On one day in March dozens of people gathered in a hospital in Hargeisa, Somaliland. The bright room was decorated with flowers and banners in red, green and white, the colours of Somaliland’s flag. Doctors –foreign and Somali – ministers, medical students, former patients and journalists filed in, greeting each other, standing in little groups and talking animatedly. A man walked to the front, bowed his head, and intoned a prayer over the crackly microphone, and the murmur turned...
In a large, empty-looking house on a hill in Hargeisa, Somaliland, Nejuu is preparing dinner for her “babies.” The veterinary student cuts up a kilo of red meat and places chunks of it on a plate. “Careful! They’re going to go crazy when they see it,” Nejuu says as she opens the kitchen door and walks out into the large yard. A second later, two young cheetahs emerge from the shadows and shoot towards her at breakneck speed, halting and...
When Innocent fled his native Democratic Republic of the Congo and arrived in the Kakuma refugee camp in 2009, he felt as if he couldn’t have been any further from the rest of the world. Kakuma is a sprawling settlement in a remote and arid part of northwestern Kenya, and its inhabitants — refugees from DRC, Somalia, Burundi, Ethiopia, and other countries — have little access to higher education, business opportunities, job markets, and healthcare. For a while, like many others...