Eritrea: Eking out a living in Emkulu

As the blazing sun mercilessly beats down on her, Halima Abdi Adam squints and tries to find some shade under a shrivelled tree. She is one of over 3,200 Somali refugees who have ended up in the Emkulu refugee camp on the outskirts of the Eritrean port city of Massawa. Emkulu, administered by the Eritrean Office of Refugee Affairs (ORA), which in turn is funded by the UN refugee agency (UNHCR), was originally intended as a transit centre for Eritrean returnees from Sudan. Hundreds of thousands of Eritreans have been applying for voluntary repatriation from camps in eastern Sudan which, for many of them, have been their homes for 30 years since they fled the fighting of Eritrea’s liberation war.