Life in a refugee camp

New arrivals in Kakuma 3 - the most recent part of Kakuma Refugee Camp.

It is now over a month since I was in Kakuma Refugee Camp, which tells you just how far behind in my blogging I am.  And while this might sound like a mere excuse for my tardiness, I do think there is an advantage to writing about things some time after they occur.  For any experience, it takes a while for all the details to, first, sink in, and then to stitch themselves together into some form of cohesive whole or narrative.  That has certainly been the case for my visit to Kakuma.

At the time when I left for Kakuma, I had been so busy with my Nairobi field research I'd hardly had time to even build a picture of what to expect.  But when I arrived, I soon realised that the picture had been there all along, formed from years of viewing television charity commercials and the pictures on covers of refugee law text books.  I realised this picture was there because the environment I arrived in felt so familiar, but also because so much of the picture was incorrect.

My image of a refugee camp was a sprawling mass of tents, in the middle of the desert, with harsh winds and harsher temperatures and women wearing bright coloured clothes.  And to this extent, my picture was largely true to the conditions in Kakuma.  Kakuma is hot.  In the week I was there I could do little between meals and interviews but drink water or coke and lie on my bed - and this was apparently not the worst of it, the temperature in Kakuma can reach 47 degrees.  But my picture was also full of the passive, vacuous faces of refugees, arriving en masse, having walked for weeks over mountains and desserts, and being herded into what is in effect a prison.  And certainly this happens.  Had I visited Dadaab refugee camp at the height of the Somali food crisis in 2011, this is likely what I would have seen.  But at Kakuma, in November 2012, it was slightly different.  For a start, Kakuma does not have fence.  It has a nominal curfew, but both refugees and locals are physically free to come and go.  And when I asked the UNHCR field worker showing me around the camp on my first day whether most of the refugees there had arrived by foot, she laughed and said no – most arrive by bus, or taxi.  And like the Kibera slums in Nairobi, Kakuma is a place of much more activity, energy and entrepreneurship than one might at first expect.  I visited numerous clothing shops, restaurants and various repair services, and heard how the aid workers prefer to shop at the market in the camp, rather than in the nearby town, because the produce is better.

But of course this hive of activity and seemingly booming micro-economy reflects the experience of only some of Kakuma’s residents.  I also asked my guide about the conspicuously falling down white canvas tent, surrounded by hastily constructed but much sturdier looking mud-brick shelters.  She explained to me that refugees are issued with the tents when they arrive - the mud-brick shelters are built by refugees themselves, usually with materials obtained from the locals in exchange for food rations.  The lone tent was probably home to a single woman, who could not build such a shelter and had no community support to help her to do so.  Later in the day I also visited the ‘Protection Zone’, a fenced-off and guarded area next to the police station, which is home to those cannot live safely in the camp itself.  There I met three children, desperately keen for their photo to be taken.  Another refugee told me that the children were recently abandoned by their mother, who took off in frustration at the lack of assistance from UNHCR and was later arrested and jailed for abusive conduct.  The children are being cared for by other families in the Protection Zone.  At the Protection Zone I also spoke to a young man, who explained he was there with his father because the rebels who were after them in Somalia had followed them to Kenya and recently attacked them, leaving his father in hospital and him in the Protection Zone.

For my week in Kakuma, I stayed at the UNHCR compound, which is itself quite separate from the camp.  And as most of my interviews were conducted either there, at the nearby ‘NGO compound’ or the Department of Refugee Affairs’ offices next to the airstrip, beyond my introductory tour I spent little time in the camp itself.  Perhaps because of this, by the end of the week I felt little closer to understanding the place than I had been when I arrived.  Every time I thought I neared a comprehensive picture, I would read or hear something that disrupted it entirely.  For example, the legal processes for determining refugee status and selecting refugees for resettlement to third countries outside of Africa seemed surprisingly fair, professional and efficient.  Until I was told on my last day that the refugees residing in the camp are called to their interviews via weekly lists posted on noticeboards throughout the camp.  The effect of this is that those waiting to be selected to leave the camp and find a new life elsewhere, in most cases the United States, must go to the board every single week of their stay – for some, in excess of ten years – to see if their lucky number has come up.  With resettlement being the number one dream of so many in the camp, this system seems rather like a form of torture.  Similarly, I was impressed to see the many clinics and hospitals in the camp – including specialised maternity and pediatric wards – but was later informed that for the camp’s population of approximately 10,000 people, many of whom have escaped torture and trauma, there was not a single mental health professional. 

While there is indeed plenty of life, energy and entrepreneurship to be found in Kakuma, when I boarded the plane back to Nairobi at the end of my week there, I was acutely aware that in doing this, I was highlighting perhaps the most important distinction between me and the refugees who live in Kakuma – the freedom to leave.  It is now more than a month later and, while I sit in a cafe in Oxford reflecting on the refugees I met in Kakuma, those refugees are still there.  Despite the lack of fences, and a rudimentary permit system which allows refugees to leave the camp for health reasons, to visit family or to try their luck elsewhere, for most of Kakuma’s residents there is simply nowhere to go.  They cannot go home, and life in Nairobi means life without the safety net of UNHCR and other NGO services.  So while they wait for something to change - for their resettlement number to come up, or for things to improve at home - they continue to collect their monthly food and water rations and hope that their tent, or mud shack, will provide relief from the blistering sun, or survive the next bout of monsoonal rain.

Inside Kakuma Refugee Camp 

Reception Centre - here, new arrivals will be issued with basic supplies (blankets,
buckets and utensils) before they are issued with a space in the camp

Inside the Reception Centre, this board records the number and origins
of all new arrivals since the beginning of 2012 - 8,268 in total

A refugee volunteer field worker tells my guide about a family with three children whose
 tent has been flooded, forcing them to sleep on water while they wait for a new one.

Sign for one of Kakuma's health clinics 

A Kakuma sporting field.

This tent displays a very new garden.  Refugees are encouraged to use some of their water rations
 to grow food.  Some will eat the food, others will sell it to make money for other things.

Self-built houses under construction. 

The more established homes (some people have been in Kakuma for over 10 years)
have these home built fences and large trees, planted by refugees themselves

A restaurateur displays his menu. 

Selling veggies in Kakuma.  The humanitarian workers at the camp buy their
 vegetables within the camp's small markets - the water rations issued to refugees
make them better able to grow vegetables than the local population.

A sign at the entrance to the Protection Zone warns that 'non-protection [refugees] are not allowed in'.

A woman and child who live within the Protection Zone proudly show their UNHCR documentation.

Three children reportedly abandoned by their mother at the camp. 

A woman explains that while one of the older women refugees in the Protection Zone
 is officially looking after the children - looking after their ration cards and
documentation - everyone within the zone helps to care for them during the day.

My home for the week inside the UNHCR compound.

The compound is sprawling and everything looks the same - these signs are important. 

Speaking of signs - even you-know-who is here.

UNHCR Cafeteria.

The dining hall.