Friday, July 18, 2014

In Kenya, Somalis at refugee camp languish with limited options | NEWS.GNOM.ES

In Kenya, Somalis at refugee camp languish with limited options | NEWS.GNOM.ES

At night he dreams of the sea.
As a young man, Noor Hassan Shanglo spent years working on cargo ships that carried apples and oranges from South Africa to ports across Europe and the Middle East. He fell in love with the blue waves and the bright streets of Sicily, Durban and Dubai.
Now he lives in a place where food does not grow and sand blows constantly, shading the sky gray. It has been 22 years since he last saw the ocean.
He did not come here by choice. Nobody does.
When civil war erupted in his native Somalia in 1991, Shanglo and his family escaped across the Kenyan border and took shelter near the tiny town of Dadaab at what was supposed to be a temporary refugee camp.
“We thought in one or two years, peace would prevail and we would go back,” Shanglo said.
But the conflict continued. And what started as a few tents clustered on a bone-dry stretch of Kenyan desert grew into the largest refugee complex in the world.
In Dadaab, he said, “you cannot move on.”
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Ruman Harun Nasib and Salima Noor Abdi belong to a distinctive club. Both 18, the young women are among more than 106,000 children born at Dadaab since the camps opened more than two decades ago.
Even though most have never set foot on Somali soil, camp babies are considered by law to be Somali refugees instead of Kenyan citizens.

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