Tens of thousands are living in limbo

Many minorities don't feel welcome in their homelands.
MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS
DADAAB, Kenya -- The baby boy was still growing in his mother's womb when government troops stormed their village in southern Sudan and opened fire. She was shot in the back of her left shoulder as she tried to flee, and the trauma sent her into labor.
The bullet that ushered the boy into the world came from a rifle that the family mistakenly called an AK-42. So the Deng family named him "42," a defiant joke on his would-be killers and a lifetime reminder of the two-decade civil war that's decimated his people.
Officially, the fighting in southern Sudan has been over for nearly two years. But 42, who's now 15, still lives here, hundreds of miles from his homeland, in a closet-sized hut cobbled together with sticks.
He may never go home again.
"After 20 years," said the tall, earnest boy, "I don't believe a war can just stop."
Worldwide, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that some 6.2 million people -- roughly the population of Washington state or Indiana -- are living in "protracted refugee situations," which it defines as five years or more in a refugee camp. They're living in limbo, unable or afraid to go home, struggling to put down new roots in foreign soil and subsisting on the kindness of strangers.
What may be one of the largest collections of refugees anywhere in the world is in northern Kenya, where 42 and more than 160,000 other people live in three refugee camps clustered around the desert town of Dadaab.
Wreaking havoc
Now heavy rains and flooding are wreaking havoc in the camps, says the aid agency CARE, which has run the Dadaab camps since they opened 15 years ago.
"Food storage facilities have been flooded, latrines have collapsed, and a significant number of shelters, including one wing of the hospital in Ifo camp, have crumbled," said Mohammed Qazilbash, CARE's senior program manager for refugee assistance in Kenya.
The vast majority of the people in the camps around Dadaab are from Somalia, but there are also Rwandans, Congolese, Ethiopians, Ugandans, Eritreans and Sudanese -- the human debris of the civil wars, genocide and ethnic cleansing that have plagued East and Central Africa for two decades.
Except for Somalia, where growing numbers of people are fleeing a possible war between Islamist militias and an interim government, the conflicts that sent people fleeing to Dadaab have largely subsided. Southern Sudan is trying to rebuild after a 2005 peace agreement; Congo just held its first democratic elections in more than 40 years; post-genocide Rwanda boasts one of the fastest-growing economies in Africa.
But many refugees aren't going home anytime soon, and life for most has a stifling air of permanence.
Members of long-persecuted minority groups don't feel welcome in their homelands. Other refugees are too poor or too frail to make the long, hot trek. Still others, having lost their families and villages to war, say they have nothing to return to.