BLOG DAY 5 - Crossing the Somalian border

On Tuesday our field team had arranged to meet with the Mandera District Commissioner in order to obtain a border crossing permission. Mandera is a town in the North Eastern Province, Kenya, close to the Ethiopian and Somalian border.
We arrived at eight in the morning at the DC’s office. He wasn’t in. When he finally arrived, he briefed us on the refugees’ situation in Somalia. He told us to sign the guestbook. I noticed that 874 visitors had done so before me.

The DC accompanied us to the border to ensure that we would be safe. At the Kenyan immigration office we reported the aim of our travel. The immigration officials informed us that the border was officially closed. At the same time, however, there were no restrictions for people crossing, but we would be responsible for ourselves. I thought he was joking, but he wasn’t.

The border gate had no sign to indicate that you were entering Somalia. I asked my colleagues whether we were in Somalia and they told us we were. Suddenly I felt different, as if I was waking up, and I looked around. I saw donkey carts, women carrying firewood on their heads, men dressed in traditional men’s skirts and all sorts of other traditional Somali things I had been missing for so long.

We drove on and after 25 kilometers we arrived at the first refugee camp, Beled Amin in the town of Beled Hawo. The whole landscape was grey, dry and dusty. I saw skeletons of dead animals, destroyed houses and mosques, and adults and children in search for food. In the camp we were surrounded by people who thought we had food for them. I started to talk to the women around me and asked them about their daily life and how long they had been living in this camp.

One mother’s story touched me most. She had a small girl on her back. The child was malnourished and didn’t seem to be as old as the mother told me she was. I asked her if she had any other children. She had given birth to six more, three of whom had died on their way to the refugee camp. The woman said that she had left two of the children behind alive, because they wouldn’t have made it. “I left them behind to save those who could still walk.”

The woman was thin and you could see the pain on her face. I asked her to show me her house and she did. It was a small hut with no furniture or equipment. She told me that there was no water and no food. I understood her plight and suffering; I’m a human being and her fellow countrywoman. The reason for me to go to Somalia was to see the suffering of refugees with my own eyes.
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The more I listened to the woman’s story, sitting in her shabby hut, the more emotional I became. All the stories that I heard in the camps were almost all the same. Everybody had walked a long distance, sometimes as far as 350 kilometers. Most of the refugees had lost family members on the way, especially children. Some of them told me they even had eaten human flesh to survive.