Waiting in Kakuma

A young woman watches through a wire fence at the edge of a small airfield in western Kenya where U.N planes land and deliver aid to the Kakuma Refugee Camp. Here near the border with Sudan, she and 185,000 other refugees who have fled persecution in their home countries, usually based just on their tribe or ethnicity, wait for assistance or resettlement from the United States and other countries which signed the U.N. Convention of 1951 obliging to help. Malnutrition and disease are constant worries, while some countries cut back on their promised assistance and even some states like Texas have tried to refuse refugee settlement. I spent six weeks in Kenya interviewing refugees and took this photo as my plane prepared to depart while she and others continued to wait.