![\"Refugees](\"http:\/\/www.photoshelter.com\/img-get\/I0000TKYfiJOYBlA\/s\/800\/548\/kenya2011jeffrey-dadaab26B01.JPG\")
<\/a><\/p>\nIt is huge, but it\u2019s really three camps in close proximity. When they opened two decades ago, at the outbreak of civil war in Somalia, they were designed for 90,000 people in all. Today the complex hosts upwards of 390,000 refugees, plus at least 60,000 people not yet officially registered with camp managers. United Nations officials say newcomers continue to arrive at more than 1,300 per day. Most of the refugees are Somalis, though among the old timers there are small groups of Ethiopians, Sudanese, and others.<\/p>\n
As the newcomers flock in, much of the media has focused on the easy to report story of how aid agencies provide immediate assistance. It\u2019s a quick story: just find the lines that form before dawn. People are standing around, or squatting in the dust waiting to get photographed, fingerprinted, evaluated, and then to receive food, a tarp, cooking pots, jerry cans and donated clothes. They can\u2019t escape the cameras or they\u2019d lose their place in line. But the images the scene generates reflect refugees as passive victims, aid \u201crecipients\u201d or \u201cbeneficiaries.\u201d That\u2019s not all there is to the story, however.<\/p>\n
Along with malnourished children, photos of refugees sitting or passively waiting are part of what some disparagingly call \u201cfamine pornography.\u201d Yet while it\u2019s easy to cynically chastise the media for chasing the most visually dramatic story, in my experience most journalists do so because they believe that\u2019s what will most readily move hearts and liberate credit cards back home. Unfortunately, this reinforces the well-founded belief that misery sells.<\/p>\n I wanted to tell a different story, one that showed the dignity of the refugees, so I wanted to head toward the Somali border to interview people before they got to the camp, where the focus would be on why they had left and their courage and determination to reach safe harbor. When I asked my ACT Alliance host, the Lutheran World Federation (LWF), about doing so, they said there was a convoy of United Nations officials headed out that way to survey possible sites for installing a reception center closer to the border. With luck, we could tag along, taking advantage of the police escort the U.N. convoy would have. It\u2019s a dangerous area, teeming with bandits and one or two lost Al-Shabaab fighters, and is patrolled by both Kenyan soldiers in tanks and APCs as well as troops from the Transitional Federal Government\u2013the Somali \u201cgovernment\u201d backed by the U.N. So no expats move through it without police escorts. The trouble was the head UNHCR official on the journey was a jerk, and didn\u2019t want to stop on the trip out. So we passed by several groups of refugees walking along, and all I could do was shoot from the window of the moving car. High shutter speed, vibration reduction on, a sort of Hail Mary shot, especially since the sun was behind them. <\/p>\n We got to the border, looked at a lot of dust, and then headed back. Now the U.N. official was willing to stop, but it was hotter and the refugees had all stopped to rest. The U.N. people were taking pictures with their mobile phones as they handed out water and food to the refugees, and of course a Belgian television crew comes along to shoot at just that moment. We\u2019re back to the passive pictures of people sitting around.<\/p>\n It was a frustrating day, so I started whining about doing it again. Finally, my last day, I paid a fortune for a vehicle and driver (with all the media in town it\u2019s a seller\u2019s market), forked over some \u201cincentive pay\u201d for two Kenyan police escorts to get up early, recruited a Somali translator from one of the camps, and set off toward the border on my own. What\u2019s interesting is that we had a harder time finding refugees. People who live close to the border said they\u2019d seen the numbers fall off in the last few days, which could be the result of various factors, including changing conditions inside Somalia and shifting migration routes across the semi-arid plains. How that jives with U.N. figures that show a slight increase in \u201cnew arrivals\u201d at Dadaab is beyond me, though some newcomers may, in fact, have been staying with relatives in the camps for several weeks before getting around to officially register. There are also some enterprising refugees who\u2019ve tried to register more than once in order to receive double rations. (That means their kids get vaccinated twice, something that doctors from M\u00e9decins Sans Fronti\u00e8res pointed out was not exactly good health policy.)<\/p>\n Anyway, on my solo quest to find traveling refugees, we finally came across two men and a donkey cart. We stopped and shared water and food with them, though one of the men clearly didn\u2019t like my Costco-purchased granola bars. Their story was typical: fleeing drought they\u2019d set out for Dadaab, endured all manner of hardship, and just two days before had sent the women and children on ahead on a bus. With their meager possessions piled on the cart, they were following behind. After we talked, they started on their way again.<\/p>\n Some people arrive at Dadaab in really bad shape, and some of the kids are dramatically malnourished. I wanted to capture that as well, but am always searching for a way to do it that doesn\u2019t just turn the kid into an object of pity. That\u2019s tough, because severe malnutrition is pretty pitiful. But in the hospital in the Hagadera Camp I shot Asio Dagene Osman caring for her 7-month old son, Minhaji Gedi Farah. While showing the sunken face characteristic of malnutrition (the eyeballs don\u2019t shrink with dehydration so they seem relatively larger), the mother\u2019s love is also evident. Suffering has context. <\/p>\n Much of the media coverage of Dadaab focuses on what the U.N. and NGOs are doing to care for the refugees. That\u2019s an understandable spin, as foreign journalists largely depend on aid workers for access, information, and often even housing, food and transportation. \u201cMedia relations\u201d work is an important part of aid agency operations. If you\u2019re nice to the reporters, maybe they\u2019ll mention your agency in their coverage. It\u2019s a symbiotic relationship that works well for both parties. How it works for the news consumer is a bit more problematic. Even good reporters, like Nick Kristof, can at times suffer from a journalistic Stockholm Syndrome and see problems as they are defined by NGOs, with their own particular perspective, and see the solutions to hunger and poverty as precisely whatever the NGOs are currently peddling. (This is especially true, in Kristof\u2019s case, if the NGO is headed by an English-speaking do-good westerner, ala pre-scandal Greg Mortenson, because the reader can more easily relate to otherwise exotic issues if they\u2019re seen through the experience of someone \u201clike them.\u201d)<\/p>\n Because of this, what\u2019s often left out of coverage is how the poor help the poor\u2013probably because the poor don\u2019t have media relations officers. So the quiet but significant help that refugees get along that road from local villagers (who are all ethnically Somali) isn\u2019t as photogenic as a U.N. official handing out food. Nor is the story of how, within the camps, long-term refugees receive the newcomers warmly, despite cultural differences.<\/p>\n The ACT Alliance is the camp manager for Dadaab, and the head of LWF\u2019s operations there, Anne Wangari, helped me understand this.<\/p>\n \u201cRefugees have been coming here since time immemorial, but the new refugees are different than the old refugees, who have been living under Kenyan law for 20 years. They know the usefulness of queuing and a bit of patience. But queuing and courtesy are foreign to the new arrivals, who want to go to the food distributions with a weapon,\u201d said Wangari, a former Sister of Loretto. \u201cYet when the newcomers arrive hungry, the refugee community goes out of its way to receive them and give them supplies, food and clothes. This has happened in all the camps. When the United Nations stopped giving biscuits, the old refugees went to the shops and bought biscuits. They let the new arrivals settle on their small plots. The sense of sharing from the Somalis, and among the Muslims, is great.\u201d<\/p>\n Another part of the story that\u2019s under-reported is the economic and political context of what\u2019s now officially a famine in some parts of Somalia. It\u2019s not just drought. As the Indian economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen observed long ago, famine and democracy are incompatible:<\/p>\n Famines are easy to prevent if there is a serious effort to do so, and a democratic government, facing elections and criticisms from opposition parties and independent newspapers, cannot help but make such an effort. Not surprisingly, while India continued to have famines under British rule right up to independence\u2026 they disappeared suddenly with the establishment of a multiparty democracy and a free press. \u2026 a free press and an active political opposition constitute the best early-warning system a country threatened by famines can have.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n While on this trip I was reading Thomas Keneally\u2019s new book, Three Famines<\/em>, which underscores this point. In the case of the current situation in the Horn of Africa, Christian Parenti\u2019s new book, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence<\/em>, which I haven\u2019t read yet, makes the case for how \u201cclimate fascism\u201d is exacerbating suffering. The Somali refugees are victims of a perfect storm of weather and politics. \u201cIt\u2019s a combination of war, climate change and very bad policy, particularly an embrace of radical free market policies by regional governments that mean the withdrawal of support for pastoralists, the type of people you saw with their dead cattle,\u201d Parenti said<\/a>.<\/p>\n While that part of the story isn\u2019t covered in most news reports, the news of the refugees\u2019 plight, broken weeks ago by the BBC, has provoked an avalanche of aid agencies flocking to Dadaab trying to find a contribution to make. A lot of this is what’s called “donor-driven aid.” When headquarters gets enough calls from people who have seen the suffering on their televisions, asking what (fill in the blank) is doing to help those starving people in Africa, then word goes out to the regional office to find a way to spend money there. So Anne Wangari and others, who\u2019ve been toiling in the trenches long before the media invasion, have to not only deal with their increased work load, but also wrestle with the onslaught of new NGOs looking for a piece of the action.<\/p>\n While tending to malnourished babies may be considered \u201csexy\u201d (MSF recently closed media access to its hospital in Dadaab\u2019s Dagahaley Camp for a while as it was difficult to get their work done with so many journalists milling about), the work done by groups like the ACT Alliance are what make the place tick, even though the daily tasks aren\u2019t always exciting. Take streets, for example. Wangari told me that when they took over camp management four years ago, the refugees had so encroached on the \u201cstreets\u201d running through the camps, expanding their thorn bush fences to make their small compounds a bit more spacious, that it made movement through the camps impossible.<\/p>\n \u201cThe streets had become so narrow that a vehicle and a donkey cart couldn\u2019t use same road if they were coming from opposite directions. If a donkey cart and a jeep meet, who has to back up? I\u2019ll tell you, it isn\u2019t the donkey cart,\u201d she said. Wangari and her team worked to convince the camps\u2019 elders of the need to restore wider roads in order to insure efficient delivery of supplies and services, as well as a way to create a needed buffer should fire break out in the camp. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t easy, but when they understood it, the elders pushed people back, and at the end everyone was excited. The aid agencies were very happy because they no longer had to wait for the donkey cart to reverse, something that wasn\u2019t going to happen anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"Newly](\"http:\/\/www.photoshelter.com\/img-get\/I00004y0_wHPs2oM\/s\/960\/186\/kenya2011jeffrey-dadaab250037.JPG\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"A](\"http:\/\/www.photoshelter.com\/img-get\/I0000Nxh55OKWTx4\/s\/500\/373\/kenya2011jeffrey-dadaab270006.JPG\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Women](\"http:\/\/www.photoshelter.com\/img-get\/I0000K_iczCKtQmc\/s\/500\/319\/kenya2011jeffrey-dadaab26L01.JPG\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Families](\"http:\/\/www.photoshelter.com\/img-get\/I00007tyWjizmlLY\/s\/500\/274\/kenya2011jeffrey-dadaab22040.JPG\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"A](\"http:\/\/www.photoshelter.com\/img-get\/I0000dQIWt9WYsuY\/s\/500\/352\/kenya2011jeffrey-dadaab22008.JPG\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Ibrahim](\"http:\/\/www.photoshelter.com\/img-get\/I0000ReX5kwkTnH4\/s\/500\/301\/kenya2011jeffrey-dadaab27B02.JPG\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Ibrahim](\"http:\/\/www.photoshelter.com\/img-get\/I0000OaooFHTTXR0\/s\/500\/294\/kenya2011jeffrey-dadaab27B04.JPG\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Asio](\"http:\/\/www.photoshelter.com\/img-get\/I0000yMxyGyCQE9g\/s\/400\/552\/kenya2011jeffrey-dadaab26B07.JPG\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"A](\"http:\/\/www.photoshelter.com\/img-get\/I0000s2XCgexE1fU\/s\/800\/646\/kenya2011jeffrey-dadaab26B05.JPG\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Newly](\"http:\/\/www.photoshelter.com\/img-get\/I0000bdX_WD4OAvQ\/s\/500\/351\/kenya2011jeffrey-dadaab26B02.JPG\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Sagul](\"http:\/\/www.photoshelter.com\/img-get\/I0000vgK2jPi.Tfs\/s\/500\/352\/kenya2011jeffrey-dadaab24216.JPG\")
<\/a><\/p>\n
![\"Roney](\"http:\/\/www.photoshelter.com\/img-get\/I0000nhbkxRbGEc8\/s\/800\/550\/kenya2011jeffrey-dadaab21B21.JPG\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"A](\"http:\/\/www.photoshelter.com\/img-get\/I0000RNENuyDJKB0\/s\/500\/387\/kenya2011jeffrey-dadaab26s15.JPG\")
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