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Feeling Africa's Drought in Kenya and in the U.S.

  • Religion Today Religious persecution, missions, Christianity around the world
  • Updated Aug 10, 2011

ASSIST News Service reports that before coming to the U.S., Dahir Adan and his immediate family were in Kenya’s sprawling Dadaab refugee camps for 17 years. Designed for 90,000 people, the camps’ population has quadrupled to 420,000 and continues to grow by 1,500 people daily as people stream in from famine-stricken southern Somalia. Adan, 30, and his wife Fartun Muhumed, 26, are refugees from Somalia, resettled to the U.S. in February 2010 by Church World Service and Community Immigration and Refugee Services of Ohio. They now live in Columbus, with their four small children, but they worry for their drought-afflicted relatives back home in the Horn of Africa. “They have no shelter, no food, no clothes,” Fartun says. “In Somalia they depended on livestock and all the livestock they had perished due to the severe drought.” The UNHCR reports that some 116,000 Somali refugees have arrived in Dadaab so far this year. About 76,000 of them arrived in Dadaab in the last two months alone. Africa's drought affects more than 10 million people across Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia.