Further rains threaten Kakuma refugees

Efforts to provide new shelters for thousands of refugee families left homeless last week by torrential rains in Kakuma refugee camps, northeastern Kenya, are continuing amid the threat of additional downpours, according to the United Nations refugee agency.

Although the heavy rains that last week destroyed more than 7,000 huts and killed two young boys have subsided, aid workers are racing under overcast skies to relocate some 23,000 people whose tukuls (huts) of mud brick and plastic sheeting were destroyed, according to the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCR).

The two young Somali boys who drowned in the floods were caught by rising waters as they tried to cross a river from one part of the camp to another, it said.

Teams of aid workers are putting up new shelters at a rate of 60 a day in an unaffected portion of the site, according to UNHCR. Most refugees who lack their own shelters have moved in with neighbours or friends on a temporary basis, while about 100 other families moved into community centres, it added.

Regional spokesman Paul Stromberg told IRIN on Wednesday that the refugee agency had distributed two plastic sheets to each of some 2,500 families whose roofs collapsed but whose homes can be rebuilt. UNHCR was providing another 2,000 plastic sheets from a regional stockpile but was still short of 5,000 items of sheeting material, which is expected to arrive in the camp within the next week, he said.

The flooding situation had been worsened by the continuous erosion of river beds in Kakuma, which posed the risk of contaminating the camps' water system, Stromberg added.

A team of experts cited by the refugee agency has warned that further rains could heighten the risk of malaria for the camps 81,000 population, mainly Sudanese refugees.

"It hasn't rained in the past week, but it looks overcast," Stromberg told IRIN. If the rain falls, health workers will have to help protect the camp residents against water-borne diseases, he said.

Severe floods have, in the last two weeks, also hampered relief work in Kenya's largest refugee camp in Daadab, northern Kenya, which is host to a refugee population of about 130,000 refugees.

Relief workers have faced difficulty transporting building materials to the camp as some of the access roads have been cut off by the floods, an official with the nongovernmental organisation Care (Kenya) said on Wednesday.

The short rainy season in Kenya normally begins in October. A late start in some parts of the country sparked fears of another poor rainy season - after successive years of drought - but meteorological experts cited by the 'Daily Nation' newspaper on Wednesday said it was too early to assess the potential impact.

The Meteorological Department has warned that although some areas in Kenya have received high rainfall, marginal areas would receive below-average rainfall, the report added.

A poor rainy season in the north would again delay recovery efforts for the people most affected by drought, many of whom were emerging from a stressful dry season, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported in its October humanitarian update.