Hiiraan Online

We are Somalis and we want to return to our homeland. Allah, please help us!“ are the words of the song Farah Ibrahim sings. The group of 30 boys sitting in the dust before him chant to the words of the seven year old despite the fact they have all fled their homeland in fear of death at the hands of the Islamic Al-Shabaab militia or death by famine. Together with 150,000 other Somalisthey have found shelter in the Ethiopian refugee camp Dollo Ado. Life is hard in the dusty tent city where temperatures often exceed 45 degrees Celsius but at least you can live here.

“In Somalia, I had my own goats. But they all died. Here, in the camp no one has goats”, says shepherd boy Farah later. While he sings soulfully with his friends of his homeland, 100 metres or so across the away, Hamdi wolfs down porridge from a plastic cup. The United Nations´ World Food Programm (WFP) ensures that children here in the emergency school get at least one nourishing meal a day. Hamdi swallows the grey slime as if making up for what she missed during a 20 day journey from Somalia to Dollo Ado. Day and night she walked with her parents and eight siblings, the child sometimes passing out from hunger. They only ate when the people in destroyed villages and towns they passed shared what they had with the refugees. But most people they met did not have anything and joined the trek themselves.

Hamdi likes the tasteless porridge and she doesn’t want to join in with Farahs´ Somalia song. She never wants to return to her home country. Not even with Allah´s help. “Al Shabaab men cut Sawdo´s neck”, whispers Hamdi. When the murderers attacked her parents house in Rabdore, Hamdi ran away. Her sister, one year older, was not fast enough. Hamdi is awoken by her screams now nearly every night. If you ask Hamdi why the Al Shabaab-men slaughtered a seven year old kid while her parents were forced to watch, she whispers: “Because they are evil.” Her teacher does not know a better answer.

Hamdi is just one of thousands of traumatised children who have found shelter in the five camps of Dollo Ado. They have seen their relatives, friends and animals dying, they have suffered hunger and thirst and most are haunted by their memories. Faduma tries to offer them at least some kind of childhood. The volunteer teacher sings, dances and plays with them. “Usually, you don´t need to teach children how to play. They do it naturally. But these kids simply saw too much. Often, they don´t even trust their own peers,” says Faduma, who lost several cousins herself during the 20 years of civil war that afflicted Somalia.

Last summer, during the peak of the worst drought in the Horn of Africa for 60 years, 2000 starving people arrived in Dollo Ado every day. According to the United Nations, the camp had the highest mortality rate in the world. Since then, it has rained in Somalia and now far less people arrive. On the graveyards of Dollo Ados only a few fresh heaps testify to the fact that the hardship of the refugees sometimes still takes its toll in the camp, though nearly every other kid is still undernourished.

Mohammed is one of them. Flies crawl in to the open mouth of the three year old, his legs shiver while he sleeps on the bosom of his sister Fardowsa. The nine year old carried her little brother to an emergency health post. “I heard, they have special food here, that makes weak children strong again,” says the older sister, who has grown up too quickly. In Dollo Ado, there are too many grownup children.

Most people in Dollo Ado only have what they could carry when they left Somalia. Daruro Mohammed is different. The 21 year old somehow managed to carry an ancient sewing machine with her. “I was a teacher at a primary school. But due to the Al-Shabaab terror, the kids did not come anymore. So I started to sew,” the mother of three explains. A digital watch on her left wrist and a mobile phone in her right hand both signify that she belongs to the “upper class” of Dollo Ado. Beside the chattering sewing machine, the little shop in her tent is her second main support. Abdi has milk powder, soap and cheap flip flops on offer. But who has money to buy it?

“Some of the oil I will sell, to buy milk powder for my grand children,” Khairo Muktar says. In one of the five WPF food distribution centres other refugee women have just filled four litres into Muktar´s dirty jerry can. Every month, WFP distributes 16 kilos grain, 1,5 kilos pulses, 1,5 kilo corn-soy-blend, 900 grams oil, 450 sugar and 150 grams salt. According to WFP that should be enough for a whole month, but most refugees claim that everything is finished after 20 days. It is difficult to check whether that is true, or whether the refugees take part of their rations to family members on the other side of the river Jubba, to Somalia.

A stubborn mule refuses to go any further when he is forced to step on the little iron bridge that connects Ethiopia with Somalia. It seems the donkey simply does not want to return to the war torn country. On the Somalian side, the Ethiopian army established a military outpost. In 2006, Ethiopia invaded neighbouring Somalia and toppled the Union of the Islamic Courts, which paved the way for the even more radical Al-Shabaab. Ethiopia withdrew its troops, only to invade again in November 2011.

The Ethiopian and Kenyan invasion, and the troops of the Transitional Federal government in in the Capital Mogadishu – backed by theAfrican Union and the West – have weakened Al Shabaab – but the Islamists are not defeated yet.

“We do not expect that peace will prevail in Somalia soon. Most refugees will stay in the camps for a long time,” a UN official in Dollo Ado says. Farah does not care what the UN man says. He continues to sing his Somalia song.