices made...

Our conversations with the refugees are confidential, shared only with the translators and the other UN staff memebers. The translators are primarily young adults who were raised in the camps, educated in the camps, and most likely will not be prime cadidates for resettlement. It's hard, seeing educated, bright, kind, motivated individuals who you would love to send to the US to give them a solid future but are prohibited from doing so because they do not face protection issues in the actual camp.

The families we saw today all had children who were diasabled, ranging from severe physical disabilites to mental handicaps. Inside the camps people seem to be ruthless--lots of people wiht nothing to do has lead to a palpable electricity of frustration and boredom. There is almost zero opportunity for economic advacement, so the situation is that thousands and thousands of people are just waiting, bored, unhappy, hungry, pissed off. As a result, they make their own targets and those people are generally the helpless. Listening to the mothers tell the stories of what has happened to their children who can do nothing and whose only crime is a disability was heartbreaking. I found myself looking away when they would talk of beatings, and watched the siblings subconsciously protect and stroke their handicapped brothers during the descriptions. It was hard, looking at these kids who are literally at the mercy of whomever they come upon.

I did my first interview by myself after doing one with Kevin, and it is far harder than one would expect. Trying to get the story straight, asking the women to please recount again how exactly her husband died 14 years ago when the fighting broke out. Did you witness it? How exactly was he killed? where? Were you injured? Yes? Please Explain. Would you ever consider going back to Somalia now? The resounding response to that is an adament no. I cannot imagine the fear that these people feel.

We went around the camp for about 10 minutes today, very briefly, as Kevin was finishing up. When I was in Mali I would remark that in Africa there is no difference betwene the "have" and "have-nots" as there is so little difference between most people. I realize now how ergrigiously wrong I have been.