East Africa Drought Response

MCC school kits brings smiles to four-year old Abadaye and her classmates in the Hagadera refugee camp. Photo by Allan Juma

School kits, blankets arrive in refugee camp

Updated April 3, 2012

The first of shipments of 600 MCC blankets and 20,000 school kits have been distributed in the Dadaab complex of refugee camps in northeastern Kenya near the Somali border. Many families in the camps are new arrivals who fled hunger and war in Somalia last year.

Allan Juma of MCC Kenya assisted with the distributions and met some of the people in the very overcrowded schools and camps. In the pre-primary school Juma met four-year old Abadaye, who lives with her father while her mother stayed back in Somalia, and Hawa Abdile, who lives with her mother while her father stayed back in Somalia. In the primary school, he met Said Baraka, 21, originally from Ethiopia, who has hopes of being a lawyer and Mohammed Aden, 20, originally from Somalia, who has hopes of being a university professor. Both Baraka and Aden have lived in the camp since 2008,

Dadaab is the largest refugee camp in the world. Refugee camps are meant to be temporary but the Dadaab camp has remained open since 1991 and over the years expanded into a complex of five camps. In partnership with Lutheran World Federation, MCC is Improving quality of education and access to education in two camps within the complex, Hagadera and Dagahaley. Currently, the situation at Dadaab is extremely challenging. Each of the camps was designed to accommodate about 30,000 people but collectively, the five camps now have a registered population of over 463,000 people.