Condensed from “Somali Refugee Flow to Kenya Ebbs, Flows but Never Stops,” copyright Jeffrey Fleishman, Los Angeles Times, which was published in the Cambodia Daily, Oct. 19, 2010. All text below is copyright Fleishman/Los Angeles Times.
DADAAB, KENYA – He buried his children and fled west across the border to a new country.
Young soldiers with rifles pass as Mohamed Abdul walks in the clothes of a refugee, a man who once owned several houses and a kiosk in that whitewashed and bloodied city by the sea: Mogadishu, Somalia.
Things taken, life whittled, and suddenly he is in Kenya, angry and lost amid tents and huts.
“Sometimes I get the job of loading food into a wheelbarrow and running from hut to hut,” he says. “The food is too little. There's no milk, no sugar for our tea. There are no real jobs. The only thing you have in a refugee camp is peace from rifles and bombs."
Nearly 300,000 Somalis have fled to eastern Kenya, living in UN camps meant to hold 90,000. Their dead are laid in foreign soil, their new are born in borrowed beds far from the farms and fishing villages of their ancestors.
Ibrahim Hussein Abu-Bakr doesn't even dream of a place with such a pretty name as Mombasa, and he suspects he'll never again harvest mangoes and pineapples on his farm in Somalia. He speaks of men with guns, how fast they swept between the fields, burning and killing.
“There's no land for me to farm in Kenya,” he says. “It was good, though, once in Somalia. I planted my crops and supported my family. We farmers sat around the market and told stories and then we went back and worked our lands. We were happy before it all started.”
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