Bill Bryson's African Diary - Bill Bryson [9]
The plane, I’m pleased to say, was quite new and looked sound, and the pilot, a man of great calmness named Nino, was unquestionably sober and reliable looking. Under questioning he pointed out that he wanted to crash even less than we did since he would have to pay for the plane. I found this immensely reassuring. Best of all it was a beautiful day for flying, the air still and almost cloudless. We were flying into the desert, after all, so the chances of storms were practically nil.
The flight itself proved blissfully uneventful. The engine purred steadily the whole way and no one took a shot at us. By the time we landed in Dadaab I was almost calm.
Dadaab is bang on the equator, in the middle of a dusty orange nowhere, about sixty miles from the Somalia border. There has been a drought there for years, which is evident with every dry scrape of wind. In the early 1990s, refugees from the fighting in Somalia began to stream over the border into northeastern Kenya, and a camp was hastily put together. Nearly a dozen years later it is home to 134,000 people.
The camp consists of three compounds, each a mile or two apart, and when traveling between any two you must be escorted by a truckload of Kenyan soldiers, just in case. The camp has become essentially a city in the desert, with schools and markets and permanent habitations. It has been there so long now that a generation of children has grown to adult-hood without knowing any life other than being behind razor wire and heavy iron gates, and a sense that all the world beyond this snug perimeter offers nothing but danger or indifference. CARE has 175 employees on site. Forty-five percent of its spending in Kenya goes to the camp. Dadaab is a vivid reminder that refugee problems don’t end simply because journalistic interest moves elsewhere. The inhabitants themselves are irremediably stuck. They can’t go back to Somalia because it isn’t safe and they can’t go elsewhere in Kenya because Kenya has problems enough of its own without having 134,000 Somalis pitching up in Nairobi or Mombasa, looking for food and work. And so way out in the desert there exists this strange city-that-isn’t-a-city filled with people who have nowhere to go and nothing much to do.
We spent a long day doing all the things you would expect to do at a refugee camp—toured the food distribution centre, visited schools, talked to administrators, learned how water was extracted from the ground and sanitized—but there was a curious lack of urgency about it all. The camp occupants weren’t dying or malnourished or in desperate need of medical attention. They were just normal people like you and me who wanted to be somewhere where they could have a life.
Nearly everyone I spoke to complained of shortages of one kind or another—of work, of food, of teachers, of things to do. There are 28,000 pupils in the camp’s schools, but only 807 desks. There is only one textbook for every 20 students, one classroom for every 75. I talked to a bright young man named James Makuach, one of 357 students preparing to take the Kenyan Schools Certificate exam, a prerequisite for going on to higher education. He told me the school didn’t have the facilities, in particular the scientific equipment, that would allow them to pass the test.
“You have no hope at all?” I said.
“Not much,” he said and gave me a heartbreakingly shy smile.
I couldn’t understand this at all. I asked Nick—demanded really—why conditions weren’t better than this. He looked at me with patient sympathy.
“There are 20 million like this all over Africa, Bill,” he said. “Money only goes so far.” Besides, he went on, dispensing aid is much more complicated than most people realize. It is, for one thing, a fundamental part of aid protocol that you cannot make conditions notably better for refugees than they