In 48 o heat, I marvelled at the woolly garments being made in preparation for winter. It is hard to imagine living for two decades in tents with no running water, little fresh food, dust storms that last for days, relentless heat for months on end and cold winters. Water is pumped from bores and trucked to small communal tanks each day. Those camps that have bore water grow vegetables, melons and date palms in community gardens dusty oases in the red sand. These gardens have to be shifted every few years because the salts build up in the soil.
Irrigation takes place along crude channels in the sand.
Women tend goats and camels, holding them in makeshift enclosures at night. They make structures out of mud bricks and wash them with terracotta, yellow and white render. On average 14 or 15 people sleep in each UN-supplied tent. But there is no squalor in this orderly place and these women are not looking for our pity. Their frustration comes from the fact that the world has largely forgotten its promise to them.