The first thing that strikes you about Kakuma is the heat. It arrives bright and early in the morning, whether you are ready for it or not. Over 300,000 people live in the refugee settlement, in the far northwest of Kenya, the camp was established in 1992, and it was never supposed to become permanent. Some of the people living there have been there for more than fifteen years. Some were born there, and some will die there without ever having chosen that as their home.
I recently visited Kakuma at the ripe age of thirty-two. I was born in Kenya, raised in Botswana, and educated in South Africa, and I too have been on a journey of my own. I moved back to Nairobi in my late twenties to build a life in a country I held by passport but not quite by lived experience. I am not a refugee. I want to be clear about that from the onset, because the distance between my story and the stories of the people living in the camp is enormous and collapsing it would be a great disservice.
But I understood something, standing under the rays of the Kakuma sun, that I had spent most of my life circling without quite being able to name. And with World Refugee Day upon us, I find myself wanting to say it out loud.
An In-Between Child
I grew up in between countries. My parents moved us from Kenya to Botswana when I was young, one of many Kenyan families who followed work and opportunity across East and Southern Africa in the early nineties. Gaborone was quiet, undisturbed by high rise buildings and without the suffocating population we had left behind in Nairobi. For everything I could say, it was welcoming and good to us. But I was always the Kenyan kid, carrying my origin like something I needed to produce and explain on demand.
Boarding school in South Africa in my teenage years added another layer. I arrived in a country that was in a way, still navigating the complicated aftermath of apartheid, working out, in real time, who ‘belonged’ and who didn’t. For a Kenyan/ Motswana teenager with a hybrid accent and no fixed tribe in the social landscape of a South African high school, it was a masterclass in invisibility. I learned to read rooms. I learned which version of myself to lead with. I learned the exhausting skill of adaptability, which I sometimes feel is just another word for never being fully at rest.
What movement gave me though, was width, and I don’t think I fully appreciated this until much later in life. It gave me a lateral education that no classroom designs for you. In Botswana and South Africa, I grew up alongside other children from Zimbabwe, Zambia, Rwanda, Ghana children of other parents who had also followed opportunity and love across borders. Some of my closest friendships were forged in that context. A friend from Nigeria who explained jollof politics to me with the same passion I brought to chapati. A Zimbabwean who taught me that home can be a complicated grief and a fierce pride at the same time. A Zambian who had the easy warmth of someone who had also learned, young, to make a home out of wherever she was. There is something that happens when you build real friendships across cultures, built over years and shared meals and late-night conversations, you stop holding lazy generalizations. The continent stops being an abstraction and becomes a collection of specific people you love, each carrying a particular history, a particular humor, a particular way of being alive. Without planning, I became someone genuinely curious about differences rather than threatened by it. Someone who could walk into a room where I was the outsider and quickly find the thread of common humanity.
This is what no one tells you about growing up between countries. It is not dramatic. It is not traumatic in any clean, nameable way. It is a low hum of not belonging you learn to live with. But underneath that hum, quietly, it is building something in you. A capacity and fluency in other people.
Coming Back
I returned to Kenya in my late twenties. It was supposed to feel like coming home. It did not feel like coming home, well not at first. Nairobi was simultaneously familiar and extremely bewildering. I spoke Swahili with an accent that made people smile. I understood the culture intellectually, the way you understand a language you studied rather than one you argued in. Everyone here knew exactly where they were from, their county, their village, their mother tongue. I had a grandmother’s name but could not point to her village on a map and say: there, that is where we come from. Starting over in your twenties is in itself particularly difficult. You are old enough to know what competence feels like, and young enough to have almost none of it in this new context. I was building a career, building a social circle and an entire self in a country that was mine by passport and blood but not quite by a lived reality. I didn’t know the unspoken rules, have the high school friendships, or know the lay of the land.
What I did have though, was time and patience. Nairobi opens itself slowly, then all at once. Friendships deepen. The matatu routes become second nature. You develop opinions about traffic and the best mandazi and which politicians are performing versus which ones might actually mean it. You even start having opinions about the weather – hii jua ni ya mvua. Gradually, I stopped performing Kenya and started living it.
There is a difference between a place you explain and a place you simply inhabit. I was slowly, becoming someone who inhabited Nairobi. But something was still unresolved. A question underneath the question of belonging. Not where I am from, I had made a kind of peace with the complexity of that. Something rawer. Something about what my own displacement, soft and privileged as it was, meant in the broader ledger of human movement.
Kakuma
Kakuma refugee camp was initially built for the “Lost Boys of Sudan” tens of thousands of young men who had fled the Second Sudanese Civil War on foot. It was meant to be temporary. Thirty plus years later, it is home to thousands of people from over 20 different nationalities. More than half of the refugee population is under seventeen years old. Many of those children have never known anything else. I want to be super careful about how I write this, because Kakuma is not a metaphor. The people who live there are not a mirror for anyone else’s feelings. That is the first thing you must reckon with when you visit: the temptation to make it about yourself, when the whole point is that it is profoundly, urgently about them. What strikes you first is the scale. What strikes you next and this takes longer, requires sitting with someone and listening, is the personhood.
Years of friendships across the continent had given me something useful, I knew how to listen across differences. I knew that a Congolese experience and a South Sudanese experience and a Somali experience were not interchangeable. I understand that being African covers an almost incomprehensible range of histories, languages, realities, experience, joys and griefs. I know to ask rather than assume.
To be specific. To stay in the room rather than retreat into abstraction.
I thought about displacement differently after my visit to Kakuma. I thought about the enormous spectrum between moved for opportunity and fled for survival, and all the layers in between. I thought about how I had spent years tangled in questions of belonging, questions that were real, but that I had the luxury of asking slowly, at my own pace, without urgency. Nobody in Kakuma has the luxury of their displacement being philosophical. The extreme weather patterns do not allow for anything that is not survival.
And yet. There was something I recognized, refracted and scaled beyond anything I had experienced, in the faces of people negotiating between the place they came from and the place they were in. That in-between-ness. That practiced answer to where are you from that contains more history than the question was designed to receive.
What Empathy Actually Requires
Empathy is not the same as equivalence. You do not have to have suffered the same thing to understand something true about another person’s suffering. But you do have to be willing to let their reality land on you without rushing to categorize it, explain it, or make it smaller so you can carry it more comfortably. Empathy is the discipline of staying and sitting in the discomfort long enough to actually see. This is harder than it sounds.
In 2025, humanitarian funding for Kakuma was cut dramatically by over 40% declines, with food aid reduced at points to 40% of the basic minimum level. Children went hungry. The world, largely, looked elsewhere. It is easy to feel overwhelmed by the scale of suffering and mistake that overwhelm for engagement. It is easy to share a post on World Refugee Day and consider the work done.
But what I carry from Kakuma is something more personal and harder to reduce to an action point. It is the understanding that every person in that camp is a person in the full sense of the word, with a history, a sense of humor, a relationship to their own dignity, a vision of their future that the circumstances of displacement have not managed to extinguish.
They are not symbols. They are people. And I think the minimum that World Refugee Day asks of any of us is to actually reckon with that.
A Borrowed Sense of Home
I am thirty-two now, and more settled in Kenya than I have ever been anywhere. I have a life here that is mine in the full sense, not performed, not explained, just lived. And I have stopped trying to resolve the earlier chapters of my story into something neater than they were. I was a child in Botswana. I was a student in South Africa. I am an adult in Kenya. I have been shaped by friendships across the continent by a Nigerian friend, a Zimbabwean friend and a Zambian friend who each gave me a piece of their map.
The question of where I am really from has finally stopped feeling like something I need to answer and started feeling like a description of something I actually am a person made from movement, permanently curious about the lives of people navigating between worlds. The ‘nomad’ in me recognizes something in the young lady who has been in Kakuma for 10years and still chases her dreams fiercely but with care. It is not the same thing I want to be honest and clear about that. But something. A shared vocabulary. An understanding that you can be between places and still be fully, stubbornly, quietly yourself.
I think that is what World Refugee Day is really asking us to hold. Not pity. Not guilt. Not a donation made quickly enough to soothe a conscience. But the recognition that the people living in refugee settlements around the world, are people navigating the same fundamental human question that all of us, in our different registers of difficulty, are navigating: how do I make a life in the place I find myself, when it is not the place I came from? They are asking that question in dust and heat, with funding cuts and food shortages and a world that keeps looking away. The least we can do the very least is look back and acknowledge their humanity.
Crystal Cheche is an Account Director at Greydale Africa
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