The daily struggles of refugee life in Nairobi [Photos]

The word ‘refugee’ brings to mind images of sprawling camps, with rows of white tents reaching out to the skyline. Yet the reality is that 1 in 2 refugees now live in an urban setting. Take Nairobi, the bustling capital city of Kenya, for example. It’s now home to tens of thousands of refugees – like the Somali children pictured above. The five youngsters and their mother fled violent civil war in Mogadishu, and now live in one tiny room along with another Somali lady and her two children.  That’s all they can afford.

The children’s mother, formerly a nurse in Somalia, now survives by cooking food and selling it to nearby market traders. Her ‘kitchen’ is a tiny space between the outside wall of her concrete room and some makeshift iron sheeting. She cooks on a charcoal stove – which makes the cramped space incredibly hot – and has to buy water on the street as none is piped to her compound. Such work brings a little income for her family, but she’s struggled to pay her rent for the past four months.

 

These urban refugees who live in towns and cities are often hidden. Many don’t have official documentation and so fear being sent home, while others simply don’t know their rights or where to go for help. The IRC and our partner CineTrek are putting together a short film to highlight the plight of such refugees. Here Ken and John from CineTrek film Somalis who have come together to form a women’s group to support their community. The women sew bedspreads or prepare camel meat to earn money which they then share.

There are many nationalities of refugees in Nairobi, from Somalis and Ethiopians, to Sudanese and those from the Great Lakes. Mariam (pictured here) and her family fled Congo around two years ago. Today eight of them live in one cramped flat apartment because rent is hard to come by when you don’t have a job. (It’s difficult for refugees to get work permits, without which they can’t find official employment.) Here Mariam is preparing soup for her elderly, infirm mother. Mariam has scraped together a pile of chicken’s feet to make the soup. She says life in Nairobi is a massive struggle, but at least there’s peace unlike in Congo.

 

Many refugees live in the more run-down areas of Nairobi, such as Eastleigh (above). Here the few main streets are a bustle of activity, with many new enterprises and shopping centers springing up. However, the unpaved back streets are littered with rubbish and are virtually impassable in the rainy season. Untreated sewage is also a problem in here and frequently spills out onto the streets, creating an obvious health hazard.

 

Official estimates suggest that there are 50,000 refugees in Nairobi, but unofficial figures are many times higher. These numbers are likely to increase yet further with continued violent civil war in neighboring Somalia and fighting between ethnic groups in Sudan. The IRC and CineTrek hope that our short film on urban refugees – to be released in the spring – will draw more attention and funding to their plight. (As you can see the crew have already started to attract young admirers!)