Tips:
- Helping our family stay alive is crucial, but sustained help goes a lot further. When you give money, others will get snoopy, and tend to target generous donors for more money.
- Don’t talk to only one person, or only the first person. The chance of you getting taken advantage of are much greater when you don’t talk to multiple people to
- While some people may be liars or thieves, some may be helpers and provide for others. In those circumstances, people do what they need to do to survive. Get picture receipts whenever possible.
- Know your limits. If you need to, pick one person, and set a strictly monthly amount you are willing to give in whatever installment.
- Having 2-3+ people at the camp that you regularly talk to is helpful, especially when they are each not tied to the same faction. If you are lied to about the prices of certain commodities, those other people can fact check what you have been told.
- Most of the fluent English speakers are from Uganda.
- Helping one person secure their needs is great. If you have the means and have trust built up with a refugee, helping obtain bulk items will help many more people at a lower cost per person.
- Medical issues are iffy. LGBT are regularly discriminated at the agency clinic, because the doctors working there don’t want the reputation of the one who treats the gays. Often making a day trip to the private hospital in Kakuma town proper is necessary. However Medical issues are the most common way someone may lie to get money
- Funding projects that create long term changes is completely possible, but requires a lot of trust built up and receipts at every turn. This may look like protective fences of sheet metal and vine around compounds of several shelters to keep violence out. Whatever cost is told, assume there will be a Refugee tax. People involved will have life or death needs, and ensuring everyone is fed, bedded, housed, has medical care, will override budget costs. This is working with refugees living in a defacto concentration camp.
- Clothes are much harder to come by in the camp than in much of the modern world. It is very possible to ship, truck, and smuggle bulk clothes in, and may require bribing police along the way.
- Shelter fixes and builds are incredibly common. Many of the dwellings are made with wood clay mud and sheet metal. They break down, leak, and collapse.
English