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The Road between Kakuma’s Two Neighbors

Written by Ernest Waititu
Tuesday, 13 July 2010
In Kenya’s Kakuma refugee camp, conflicts over resources between the refugees and the local Turkana have escalated. Drought and famine have spiked the competition for basics. In the northern Kenya region, where Kakuma lies, residents have lost thousands of cattle. Even more disturbing, more than a dozen people have died of starvation-related complications since the beginning of the year. As famine ravages the people, conflict is also claiming its fair share of lives. One night a few weeks ago a truck driver was shot dead on the Kakuma-Loki road in the refugee camp. Even with a dusk-to-dawn curfew and regular police patrol, the camp registered more than a dozen cases of attacks, most of them by gun, in the first five months of the year, according International Rescue Committee’s (IRC’s) security office. Samuel Mangeni, an ambulance driver with IRC, usually works overnight, picking up patients from the camp and delivering them to IRC hospital. The ambulance is the only vehicle, apart from police patrol, crisscrossing the expansive camp at night. The camp has more than 42,000 people. The local Turkana living around the camp are more than 70,000. With limited water, food and no affordable health facilities, the Turkana have found it hard to survive in this wilderness. Tensions have spiraled as drought and famine make the Turkana look increasingly into the camp for basics, says Emmanuel Nyabera, the spokesperson of UNHCR in Nairobi. While malnutrition, common tropical diseases and unique desert ailments afflict the camp, injuries from the conflict have increased the burden of healthcare. “The Turkana think that we have a lot of wealth, they attack us and kill us to steal the little we might have,” says John Garang a refugee from Sudan. However, the Turkana say the refugees have been favored with amenities at their expense “These refugees are given most of the jobs by the aid agencies here. They also have the best water and medical facilities, the host community has very little,” says Alex Lusiru a Kakuma native. Lusiru says that but for the biting drought, the Turkana would have had other options. In the taxing duty of saving lives with the ambulance the different realities of the two groups are manifested. Mangeni picks up two kids who have been stung by a scorpion. He picks up a drunken youth who says he has been struck by a blunt object on the head but who looks more like he has been knifed. He also delivers to the hospital a man beaten by thugs. In between, he picks people suffering from Malaria, headaches and diarrhea. The night’s big call happens when Mangeni is asked to pick up a woman in labor. Just before the edge of the camp, where the pick up is supposed to happen, a man frantically waves down the ambulance. He points toward a dusty road that exits the camp to the far-flung settlements where the Turkana live, indicating where the maternity case is. The man says his wife has just delivered on the road. Mangeni hesitates, saying he doesn’t pick patients outside the camp. The man, an Ethiopian refugee married to a Turkana woman, presents a nexus between the two troubled neighbors -- the Turkana and the refugees. He talks rapidly, explaining that his wife stays outside the refugee camp with her family, while he stays inside the camp. He had tried to walk his wife a couple of kilometers to access the free health facilities in the camp but the baby “just came.” Mangeni appears convinced of the genuineness of the case; he drives down to the scene, where two women sit facing each other. “How do I do this?” one of the women asks. “Part of the baby (the placenta, doctors tell me later) is inside and the rest outside? How do I get into the ambulance?” she wonders. The husband holds her by the hands and helps her to stand as the second woman bows and clutches a dangling thing — a baby! Ever so slowly, the team helps the woman and her baby into the ambulance. At the hospital, when Mangeni opens the back cab of the ambulance to let mom and son out, there is a huge pool of blood. The baby’s dad seems unperturbed. As he splashes water on the bloody ambulance he has offered to clean; he says the baby will be called Erot -- Turkana for road. Later in the morning Dr. Milhia Abdul Kader says that the mother is “still not out of the woods,” but the baby boy, after the cutting of the umbilical cord and a fine bath, is as fit as fiddle. Yet even with such heartening news, you can’t help but wonder about the night on the other side of Kakuma in the Turkana villages, where the ambulance could not reach, where health services are too far or too expensive for the poor of Turkana. Erot, born on a dusty patch of a deserted road, may have survived the first test of his life, but his birth was just a harbinger of more daunting tests that lie ahead. His chances of surviving to be his father’s age may as well depend on what part of Kakuma he lives on – with his father inside the camp or with his mother in the mud-walled manyattas of the Turkana.

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Its such an inspiring story for kenyans to understand the challenges our dear brothers undergo.thanks waititu.recall we used to meet at coast montessori and the last day with FR LANCE before you left for states.A great achievment men. keep up.

Posted by tony kingola, on 08/04/2010 at 05:46

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