Liz Jones in a Somalian refugee camp: 'The tiny girl scrapes her teeth with a twig to make herself pretty for me. A tooth falls out into her hand. Her very being makes a mockery of the world I have come from'



The most poignant sight, in the vast sea of humanity that surrounds me, in among all the rags that flap, in the unrelenting sandstorm, against thighs that are mere bones, is one little boy who is wearing a pair of pink flip-flops.



These are girls’ shoes, with little rosebuds and one remaining sequin dangling by a thread. They are far too small for him, so end halfway along the sole of his foot, making it painful and awkward to walk.

But he thinks he’s the bee’s knees. He’s attempting to swagger on his tiny girly shoes — the sort of apparel that would make him the subject of ridicule anywhere else in the world. But here, in a place I would safely describe as Hell on Earth, he is king of his world.



Shocked: Liz Jones with Dahiro and her sick daughter at the Dadaab Refugee Camp

I have come to Dadaab to see for myself the vast refugee camp on the border between Kenya and Somalia which has become the magnet for victims fleeing the drought and famine in the Horn of Africa. Millions are facing starvation, and more than 29,000 children under five have died in the past 90 days alone.



It’s early morning, but already 40 degrees and the wind makes it feel as though I’m inside a giant hairdryer. I am surrounded by children — there are 300,000 of them here, none of whom has even the basic means to wash themselves or owns a pair of underpants. These children, when they have the strength, use twigs to clean their teeth.

One tiny, filthy tot, like something out of a Dickens novel, is scraping at her teeth in front of me. I ask how old she is, thinking she is maybe four or five. She tells me she’s 13.

Liz Jones with a young refugee called Hassan, three, who with his mother Jamilla fled the the civil war and worst drought in Somalia for 60 years

As she scrapes, making herself pretty for me, she dislodges a tooth and calmly takes it out of her mouth. The poor girl is disintegrating before my eyes; at once impossibly young and improbably old.

Her very existence mocks the world that I have come from.



Oh, I know what some of you may be thinking. What on earth is a woman like me — who has spent a lifetime working in the fashion world, and who has long written about her own battles with her weight, her image, her debts — doing in a place like this, where the cost of my recent facelift would feed, what, a thousand children for a year?



That is precisely why I had wanted to come here: to stare true starvation in the face. To put not only my own problems in bitter perspective, but the whole pampered world we inhabit. To show how obcene are our worries in comparison to the parents who must watch their children wither to dust before their eyes.

Pose: Liz Jones with another young Somailan refugee

Last year, the average British woman spent £2,055 a year on her face, hair and body. Men spent £1,154. Still feeling comfortable?



The chasm between our world and the one I am visiting is brought starkly home to me when, shortly after arrival, I feel tiny fingers probing my pocket. Immediately my hand shoots there. I’m worried about my Blackberry, my electronic umbilical cord to the world I normally inhabit.



I look down, and a little boy aged three, called Hassan, is looking up at me with a great big snotty grimace. He’s not about to steal my phone: he’s just trying to put his tiny fist in mine.



In any case, I realise, my fears are ridiculous. Who would he call? What would he look up on the internet? The fact the worst drought in 60 years has hit his home, and he has had to walk for 28 days without food to get here? That Hillary Clinton is arguing with Islamist militia group Al-Shabaab, who are refusing to allow aid into Somalia?

Learning: Liz Jones with children at a school in the refugee camp on the border with Somalia and Kenya

He wouldn’t understand, because I don’t understand, how it can be that this morning I left my hotel in Nairobi, with its all-you-can-eat buffet, and eight hours later I’ve arrived in a place that is pre-historic?

If I had found pterodactyls flying above my head, I’d have been less bewildered.



I find myself staring at these children’s feet — not because I’m wondering what they wear, but because I’m too ashamed to meet their huge eyes.



I go in search of Hassan’s mum. I have a crowd of children with me now. One little boy wears a football shirt as a dress, with the word ‘Fabregas’ across his narrow back. I wonder what he’d think if he knew how much footballers earn.

Invitation: Liz in the home of a Somalian family - Kadija with her four children Momuhubi, Mardada, Kuresha, Ibrahim, Hadiji Ali, and Abdi

A little girl with tawny highlights, which in the West are the height of chic but here denote severe malnutrition, keeps doing an impression of me, hands on jutting hips, giving me a toothy grin. I wonder how she can smile in such a place, when her home is a makeshift teepee covered in plastic rubbish bags.



When I find her, Hassan’s mum, 40-year-old Jamilla, is sweeping her ‘front door’ with twigs, a pathetic attempt at pride. She invites me, with my combat trousers and bottle of antiseptic handwash, inside.

Jamilla tells me she walked with her five children for four weeks to get here. She demonstrates how she would bind her stomach with rope to quell the hunger pains.



She didn’t have the strength to carry little Hassan, so he had to walk, too. Some days, he just wanted to lie there and she would have to pull his matchstick arm — so narrow it might snap — and he’d make a trail in the sand.



I think of the baby in the seat in front of me on the flight out from London to Nairobi, with his papoose and brightly coloured changing mat and Wet Ones, and a mum about to go on an eco-safari.

I hatch a plan to steal Hassan, put him in the back of my 4x4, and drive him somewhere safe. But why him, when there are horror stories wherever I turn?

Patient: The Daily Mail writer walks through the rows of refugees waiting to be processed at the Dadaab refugee camp

I meet Salatho, who arrived this morning with her three children aged seven, six and four. To save these three, she left her three youngest children behind in her village of Dinor in Somalia to die. I ask how on earth she could do that — leave her little ones behind?



My translator tells me she cannot answer because Salatho has never been asked how she feels before. It turns out that human emotion, grief, is the biggest luxury of all here.



This woman did what she had to do. If she allowed herself that ultimate Western accessory depression, then she would just lie down in the sand and die.



Then there’s 50-year-old Osman, who has eight children clustered around him. His youngest, aged one, died on the way here. Unable to walk any further, the family had hitched a lift in a truck. The truck was so crowded that the baby had suffocated.

School children in the Dadaab refugee camp in their playground

Another of Osman’s sons is blind in one eye. Yet another has a hare lip.



That will never be mended, I think, instinctively putting a hand to my facelift. I have tried to reverse the signs of ageing: this boy will go through life, if he is lucky, with a gaping window to the inside of his skull.



It is a savage irony that despite the horrror of their circumstance, Somalis are probably the most naturally beautiful women in the world. At the camp’s reception centre, where between 1,400 and 1,700 people queue every day at dawn to be allowed in, I see face after face that reminds me of the supermodel Iman, who also came from Somalia. The difference, of course, is that Iman escaped.

These women won’t look like her for much longer, desiccated as they are by the sun, exhausted by constant child-bearing. (There is no concept of contraception here.)



I tell Jamilla, with her tiny waist, that women in the West strive to be thin. That if you are rich and privileged in my society, you stay young and thin forever, and fit into tiny clothes. She thinks I’m joking. She simply doesn’t believe me.



I tell her I used to starve myself to be beautiful. ‘I starve myself to feed my children,’ she says. And then, puffing out her hollow cheeks, she adds: ‘I thought everyone in the West was fat.’

Fear: Most of the refugees are fleeing the civil war in their country, which has come at the same time as a devastating drought

‘Yes, that is true, too,’ I say — for what else can I tell her? That our government spends millions trying to tackle the growing problem of obesity? There is no way to explain to Jamilla how we live in the West. We might as well inhabit not just a different century but a different planet.



At 5pm, I climb into my air-conditioned SUV — there is a strict curfew here — and am driven the few hundred yards to the Save The Children compound.



In this camp, it’s the aid workers who are the ones behind high fences and barbed wire — offering protection from bandits and Islamist militia streaming over the porous border.



Every nationality is represented here: groups from Norway, Sweden, France. It reminds me of MASH. Except in this war, on hunger, it’s not clear who the enemy is: global warming, world commodity prices, Al-Shabaab …



The UN protection is necessary not only to ensure the safety of the relief workers, but also to ensure the food that arrives daily in giant World Food Programme lorries.

Long walk: Men, women and children have walked huge distances to get to the camp

I admire their courage, though I do wish the UN did not hose down its fleet of snowy SUVs every night. Not with a drought on, surely? Not when no one thinks to give water to the donkeys — the only other mode of transport.



But then compassion itself has become a corporate affair. On arrival, I’d been given a set of rules: the half million people in the camp are not called famine victims, but ‘beneficiaries’. I swiftly learn the charity-speak: an OVC is an ‘orphan or vulnerable child’; a POC a ‘person of concern’.



Talk in the UN High Commission for Refugees bar that night is of the extreme demands of the press, celebrities and dignitaries who are clamouring to come here. Kristin Davis caused a stir here a week or so ago, and Angelina Jolie is expected soon. The most high-maintenance VIP so far has been the President of Kenya. He required a red carpet and an orchestra.



It’s easy to be cynical — especially when you’re sitting safely at home. But people in the UK have been the most generous in the world, giving £45 million in just four weeks. The relief effort needs many millions more. Will it — can it — make a difference in a region where famine seems, well, so wearily familiar?



The next morning, I drive out with my armed guard to see where our money is being spent. We arrive at one of the three feeding stations. Every day, at each feeding station, 20,000 people are given the basics of rice, flour, sugar, pulses, oil and tiny bags of sugar.

Desperate: Hundreds of thousands have fled to the camp

Despite the widespread criticism that the U.S. has not responded to this crisis, every single sack I see is stamped with the Stars and Stripes and the words ‘From the American People’.



One of Save The Children’s biggest expenses is to give each mother with a child between six months and a year a voucher for fruit and vegetables, in an effort to stamp out the ancient affliction of scurvy. (It’s the old-fashioned diseases that kill here. Measles is aother one.)



Each ‘beneficiary’ has a card, with a bar code, which means no one ever gets more than their fair share. Even so, a loud fight breaks out among the men, and the women, despite their burkas, weigh in too. A tiny child is dragging a sack bigger than she is.



I think of Sainsbury’s on a Saturday morning, trolleys piled with ready meals. A little girl, whose mum is unwrapping a blanket, is handed a set of primitive cooking utensils. She gives a tired little jig. You’d think it were Christmas morning and she’d been given an Xbox.



I climb back into the car. The Save The Children worker comes to see if I am OK. I tell her I can’t take it any more. How can this still be happening? After Live Aid and Live8?



This refugee camp has been here since 1992, which is when the last famine struck this region. It was built to shelter 90,000 people, but the current population is more than 400,000, with thousands of new arrivals crammed into areas outside, waiting to be admitted.

A Somalian refugee waiting to be processed at the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya

And this is just one camp. In total, the UN estimates that 3.2 million Somalis need ‘immediate life-saving assistance’, including 1.25 million children.



Can aid ever make things better? Or does it simply make benighted nations hooked on hand-outs and prop up wicked dictators? There are no easy answers. But you try explaining compassion fatigue in a place like this.



We drive to another compound. This one is very quiet. It is home to a clinic run with money given by the German people. I lift open the canvas and step inside. It is stiflingly hot, and eerily silent.



I count about 30 thin mattresses on the dirt floor, with a pile of rags on each — which turns out to be a mum holding a baby. The babies make no sound: they’ve already learned there is no point in crying. Fatima arrived today with Ayan. He is two years old but weighs just 6 kg. He has not eaten for 15 days.



Another child, like an alien, tries to stand on her bed — but she falls down; again and again. She lies down, her face on the dirty blanket, unable to lift it.



Next, I notice Dahiro — mainly because she has such a beautiful face. She is only 23 but already has three children. I look at her gnarled bare feet, like those of an 80-year-old, and tuck my own beneath my combats.

Mother and son: This refugee family arrive in search of food, shelter and safety

‘I could no longer breastfeed, so I gave my daughter water, and now she has diarrhoea,’ she tells me. The doctor lifts seven-month-old Khadi and takes her to be weighed. The baby’s huge eyes are wide with terror; she does not have enough fluid to make tears.



HOW YOU CAN HELP

To give to the Save The Children Appeal, go to www.savethechildren.org.uk or telephone 020 7012 6400. To donate £5 via your mobile, text DONATE to 70008. Messages cost £5 plus one standard text.

Whatever the cause of the famine, whatever the politics, we surely cannot look the other way.



The next day, I walk across the makeshift airstrip to catch a UN flight out of here. I don’t think I will ever say I am starving again. Or thirsty, or miserable. I close my eyes as the plane lifts off, not wanting to see the thousands of tiny graves on the ground below.



But there is one face that simply will not disappear. It belongs to Shuhiti, who is 15 and arrived, like so many children, at the camp on her own. Sitting in the dust, she told me her story.



Shuhiti lost her entire family in Mogadishu in 2008, as Islamist guerillas battled government troops for control of the city. She had been sent to the shops, and when she returned her house had been hit by an explosion. A suicide car-bomber had targeted the area nearby, and her parents, brothers and sisters were all burned alive.



The fighting escalated, and finally the famine came. And so she walked for days and days to get here — the place she longed to reach and I can’t wait to leave.



I ask what she wants for herself in the future. ‘A calm place,’ she says. ‘I can still hear my parents’ screams.’



As I drove away, she put her hand to the car window and begged me to take her with me. As she became smaller in the wing mirror, she already looked like a ghost.



Her face haunts me now. I can’t believe I left her to her fate. I can’t believe any of us can.

