Not enough room at Somali refugee camp
DADAAB REFUGEE CAMP, Kenya - With 400,000 people living here, the Dadaab Refugee Camp has become the largest in the world. One-quarter of the people have come in the last six months.
The United Nations hasn't been able to expand services that fast, so many of the refugees are living in the desert as best they can.
CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley reports when new refugees arrive, their fear of immediate starvation is over. They'll find the basic foods they need but then they set off for the place that's known as the outskirts.
Against the winds they hold on to a piece of desert that is about as barren a place as there is on the Earth. They make domes out of twigs. Inside, families of five, six or more huddle inside against the sun. They're no longer starving, but they're not quite living.
300,000 in danger of starvation
Chris Tridy of the UN children's agency UNICEF said, "there is a huge population on the outskirts of the camp here that are not getting the services that they need just because the rate of influx is so high."
"We talked to people today who said their entire village just got up one day and they all left together," Pelley said.
"You are talking thousands and thousands of people who are just moving in mass," Tridy said, "and moving as quickly as they can to regions where they can access food and water."
Diseases like malaria and measles followed the weakened refugees to the outskirts. Nearby we met a girl who weighed no more than an infant. She was fighting what appeared to be infections that caused bleeding in her eyes. She's now blind in one eye, and just seven years old.
Chris Tridy of UNICEF called the medics. They said she was not dying. They told her father to bring her to a camp hospital the next day. The U.N. is expanding services. But too many are coming too fast - about 1,500 a day. The weather drove them here - and all day long in the outskirts - it seemed the wind had come to finish them off.
