LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - "The situation is getting better now because our farms are growing again. We can go back and feed ourselves without depending on anybody," Halima Mohammed Abdulla, a mother of five who has been living in a Mogadishu refugee camp for five months says.

IN the meantime, more than 180,000 Somalis left their homes seeking help in other parts of Africa. About 85,000 crossed into Kenya, usually ending up in the Dadaab refugee camp. Another 47,000 Somali refugees headed west, into Ethiopia while others fled to Djibouti and Yemen.

About 13 million people suffer from drought and a lack of food in East Africa. As most of the men have gone home to try to revive devastated herds and withered crops, women along with their children would like to join them. A lack of funds holds them back, meaning fewer hands on the farm and a smaller harvest.

At a sprawling Mogadishu refugee camp, one woman said she was grateful for a plastic sheet over her ramshackle stick hut that keeps her children dry. For another woman, a daily cup of porridge for everyone in her family was keeping them going.

There is a growing element of danger at the refugee camps. U.N. security personnel say there have been six improvised explosive devices found or detonated in Mogadishu the last two days, including a blast Thursday at a police checkpoint near a refugee camp that exploded shortly after U.N. personnel and international journalists visited a nearby feeding site.

Two police and four refugees were killed in the blast which did not appear to be aimed at the visiting delegation.

In addition, many Somali government soldiers in a highly contested Mogadishu neighborhood have abandoned their posts because they have not been paid.

After months without rainfall, the U.N. on July 20 declared several parts of Somalia a famine zone. Rail-thin women stumbled into refugee camps in Kenya and Ethiopia with dead babies and bleeding feet.

The journeys sometimes took weeks, and weaker family members, such as children and the elderly were left behind on the way to die alone. The U.N. expanded Somalia's famine zone a couple weeks later, defined as when two adults or four children per 10,000 people die of hunger each day and a third of children are acutely malnourished.

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