Thread by @althecat

This morning I visited Dubti IDP camp near Samara where 8000 families, 40,000 #Afar Zone 2 TPLF invasion refugees are located.

The camp is in an appalling state. It has received almost no assistance whilst a massive effort is underway to address unclear issues in Tigray.

https://twitter.com/althecat/status/1526344398564380673

The camp is receiving just 2 trucks of potable water a day, and sometimes just one. This works out at 25 liters per family or five liters per person. The minimum safe amount of water is 25 liters per person per day.

As a result the residents are forced to wash themselves and their clothes in stagnant fetid water which surrounds the camp. Diarrhea is rife worsening the hydration deficit caused by a massive shortage of drinkable water.

The camp has received minimal food aid and it’s inhabitants are purchasing food in the nearby town. If they have money.

The camp’s 2 week old medical center (finally opened after more than three months of camp operation) has no medicine to treat fetid waterborne diseases that are causing significant and dangerous skin infections for a massive number of children.

A camp medical center doctor confirmed that 3-4 children are dying everyday from a variety of causes. I interviewed 2 and photographed four mothers with children suffering acute malnutrition in the new health center.

The accommodation buildings used to house the refugee victims of the largely unacknowledged invasion of their home areas along the Tigrayan border in January - have broken or no sanitation and sewage is bubbling up from underground in the central square.

Because of the acute lack of potable water the fetid water is also being drunk. The vast majority of those in the camp are children, many very young. I watched an emaciated 8 year old girl doing so. Drinking some of the water she had collected to wash her clothes.

The medical center is distributing water purification tablets, to try to reduce the harm but purification tablets do not make the water even close to safe. Clothes washed in the water can also causec a variety of dangerous diseases.

Two Western Aid agencies I spoke to seem well aware of the scale and severity of the health crisis in the camp and have visited it during its four months of operation. But they have taken no action to address the underlying causes.

A single large water tank is used to distribute what little water is arriving. Increasing the number of water trucks to at least 10 a day - and providing more storage tanks would improve compliance with minimum standards. But much much more work is needed to make the camp safe.

Meanwhile the WFP is scaling up its gargantuan efforts to address Tigray’s humanitarian needs.

Over the past 22 days at least 1760 trucks have made the trip through a devastated Afar region (from 2 credible sources).

Tigray’s TPLF leadership ordered the Zone 2 invasion - an attack which led to 100s of thousands of IDP’s including those in the Dubti Camp.

“It’s political, they don’t care about us, they only care about their friends to the north”, an Afar business woman told me this evening.