(ERGO) – Mohamed Nur Gelle, a disabled former farmer, lives with his wife and 10 children in Danyar internal displacement camp in Mogadishu’s Kahda district, where they struggle to make a decent living and can’t find stable income.
“We are here because we are poor! We don’t have money, we don’t have food, we don’t have a house, our situation is very bad. I have a wife and children and we don’t have relatives to support us,” Mohamed told Radio Ergo.
They have occasionally received aid handouts from Somali diaspora groups although Mohamed said they hadn’t received anything at all in the past three months.
Both of Mohamed’s legs were paralysed in a car accident in 2005. This has barred him from getting odd jobs. He said he attempted to get jobs in the city but was never selected because of his disability and his lack of education.
He is forced to go around begging, explaining his desperate situation to anyone who can listen and give him a few shillings to take home to feed his family.
His wife has been trying to earn some money to support the family by washing clothes. Whenever she is called for work, she brings home $3-5, which doesn’t cover the large family’s needs.
Mohamed and his family were displaced from Barire, Lower Shabelle region, in 2015 following clan conflict that forced them to abandon their one-hectare farm and flee the insecurity in the area.
They moved to Mogadishu hoping to find better living conditions but have been greatly disappointed. He said they thought about moving back to their village but never had enough funds to get them back, leaving them caught up in the IDP life that has many challenges.
Like many breadwinners who lost their old livelihoods in their home areas and haven’t found an alternative, Mohamed believes if they received investment money to start up a small business, they would be leading a better life and wouldn’t have to worry about meals.
“Our situation can improve if we get a business and we get jobs. We would like to work doing something for ourselves like running a shop. It would be good for us to get investment so that we don’t have to depend on aid,” he said.
Another father of 12 children, Ali Farah Mumin, has been an IDP for eight years. He and his family have been sleeping in a small shack made of plastic bags tied to sticks that can’t possibly protect them from heavy rainfall.
Ali digs waste pits making less than $4 a day from his work. Since 2017, the family has struggled to get enough food and are used to cooking and eating just once a day.
Since joining the IDP camps in Mogadishu, he said they had received handouts of food aid on six occasions and cash aid twice from different aid organisations.
However, he told Radio Ergo that this random support had not helped them at all in the long term. He hopes one day to get investment money to start a small business that he thinks could provide a sustainable solution to their hardships.
“We are just getting by, we don’t have land, we live in the camp. They’re constantly telling us to move out. We don’t have our own land,” he said.
Ali has lived in six different camps since being displaced. He said the constant movement to different camps has worsened their situation as they have constantly had to rebuild their lives in each new setting. They now live in El-dhere camp in Kahda district.
In 2016 he and his family were displaced from their pastoralist life in a rural part of Moqokori, Hiran region, where all his 120 goats died in severe drought.
Similarly, Mohamed Hassan Ali, a father of six children, has been internally displaced for seven years during which time they have never lived in proper shelter and always faced food shortage. He sells peanuts but his paltry income can only get them one meal a day.
He is worried about his poverty and inability to earn a decent income as his children don’t get an education. His wife lives with a mental disorder that she developed two years ago. They have taken food on credit from local shops worth $800.
“I told them I would pay them back when I got money at the end of the month. I’ve been taking powdered milk and food for the children but I couldn’t repay them. We need help in repaying the money, we don’t have anything,” Mohamed said.
Also living in El-dhere camp, he is now forced to divide his scanty income between buying food for his family and repayment of his debts.
His only skills and knowledge are about farmwork. They migrated to Mogadishu from the farm they owned in Awdhigle, Lower Shabelle, after the Al-Shabab militia ordered him to join their fighting forces.
