An Interview with Caroline Diehl
In May, the Kenyan government decided to close the world’s largest refugee camp. Kenyan military intelligence reported that the terrorist group, Al-Shabaab, had used the camp to launch attacks against the Westgate Mall and Garissa University College. The Kakuma and Dadaab refugee camp complex, home to over 340,000 refugees, covers over 50 kilometers and is the third largest “city” in Kenya, after Nairobi and Mombasa.
The Kakuma camp was established in 1991 to house 90,000 people fleeing Somalia’s civil war. Caroline Diehl, a young idealistic Dartmouth graduate, was one of the first NGO workers to move to the Kakuma camp and set up an ad-hoc resettlement office to begin the arduous, and as it turns out, endless task of registering thousands of refugees who had no identification documents.
Last week, I interviewed Caroline's father, Frank, a contributing writer to our blog about Caroline's work at the Kakuma and Dadaab camp.
“It is true. We were a little idealistic and perhaps naive back then,” Caroline told her father when he called her hearing about the news that Kakuma and Dadaab were ordered closed. “We waded into Kakuma with no idea that the throng of war refugees from that part of Africa would not only continue endlessly, but would grow to the world-wide numbers we see today. You have no idea the humanitarian disaster that closing those camps will create. Even back in 1991, when I lived in Kakuma, the human suffering was almost unbearable. Little children wandered around crying, looking for their parents. Mothers were frantic to simply feed their children and find any kind of temporary shelter. The strong young men were already preying on the more vulnerable girls and women alone. Gangs began to form. You could always feel that chaos could break out at any moment with the slightest provocation. Food and clean water were always scarce.”
Frank asked: “Back then you were dealing with what would become 90,000 refugees. An enormous number, no doubt. But what will happen to 340,000 people, the current population of the Kakuma and Dadaab camp complex if they’re forced to move along?”
“It’s unimaginable. I’m not sure what the Kenyan government is thinking, but there are currently over 600,000 refugees from Somalia, South Sudan, and Burundi in Kenya. Kenya is perhaps the most accommodating country in the world to refugees, but closing that enormous camp complex will create humanitarian problems that frankly give me nightmares.”
Frank asked: “How about all the refugees from the Arab spring? What’s happening to them?”
“The Syrian civil war alone has displaced 11.7 million people. According to the UNHCR roughly 2 million registered refugees reside in Turkey, more than a million live in Lebanon, and well over a half million live in Jordan. An estimated half a million people journeyed to Europe this year through Greece. Tragically, nearly 3,000 of them died along the way. When you have lived and worked with war refugees as I have, these numbers are staggering. And these are not wealthy countries or particularly well run. Think of the problems they are facing. The world has got to take real action to help these countries. No time for platitudes. Food, water, clothing, shelter, police, and instant infrastructure of all kinds must be provided by the developed countries. Immediately.”
Frank asked: “Do you feel that the wealthy countries are not doing their part?”
“Right now, over 65 million people in the world are currently refugees. The six wealthiest nations in the world host less than nine percent of the world’s refugees. You do the math. We have both a humanitarian and a moral crisis. The Bible says in Luke 12:48, ‘to whom much is given, much will be required.’ The developed countries of the world better start to heed Luke’s admonition or we, the human race, are in for some bad times ahead.”
Caroline Diehl spent 5 years living and working in the Kakuma camp in Kenya. She currently works with the humble women of Malawi helping them establish birthing clinics and schools to educate their young women for careers beyond backyard farming. She is one of the unsung heroes we are privileged to discover and learn about through our work with our clients and partners. She knows what she’s talking about, and we would do well to heed her warning.
