| | The poor were bunched on scraps of land. Some were in courtyards of bombed out buildings. Some were crowded on what looked like abandoned rubbish tips: others were huddled against the walls of occupied buildings on road verges. Their houses never above head height are roughly hewn wood posts, between 1 and 3 i nches in diameter, covered with a colourful range of tatty plastics. A sense of shelter, and permanence, is given by the occasional piece of tin hammered into the wood as part of a roof. The poor are not apart but integrated into the geographic fabric of Mogadishu.
How many poor? Let us start somewhere else. How many Somalis? Pre-war (1991) the population was estimated at 7.5 million. Now thirteen years later, estimates suggest as few as 4.8 million although recent UNDP/World Bank calculations indicate the reality is closer to 9 million. But as more than 2 million are involved in the Somali Diaspora and since over a million Somalis have been born across the last 15 years, this would suggest premature deaths of over a million. |
