Somalia

Street children in Mogadishu sniffing glue, bought to older children with the money that they get begging. To feed themselves, they scavenge in rubbish dumps. Heavy glue users like them can expect to suffer irreversible brain damage in two years. ------ Sadam (centre), 8 years old, is from Baidoa. His father was addicted to qat (an intoxicating plant very widely used in Somalia) and owed money to a woman who sold it, so she called Al Shabab. A group of soldiers chained him and, in front of the rest of the family, shot him in the head. Sadam's mother, with all his other brothers and sisters, left for Mogadishu but died on the way, leaving him alone when the children dispersed. Sadam continued walking, sleeping in trees during the night and begging for food during the day until he arrived to the city, where he arrived three months ago. Here he met other children and started sniffing glue. He sleeps in the ground and the nightmares awake him in the night. He only gets to forget where he sniffs glue. ------ Farham (right), 12 years old, is from Markah. He arrived to Mogadishu with his family in 2007 escaping the frequent combats between the Ethiopian Army and the Islamic Courts of Justice, from where Al Shabab originated. Since his mother suffered mental problems, his father divorced her and expelled from the common home, marrying another woman. Since his new stepmother beat him frequent and brutally, Farham escaped and now lives in the street. He has been injured twice: a ricocheting bullet hits his left leg while he was playing football with friends and later on, a mortar felt near the place where he was sleeping at Km.4. When he sniffs, he feels to be floating and to be somewhere else, and forgets his troubles.

Mohammed Abdul Katir, 10 years old, was walking home with three other boys when a bomb exploded in the street killing his three friends. He received shrapnel impacts in his stomach (for which he has just been operated) and on the chest, and has injuries in legs, arms and hands. He recovers at the only facility with the capacity to cope with such injuries in the war-ravaged country, Medina Hospital in Mogadishu, supported by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

Street scene near Bakaara Market in Mogadishu. After more than 20 years of continuous war, the country's economy is totally ruined

Camp for Internally Displaced People (IDPs) of Darwish, Mogadishu, where 7000 people live and share six latrines. They have no drinking water or sanitary assistance, and receive occasional food from Turkish humanitarian organizations.

Sukarey (left) is 30 years old and lives at Gar Gaar camp for displaced people in Mogadishu, with her husband and five children. They had to abandon their fields and village near the city of Baidoa because of the continuous drought. After four months in the capital, they have neither income nor more help than the erratic food deliveries provided by a Turkish humanitarian organization

View of a camp for displaced people in Mogadishu. Hundreds of thousands of people live surrounded by rubbish and among the ruins of the war, with no sanitation, running water or any other kind of services

Ifrah Mukhtar, who is three months old and weights 2.3 kg. Born in Afgoye, her mother and grandmother brought her to Mogadishu in order to receive malnutrition treatment. They arrived with nowhere to sleep or money to buy food, so the hospital feeds the three of them. Ifrah is at the malnourished children wing of Banadir Hospital, meters away from the place where a bomb exploded in November 2011 while she was there.

Funeral of Zaina Siido, a girl five months old, who the previous day had breathing problems. Since their parents live at the Tarabunga camp for displaced people, they had nowhere to take her for assistance so she died in the evening. It is not the first time that a child of the family from Baidoa dies in the three years that they have been living in Mogadishu.

A chained patient sleeps at Habib Mental Health Hospital in Mogadishu. Although one in three Somalis suffers severe mental health disorders, assistance in psychological facilities is practically non-existent. The population believes that mental health patients are actually people possessed by black magic charms and, in thousands of cases, people suffering schizophrenic or psychosis who might be easily treated and have a normal life are instead tied to trees for decades, dying of tuberculosis or eaten up by hyenas. Neither the government nor any humanitarian organization supports the hospital.

Habib Mental Health Hospital in Mogadishu. Hospital staff reduces a patient, admitted the same day, after suffering an anxiety attack. Founded by Dr. Abdirrahman Ali Awale in 2005, the only support that the hospital (the only facility for the treatment of mentally ill patients in this traumatized city) receives comes from sporadic donations from Somalis from the Diaspora plus some drugs provided by the World Health Organization (WHO). The workers are volunteers and many patients are homeless or have been abandoned by their families.

Shamso, 18 years old, deaf and blind on one eye. Even though she laughs continuously, she has almost no interaction with other people. Shamso has no other diagnosis than "mental disorder", although she seems to suffer an extreme case of post-traumatic stress disorder, probably caused by armed fighting. Her family abandoned her here, in an annex building to the Habeb Mental Hospital in Mogadishu, where there is neither the capacity nor the means to provide her with treatment.

Boys playing football in the streets of Mogadishu.

Man affected by polio when he was young, now working as collector for a moneylender at Bakaara Market in Mogadishu. The total absence of financial institutions (and anything resembling tax collection) makes the population vulnerable to extortion and usury

Camp for displaced people of Yibuti in Mogadishu, where more than 3500 people live. The camp has been opened for 6 years and hosts people from Baidoa, who claim not to have received water, food or any kind of assistance in the last two years. Even though the main source of income for their habitants is all kind of daily jobs and begging, they are collecting money to build two latrines, which would be the first ones in the camp.

Street children foraging for anything valuable in the rubbish mounds accumulated in front of the catholic cathedral of Mogadishu. Built during the Italian colonization of the country, it was destroyed during the war, being bombed several times. Today, the building is in ruins and populated by the plastic tents of the families displaced from the countryside.

A group of street children and homeless people (mostly drug abusers and mentally ill people and all of them men since women don't survive on their own in the streets of Mogadishu) receive a daily pot of cooked food delivered by a local organization

Scene at Hamerweyne Market

Scene near the Bakaara Market in Mogadishu, a city where no building is untouched by the ravages of the war, and most of them have been extensively damaged

Two old men in the street going to Bakaara Market in Mogadishu, the biggest commercial centre of Somalia and still fiercely disputed by diverse militias from the city that finance themselves by taxing the shop owners

Mogadishu fishing port, a small beach where small artisanal boats disembark relatively big amounts of fish every day including sharks, manta rays and turtles. Fisheries are an artisanal industry in Somalia, and fishermen use small boats that can't get away more than a few kilometres from the shore. Industrial fishing (fishing being the only resource that might help to develop Somalia) is carried out by big factory boats belonging to foreign companies

Scene at the Mogadishu fishing port, a small beach near the city centre. As with every other industry or task, hundreds of children are used as cheap labor.

Panoramic view of a recently habilitated section of Ifo refugee camp near Dadaab. More than half a million Somali refugees live in four camps surrounding Dadaab in Eastern Kenya, which continue receiving a constant influx of families escaping drought, war and famine in Somalia.

Habiba Mohammed and her five children (here pictured with two daughters, one of the in malnutrition treatment at a nearby clinic run by Médecins Sans Frontières -MSF-) has been living in a shack for five months at Ifo refugee camp near Dadaab, while she waits for a regular tent. Since her husband had to stay to take care of the family's land in Somalia, she and the children had to do alone the gruelling one-month trip to the camps.

Refugee families receive their fortnightly allowance of food (wheat flour in the picture) in a distribution centre managed by the organization CARE and the World Food Program (WFP) at the Dagahaley refugee camp near Dadaab in Kenya. Food rations (together with the rest of services like drinking water, latrines, health, education, etc.) guarantee the survival of the refugee families but create a culture of dependency in a population without realistic perspectives of a better future.

A group of women return home after collecting firewood for cooking at the Ifo refugee camp near Dadaab in Eastern Kenya. In a situation where the basic humanitarian assistance (food, water, health) is not 100% funded, firewood is the only fuel that refugee families can afford in spite of the huge ecological impact in a region already very arid and severely eroded.

Khadija Adam, nine months old, suffers acute malnutrition and for 15 days has been receiving oxygen and therapeutic food at the hospital that the German organization GIZ runs at the Ifo refugee camp near Dadaab.

Hodan Diriye Faraha (left), left Kismayo in Somalia in 1999 to be relocated to South Africa with help from the United Nations High Commission for the Refugees (UNHCR). She was there operated of a severe back problem. The South African government, however, expelled her to Kenya in 2007, where she has no relatives. Since she got pregnant without being married, the rest of the Somali community immediately repudiated her, so she was forced to leave in the street, where her son died. She was eventually hosted by a group of women in their flat of Eastleigh in Nairobi, where she shares three rooms with another fifteen people. She barely goes out to the street since she fears that she might be assassinated.

A family arrives at Ifo refugee camp near Dadaab in Kenya. After living several months in shacks on the outskirts of the Dagahaley refugee camp, they have finally been assigned a definitive tent at Ifo. Although the tents themselves are supposed to be a temporary solution until conditions in Somalia allow for repatriation, some families have been living in the camps for more than twenty years and the possibility for real improvements in Somalia are minimal.