Somali refugees walk the more than 200 mile journey by foot through the desert to the Dadabb refugee camp where a quarter of the country's 7.5 million people are on the move. Help has been blocked by Shabab, a militant group linked to Al Qaeda, which controls some famine-stricken areas and is suspicious of foreign aid agencies.The result is streams of refugees, struggling miles through dry desert wind and fine, sleeting sand in search of sanctuary. The worst drought in decades has blistered large parts of the Horn of Africa, turning it into a landscape of deserted villages and dead rivers. The United Nations says 12 million people need emergency aid.
PHOTOGRAPH BY: Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times
Link
Somali refugees wait to be registered at Camp IFO on the outskirts of Dadaab, Kenya. They are hoping for an open spot at the world's largest refugee complex. .
PHOTOGRAPH BY: Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times
Link
People mass outside the gates, hundreds deep and eerily still, many squatting in the red dirt holding emaciated children. They wait for water and medicine, but most of all, they wait for an open spot at the world's largest refugee complex.
PHOTOGRAPH BY: Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times
Link
The Dadaab refugee complex in northeastern Kenya, a 19-square-mile sprawl, was created in the early 1990's to accommodate refugees fleeing political chaos in Somalia. It now holds 372,000 people, more than four times its original capacity.
PHOTOGRAPH BY: Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times
Link
Every day, more than 1,000 people arrive at the camp, an estimated half are malnourished children.
PHOTOGRAPH BY: Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times
Link
Women venture to the camp outskirts to forage for firewood, and return bowed under the big bundles lashed to their backs. They run at the sight of official-looking vehicles. Stripping the trees has angered local Kenyans. They return with horror stories of being raped out in the bush since they travel alone and without their men.
PHOTOGRAPH BY: Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times
Link
The onrush of refugees has created a backlog of 17,000 people, and growing, who can languish for months before they are registered, said Alexandra Lopoukhine, a spokeswoman for the aid agency CARE International. Lopoukhine said the vast majority of new arrivals are women and children. Men stay behind with the dying livestock, trying to protect the precarious family wealth.
PHOTOGRAPH BY: Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times
Link
A Somali refugee holds her child as she waits to see medical volunteers at a Doctors Without Boarders field hospital.
PHOTOGRAPH BY: Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times
Link
Ayan Hussain waits on the floor of a Doctors without Boarders field Hospital for her sick child to be seen by a doctor. Ayan recently traveled the long journey from Somalia by foot to Dadaab hoping for aid. She said her child became very ill along the way.
PHOTOGRAPH BY: Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times
Link
Habido Sharif Hassan, 2 years old and severely malnourished, lies inside a United Nations hospital at the refugee complex.
PHOTOGRAPH BY: Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times
Link
Hawa Barre Osman looks for a sign of life from Abdi Noor Ibrahim, her severely malnourished 1-year-old, inside the Doctors Without Borders therapeutic feeding center at the Dadaab complex. She walked for a month with her five children from Somalia to reach the camp.
PHOTOGRAPH BY: Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times
Link
A mother uncovers the face of her child who recently died in a United Nations makeshift hospital from malnutrition. Throughout the affected region Doctors Without Boarders say it's agency is treating over 10,000 severely malnourished children in its feeding centers and clinics.
PHOTOGRAPH BY: Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times
Link
A child who died from malnutrition has his chart examined by doctors before being released to the family for burial.
PHOTOGRAPH BY: Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times
Link
An all too common sight in the refugee camps, family members digging shallow graves for their loved ones, often children, who have died from illness and malnutrition.
PHOTOGRAPH BY: Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times
Link
In Dadaab, the World Food Program provides foodstuff for all needy refugees. Refugees receive at least 2,100 calories in their daily ration, made up of pulses, wheat flour, maize, corn-soy oil blends, lentils, vegetable oil, and salt. An average person requires a minimum of 2,100 calories. For security reasons, food distribution in the camps is carried out on a bi-monthly basis. Families are provided with food in quantified bulk to last them until the next distribution date. To obtain non-food items, refugees must sell and/or barter part of their food rations.
PHOTOGRAPH BY: Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times
Link
The Doctors Without Borders therapeutic feeding center at the Dadaab complex runs desperately low on medicine and operates with minimal medical staff.
PHOTOGRAPH BY: Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times
Link
Refugees collect water from a humanitarian water source. It's a reminder that behind the science, statistics and debate over global warming, climate change is already having a deep impact on Africa's poverty, security and culture. So far, there's no comprehensive strategy for coping with climate refugees, who are not yet legally recognized and receive no direct funding. As a result, those fleeing drought, flood and other weather changes usually end up in slums or refugee camps that were set up and funded for other purposes.
PHOTOGRAPH BY: Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times
Link
A new kind of refugee has arrived-those forced from their Somalian home regions not only by war or persecution, but by the climate. This Kenyan camp, Dadaab, is overflowing with the displaced.
PHOTOGRAPH BY: Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times
Link
Somali refugees hold their children as they wait to be seen at one of the five health stations run by the Doctors Without Borders aid group.
PHOTOGRAPH BY: Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times
Link
Haredo Bule Ali checks to see if her granddaughter's heart has stopped. Doctors pronounced the child dead in a hospital but when the child was brought home, the family members thought she might still be alive. In a state of panic family members took turns to see if the child was alive but, she was indeed dead. The 10-month-old died from pneumonia she contracted during the 200-mile walk she and her family made to the Dadaab refugee camp from Somalia.
PHOTOGRAPH BY: Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times
Link
Despite the sorrow they have lived through, children still manage to have fun by swinging on the dying trees inside the refugee camp.
PHOTOGRAPH BY: Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times
Link
School children study the Koran for eight hours a day in small made huts in the refugee camps. Security is also a constant worry for those living at Dadaab, whose red sand is scattered with the bones and carcasses of animals.
PHOTOGRAPH BY: Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times
Link
Some of the refugees are being sent to a tented camp extension, but the aid group Doctors Without Borders has complained that it lacks a hospital and does not meet "minimum humanitarian standards."
PHOTOGRAPH BY: Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times
Link
Near the Dadaab refugee camp, the sand is scattered with the bones and carcasses of animals.
PHOTOGRAPH BY: Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times
Link
Security is a constant worry for those living at Dadaab. Bandits lurk in the surrounding desert, and some aid workers suggest that Shabab has been recruiting fighters in the camps for the militia's battle against Somalia's wobbly transitional government.
PHOTOGRAPH BY: Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times
LinkMore galleries on Framework
return to gallery
On Jan. 15, 1917, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Thomas Cusack Co. v. City of Chicago that a city may prohibit billboards in residential districts in the interest of... View Post»
2012 Academy Awards | Backstage
See also Framework's 2012 Academy Awards red carpet arrivals and
Pictures in the News | Feb. 16, 2011
A passenger jet flies past the famed London Eye against the backdrop of a moon two days from being full; across the River Thames, nearby buildings tower over the city's Canary... View Post»
The Week in Pictures | Nov. 29 - Dec. 3, 2010
Each week we bring you the best images from around the world, and this week is no exception. Europe's deep-freeze provided an assortment of images, including motorists... View Post»
