On Saturday, Angelina Jolie made a day-long trip to the world’s largest refugee camp, the Dadaab camp on the Kenyan side of the Kenyan-Somali border. The camp is made up of 285,000 Somali refugees that have been streaming across the border since the 1990s, when Somalia became, in effect, a failed state, or a terrorist haven/narco-kleptocracy, whatever we’re calling it these days.

The Dadaab refugeee camp is actually three large, conjoined camps that host approximately 90,000 people each. Angelina toured all three, speaking with refugees and calling attention to issues like access to fresh, clean water and waste disposal, where the lack of both is enabling cholera to run rampant. Jolie noted, “The toilets are already overflowing. There is not even enough space for trash dumps so people are living amongst the garbage… with up to 7,000 refugees arriving from Somalia each month and rain on the horizon, they say it will be hard to contain the next outbreak.”

Jolie’s visit comes one month after the UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres visited the camp and made an appeal for additional funding to improve the sanitation issues, and to help care for the thousands of refugees arriving every week. My guess is that Guterres’ visit didn’t make the kind of headlines needed to jump-start a donor-drive, so they sent Angelina:

12 September 2009 – Visiting the world’s largest refugee camp, housing refugees from Somalia, on the Horn of Africa nation’s border with Kenya, Academy award-winning actress and Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations refugee agency Angelina Jolie today characterized the site as “one of the most dire” she has ever seen.

“If this is the better solution, then what must it be like in Somalia?” Ms. Jolie asked during her day-long visit to Dabaab, one of three camps that together were designed for 90,000 people but now host some 285,000 refugees.

Children ran to greet her as she made her way to the new arrivals area, where she met a young women with three small children with distended stomachs and streaming noses who just reached the camp in Kenya after walking for days to flee Somalia, where half the population – or some 3.8 million people – are in need of aid.

The Goodwill Ambassador saw first-hand the daily reality of life in Dabaab, where women and children line up for hours every day at water taps which are turned off for hours.

“The the toilets are already overflowing,” she observed. “There is not even enough space for trash dumps so people are living amongst the garbage.”

Ms. Jolie was told of a cholera outbreak earlier this year by staff from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) at the camp, where some families who have made their homes there for years are hosting newly-arrived refugees.

“What is amazing is that as more and more people come into the camp, the Somali families continue to be generous with what little they have, even if that means having one eighth of the water they need and their children suffering from dehydration,” she said.

At the end of her visit, Ms. Jolie noted that “the Somali families I met today are full of warmth and affection. I wish more people could meet them [because] then they would have a stronger desire to help.”

When he visited Dabaab last month, High Commissioner António Guterres was assured by the Kenyan Government that it understood the urgency of granting additional land to alleviate overcrowding at the site.

Mr. Guterres, who called Dabaab the “most difficult camp situation in the world,” pledged UNHCR’s support in the interim to boost the refugees’ living conditions by upgrading the aging water and sanitation systems, increasing health services and providing adequate shelter and nutrition.

He also committed an additional $20 million for refugees and the host community in Dabaab, calling for massive international donor support.

UNHCR has recently begun moving 12,000 refugees to the Kakuma camp in northern Kenya as an emergency measure for new arrivals.

[From the United Nations News Service]

I didn’t know the Dadaab refugee camp was the largest refugee camp in the world – I really thought (and still think) there are probably larger camps in Pakistan (housing hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees) and Chad (housing the more than one million Sudanese refugees). Perhaps the Afghan and Sudanese refugees haven’t been placed in one centralized camp, though? That could be it, a technicality.

I know there are a lot of people who think Angelina just makes the goodwill trips for her own publicity reasons, but I disagree. She became a UNHCR goodwill ambassador back in 2001, which is a long time to stick with something this depressing if your heart’s not in it. Plus, at this point, I don’t think Angelina is even choosing where she goes on most of her visits. I think the trips have been planned to the last detail, and the UNHCR simply knows how to use their most public, headline-making representative, and they ask her to go to specific, targeted regions or camps when they have a political, financial and/or humanitarian agenda to push at a certain time.

Photo credit: © UNHCR/B. Heger