U.N. officials and aid workers say they must give European refugees used to cappuccino and CNN a higher standard of living to maintain the refugees' sense of dignity and stability. There's white people here. Europe Nezir Gashi's life is by no means comfortable. Every day, Gashi or one of his four children stands in line four hours for food. They haven't had a hot meal in weeks.
Water is a few hundred feet away at a communal spigot.
Still, the meager shelter and supplies are far better than what is provided to refugees in Africa. Typically, African refugees sleep out in the open, or under makeshift shelters made from branches, leaves or mud or from plastic sheeting provided by an aid agency. They rarely have canvas tents or prefabricated housing. For example, most of the 300,000 or so Eritreans deported from Ethiopia back to Eritrea in early February make their homes under trees, in riverbeds or simply at roadsides without any kind of shelter, said Fitzgerald, who recently visited the refugees. They are stranded in a semiarid terrain, where the afternoons are blazing hot and the nights freezing cold, and there are 1,200 tents for about 16,000 families, Fitzgerald said.