MARTIN GEISSLER
I was sitting in a refugee camp on Kenya’s border with Somalia when “that photo” appeared on the screen of my phone.
A tiny, lifeless body lying on a European beach.
That single picture has finally given Britain a proper shake, it’s woken us up to what’s happening out there. We all knew kids were drowning but now we can’t hide from that horrid reality any more.
Well, I’m afraid I’ve got bad news for you. It’s worse than you thought. Because, when the headlines disappear and our attention shifts elsewhere, the problem doesn’t go away. It just grinds on.
That’s why I’m here.
Dadaab is the world’s largest refugee camp, it’s grown from nothing over the past two decades. What was once a barren patch of desert is now Kenya’s third biggest city. A third of a million people live here, almost all of them Somali refugees.
I first came here four years ago, not much has changed.
Back in 2011, Somalia was in the grip of its worst famine in living memory. Aid agencies couldn’t go into the country because it was simply too dangerous, so the starving masses had to flee to find help.
They walked for days, sometimes weeks, across a dusty, baking desert. When I was last here a thousand people were arriving every single day. But many more never made it.
We based ourselves in a children’s hospital staffed and run by the International Rescue Committee.
Just as we started filming, a mother arrived. She’d made the journey from Somalia on foot and carried a baby in her arms. I’ll never forget the moment I saw little Minhaj for the first time.
He was 18-months-old but so malnourished he was, perhaps, an hour from death. Literally skin and bone.
We watched as the medical staff worked frantically to revive him and then we followed his story for a long, dramatic week.
When we left, he appeared to be out of immediate danger, that in itself seemed like a miracle. But I always wondered what became of him.
Now, four years on, I’ve returned to make a film for ITV’s On Assignment programme and, to my delight, I spent a glorious afternoon last week kicking a ball around a dusty yard with a happy, healthy, five-year-old Minhaj.
It was a special moment but while he is, comparatively, safe from harm here, I wince when I wonder what the future has in store for him.
Life for the people of Dadaab is a miserable existence of handouts and rations. They can’t work and the Kenyan Government don’t like the refugees moving around, so the only way out is back home to Somalia. They are, in many respects, imprisoned.
So Minhaj’s mother faces a grim set of choices.
We all want what’s best for our kids, just imagine if your options were misery and hunger on one hand, or fear and insecurity on the other. Which one would you choose? Not easy, is it?
Minhaj’s cousin, Omar, is an interesting young man. Tall, elegant and ambitious, he speaks fluent English, learned at one of the camp’s fifty schools.
He arrived here twenty years ago, aged just two, and since that day he’s never set foot outside this place. He’s been stuck in this dirty, makeshift city of sticks and mud for as long as he can remember.
He wants to travel. He’ll finish his studies at the end of this year and then, he says, he’ll got to America or Britain. But delve a little further into those ambitions and the plan soon falls apart.
He has no papers to get him into either country and, of course, no money for a flight. When I asked him what job he wants to do he told me he’d be a doctor or a footballer.
It’s the kind of answer you might expect from a toddler but he’s an intelligent young man. The problem is, he has no concept of what life’s like beyond the thorn fences which hem this place in. No idea how things work in the big, wide world he wants to join.
It’s nice that he reckons anything’s achievable but I fear he has some crushing disappointments ahead.
And reality isn’t his only enemy, there’s another issue looming large in the lives of these refugees just now; competition.
As the world’s attention is drawn to the crisis in Syria and the migrant tide sweeping across Europe, donors are turning their attention away from this place.
I joined Sirat Amin, the IRC’s nutrition manger, on his rounds. He tours these vast hectares of shacks and huts treating malnourished children.
As we stood in yet another dusty yard, a mother dressed in traditional robes brought an emaciated baby for treatment. As Sirat checked the child, he bemoaned the fact that he sees too many cases like this.
“There’s definitely a sense of compassion fatigue out there”, he said “a few years ago the world knew all about this place but now it’s starting to feel like these people have been forgotten”.
As donations dry up, rations are cut. A funding shortage means the hundreds of thousands who live in Dadaab have seen their food handouts shrink by a third over the past year.
Many families go hungry at the end of every month as they wait for their next allocation, they’re given just the very basics they need to stay alive.
It’s difficult to see how that’s going to change.
So what, I wonder, will become of my little pal Minhaj? Where will he be in, say, ten years from now?
Will he end up a long term resident here, like his cousin and so many others? There’s every chance that’s exactly what he’ll do. But I hope and pray he doesn’t.
Life’s dealt him a dreadful hand so far. He, like everyone else here, deserves a massive change of luck.
You can watch On Assignment on ITV on Monday 21 September
Source: ITV