(ERGO) – When Khadija Abdullahi’s family were offered a house in Luglow, a new settlement some distance outside Kismayo, she was excited for her children to have better living conditions than their experiences in their crowded displacement camp.
They were relocated in February by the Jubbaland authorities, keen to decongest Kismayo city that has been hosting burgeoning internal displacement camps for years.
However, Khadija, 40, soon had to leave her nine children behind to go and find work, as she was jobless ever since moving to Luglow.
On 13 July, when the local store in Luglow supplying them with food on credit stopped giving them more credit because she couldn’t pay, she moved alone back to Kismayo.
“Every day I knock on people’s doors saying. ‘Knock, Knock. It’s me! I wash clothes and I’ve left behind my little children.’ If I get three dollars or just two, whatever little, I send it to the children. I do this because of my children,” Khadija 40 told Radio Ergo.
Whenever she makes a few dollars from laundry jobs, she sends it through mobile money to her elderly husband, who is unable to work and watches over the children back in Luglow.
The challenge of finding employment to support themselves is affecting the 158 displaced families relocated from IDP camps in Kismayo to Luglow village, which is 25 kilometres away from the city.
Better shelter is appreciated by these families although the settlement lacks basic amenities and has no employment opportunities for them to pay for their food and other needs.
Khadija is not the only parent to have made a similar tough decision. She told Radio Ergo she lives temporarily with another family in Kismayo who have given her a space to sleep.
Bus fares to Luglow village from Kismayo are $8, which would be far more than Khadija could ever earn in a day.
“When we moved there was no income. My children’s shoes get worn out and they need me to sort it out but I don’t have the money. We didn’t have water. We didn’t have food. It was that time when they had not eaten for two days that on the third day I decided to move to Kismayo,” she said.
Khadijo and her family had been living in IDP camps within Kismayo for 13 years, since being displaced from Jilib, Middle Shabelle region, in 2011 after their 230 goats were killed off by severe drought.
Another mother, Madina Abdiwahab Abdinur, has also been thinking about leaving her children in Luglow while she goes to work. She had hoped to find work in the new location, as since being divorced from her husband two years ago she had to support her eight children alone.
“There are no jobs for men or women. There is none,” she complained. “If there was a place that offered a job opportunity, I would go there. The people here are all unemployed so who would you work for anyway?”
She gets a loan of $90 a month from her relatives and uses the money to take care of her family.
“There is not enough to get us three meals a day. We get breakfast, there is no lunch or such things. That is how I take care of my children. We don’t have the money,” she said.
Just like other families in Luglow, they live in a two-room brick house and have their own toilet. She said the house is a welcome benefit for them although they are faced with a lack of food and other necessities.
Madina and her family were displaced from Jamame, in Lower Juba region, in 2017. Their five-hectare farm failed due to drought, forcing them to move to IDP camps in Kismayo to find food.
The chairman of Jubaland’s commission for refugees and IDPs, Mohamed Sheikh Adan Khadar, said they organised the relocation to Luglow because the growing population of IDPs was causing congestion in the city.
He said they were short of funds although they planned to assist these families to get jobs.
“The government has been planning to find a sustainable solution for the people living in the city and Luglow was identified by the government as we believe it will be a solution. It is farmland which is one of the reasons we chose this area, although there are other reasons as well,” he said.
Most of the residents in Luglow are families who were displaced by droughts, floods and conflicts or a combination of factors, earned their living doing casual work in Kismayo.
