In searing equatorial heat, several dozen men, women and children sit crowded around a metal faucet amid a pile of empty jerry cans and used water bottles.
"No water," says one of the men from under the half-shade of a few dried branches.
Then, without warning, water begins gushing out onto the sun-baked earth as a frenzied crowd jostles for one of the taps. An elderly woman resorts to spooning a few cupped handfuls of water from a murky puddle into her large, hollow container.
This is Hagadera, the largest, oldest and most overcrowded of three Somali refugee camps clustered around Dadaab in Kenya's arid and impoverished North Eastern Province.
"The water supply is below minimum emergency standards," said Maeve Murphy, a field officer with the UNHCR in Hagadera, where aid agencies are trying to drill additional boreholes. "There is concern whether the actual water supply is even there."
But a water shortage is only one of many problems facing refugees who have fled continued violence in neighbouring Somalia only to arrive at camps that aid agencies say are now critically overstretched.
Originally built to hold 90,000, the camps were already home to more than 150,000 in December of 2006, when an Ethiopian-led invasion into southern Somalia ousted the ruling Islamic Courts Union and replaced it with a UN-backed transitional government, a move that was intended to bring stability to a country ravaged by years of anarchy and violence.
It didn't.
"There is still killing for no reason in Somalia," said Muhammad Farah, 30, who last month fled the southern city of Kismayo, now controlled by a resurgent Islamist militia. "Anyone with a gun can just kill anyone he wants."
He was waiting at the UNHCR office in the Dagahaley camp, where staff have been struggling to register and distribute ration cards to 500 recent arrivals each day.
In January alone some 9,000 refugees flooded into Dadaab. Last month there were 7,300. Now home to more than 260,000 people, the refugee camps are among the largest in the world and space and services are in short supply.
Mr. Farah, who was about to receive a food-ration card for his family after 11 days in the camp, was living under a tree, a scrap of cardboard for shade, with his mother and siblings and other refugees, 20 in all.
"We've been concerned for a long time about the conditions in these camps," said Emmanuel Nyabera, with the UNHCR Kenya office, which has been in negotiations with the Kenyan government and local communities since 2007 for land to build an additional camp.
In a part of Kenya where basic resources are scarce, questions have been raised about the benefit of playing host to a large refugee population.
In the meantime, overstretched agencies, a lack of shelter and an inadequate number of poorly built and maintained latrines are among the conditions that Oxfam has said amount to "a serious public health crisis."
"I'm telling you, there was a lot to be done when we got here," said Ephantus Wanjema, a medical doctor with the International Rescue Committee, a New-York-based organization that in January took over a ramshackle hospital in the middle of Hagadera, where last month cholera swept through the camp.
"We realized there was a likelihood of outbreak," he said.
But despite worsening conditions in the camps, refugees have risked a perilous journey even to get here, and it doesn't end after crossing the Somali border, which Kenya closed in 2007 when fighting erupted, citing security concerns.
In practice, it has meant that refugees are essentially smuggled into the camps and so are vulnerable to a notoriously corrupt Kenyan police force.
"The police were arresting many people," said one refugee in Dagahaley camp, who recently crossed the border with some 50 men women and children fleeing Kismayo and Mogadishu.
"If you don't have money, they're going to arrest you; they're also going to beat you," he said. "Many of the people who came with me, they were beaten, and they are now here" after family members paid for their release.
Earlier this month, Human Rights Watch and UNHCR separately accused Kenyan authorities of deporting busloads of refugees and asylum seekers to Somalia, in violation of both Kenyan and international law.
"When the government closed the border in January of 2007, they sent a very clear message that Somali refugees are not welcomed," said Gerry Simpson, lead author of a recent Human Rights Watch report.
Source: Globe and Mail
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