Displacement

These two girls live in a displacement camp in eastern Congo.

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Nayis Mariaga and her family built their home in one of the many coastal communities deluged by Colombia's historic flooding.

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Zeinab Abdikadir waters her family's goats at a Mercy Corps watering point in Kenya's drought-stricken Wajir County. Photo: Muna Ahmed/Mercy Corps

I met Zeinab Abdikadir as she was watering her family’s goats with her father at a Mercy Corps water storage tank in Bilil Burbur. She caught my attention because, at just nine years old, she was completely focused on her work. At such a tender age she was watering 100 goats in careful shifts, a few at a time.

She told me how before Mercy Corps began supplying water close to her home, she and her father used to walk to Lagbogol — which is 50 kilometers from where she lives — so that they could find drinking water for their goats.

She said: “My family used to have 300 goats, but as the drought continued they became fewer and fewer day by day because of the long trekking distance to water. My father and used to have to walk two days to reach Lagbogol and another two days to return with our goats, which are getting weaker as days pass because there is nothing to feed them on.

"I am so grateful that now I don’t have to trek anymore as water is brought closer to us by your people. Now I am able to go to school and learn because I don’t have to walk for days with our goats.”

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Click to enlarge. Photo: courtesy of InterAction

InterAction, the largest alliance of U.S.-based non-governmental organizations (NGOs), has just unveiled a beta version Horn of Africa Crisis Map. You can find the map here: http://ngoquest.org/maps/1085. Each purple dot on the map represents areas where organizations like Mercy Corps are working to address the famine in the Horn of Africa.

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There are over 1.46 million displaced people living in camps in Somalia and one third of them (about 500,000 people) are in camps in Mogadishu.

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Banadir Hospital, the government hospital in Mogadishu, is providing medical assistance to malnourished and sick people. The hospital is flooded with mothers and children, and there is a long line of people waiting to be admitted.

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I just got off a Horn of Africa emergency response team phone conference involving dozens of colleagues in at least five different countries: Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, the United Kingdom and the United States. We have these calls every few days to update each other and coordinate our efforts on what is one of the biggest crises to which we've ever responded.

There are over 1.46 million displaced people living in camps in Somalia and one third of them (about 500,000 people) are in camps in Mogadishu. Photo: Cassandra Nelson/Mercy Corps

The scale of the Horn of Africa crisis is staggering: the drought-stricken region is nearly half the size of the United States. Across this vast area, at least 12.4 million people are struggling to find enough food and water to survive, thousands of them walking for weeks to reach places where they hope to find some measure of relief.

One of those places is Mogadishu, Somalia's capital — which is, by its mere connotation, an unlikely locale to seek assistance. But 3.7 million people, about 40 percent of Somalia's total population, is at risk for starvation. That's why an estimated 100,000 people have fled to Mogadishu over the last several weeks.

Our team on the ground in Somalia is seeing the effects of that mass displacement. Today, they visited a camp where at least 120,000 people are staying in whatever shelter they can find. Our water and sanitation expert said there are only five or six latrines in the entire camp — at best, that's one latrine for every 20,000 people.

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Mercy Corps has been delivering clean, fresh water to families — many of whom are displaced — for more than a month in drought-stricken northeastern Kenya.

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