ETHIOPIA : Drought-affected displaced await return home

Abyan Abdinur has a roof over her head. Other than that she has nothing. She has seen two of her children die, lost the few possessions she owned and all her livestock - her most valuable asset - have perished.

Abyan is an internally displaced person (IDP), someone who has been forced to flee their home due to war, ethnic cleansing, or natural disasters like famine.

It was severe drought that forced her and her young family - she has been married eight years - to flee their home in 1999. Now, although they would like to return, they cannot. They are dependent on erratic government food handouts and are stuck in a downward cycle.

"We dont have any income," she says wearily. "We only get food from the government so we have to stay for that. But even that is not regular; it arrives every three or four months.

"If we tried to leave we would die because we have nothing to feed our children with. I have lost two children, and that is enough for any mother."

Like her two surviving children, Abyan has now developed TB - a disease that is rife among the 124,000 displaced in Somali Regional State and the area's biggest killer.

"In the last three years all I have seen is disease and suffering," she added, weakened from TB. "I just want to go back to my home."

In Ethiopia there are currently some 235,000 people like her, displaced by war, famine and drought - each synonymous with this fragile country. Most are women and children.

Along the disputed 1,000-km border with Eritrea, a million people were displaced during their two-year border war which broke out in 1998. About 76,000 people still have not returned to their homes.

Abyan, 26, began her journey over three years ago after the severe famine that hit southeastern Ethiopia, claiming thousands of lives.

With her husband Sheik Osman and four children - two died on the way - she travelled the arduous 400-km passage from Garbo, in Fik Zone in Somali Regional State. It took them a month of walking in searing heat.

If she crossed an international border she would have become a refugee, had legal status and rights as well as an entire United Nations agency devoted to her well-being.

Now her home is in Fafan, a makeshift camp of plastic and straw, on the outskirts of Jijiga and filled with some 1,300 families like hers. Almost all fled the 2000 famine. Each month they should receive around 50 kg of maize to eat a handout from the government.

Her children, who are both stunted, do not receive education, thwarting what little hopes they may have clinged to. Health care is effectively non-existent and like many makeshift camps for the homeless the sanitation facilities are appalling.