Dadaab is a city in eastern Kenya that is home to the largest refugee camp in the world. The camp is built to handle 90,000 people, and it currently holds over 450,000. As you might imagine, the conditions are atrocious. Overcrowding, food shortages, no amenities to speak of. To call this a hopeless place is really an understatement, and it is one of four similar refugee camps in this impoverished African country.
The amazing thing to consider, however, is that as bad as the conditions in the camps are, the Kenyan government has been forced to close its border to refugees from neighboring countries like Sudan and Ethiopia as a result of the sheer numbers of people fleeing those areas.
In neighboring Somalia, the drought is a famine beyond imagining. Tens of thousands of Somalis have died of starvation in the past month. It’s a situation not likely to get better anytime soon due to the ruthless oppression from the Islamist militants of al-Shabab, who won’t let aid workers come in or their own people flee. Despite the risk of being killed or raped along the way, however, starving Somalis have been attempting the hundred mile journey from their own country into Kenya across a closed border just for a chance of getting into one of the overcrowded and miserable Kenyan refugee camps such as Dadaab.
It sort of puts the irritation from having a slow computer in perspective, right?
1 comment:
I'm sure I speak for many Americans when I say the reason I don't think too much about the troubles the rest of God's children suffer is simply because it hurts too much. Much of that pain comes from the fact there is little I can do about it. These poor people are the victims of organized crime posing as government. They have not, because what they had has been taken. The reason I am posting is only to help answer the question, "Why does God make us suffer?" with the answer that He does not. We suffer at the hands of men.
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