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Dec 15, 2007

"Although the world is very full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it." --Helen Keller

Kindness Among Kin in Somali Crisis

In the narrow streets that wind through Mogadishu, it is difficult to find even one encampment of displaced people or a family that has been turned away. This is particularly remarkable because after nearly a year of brutal urban war, an estimated 600,000 people -- more than half the Somali capital city's population -- have been driven into the countryside. The tired and hungry arrivals have been quietly absorbed into the grass-roofed houses of local residents such as Mohamed, who estimates she has hosted 10 families over the past year. Most of them, she said, are related to her through clan -- Somalia's intricate network of families, which are providing a network of support in what the U.N. is now calling the continent's worst humanitarian crisis. "We have nothing at all," Mohamed said. "But we do what we can."