* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
"Please help me," said a desperate-looking woman coming towards me. "I have been raped and beaten several times in this camp but no one seems to hear me out," added the woman, Maria Mutetsi.
Mutetsi is a Rwandan widow who fled her country soon after the 1994 genocide that killed nearly one million Tutsi and moderate Hutus. She now lives in Kakuma refugee camp - a concentration of shacks on the sparsely populated plains of Africa's Great Rift Valley in northern Kenya.
Kakuma is home to over 60,000 Africans of more than 12 nationalities. They are crammed in together, incarcerated on a small piece of land in the middle of nowhere.
As I paid more attention to Mutetsi, who seemed as traumatised by the genocide as by the alleged rapes, some refugees from Masisi, in north-eastern DR Congo, trickled around us, curious to know what was going on.
"The Mai Mai militia are killing people in Masisi everyday and no one can stop them so we had to find safety," said Chantal Muhindo, who had recently fled attacks by the Mai Mai militia in DR Congo's Masisi area.
Located about 90 miles from the Kenya-Sudan border, the camp is also home to 19,000 Sudanese who have fled from both the south and the west.
The Darfur war surged in 2003 when rebel groups took up arms against Sudan's government, accusing it of leaving the mostly desert region underdeveloped.
"I have lived here for five years now and as long as the Darfur crimes continue, I have nowhere to go," said Adam Ahmed who left El Geneina in Darfur in 2005.
THE FORGOTTEN SOMALIS
Over 40,000 Somalis who have fled the two-decade crisis in the Horn of Africa country make up the majority at Kakuma refugee camp.
At the other end of the scale, the Somali Bantu is a minority Somali community the world has forgotten about, according to Dayo Jalib, who chairs the Somali Bantu community in Kakuma.
"In Somalia, Somali Bantu are persecuted both by al Shabaab and indigenous Somalis," said Jalib.
The Somali Bantu are the descendants of people from various Bantu ethnic groups from modern-day Tanzania, Malawi and Mozambique, who were brought to Somalia as part of the Arab slave trade.
"Indigenous Somalis, from young ones to adults, call us Adon or Habash, which means slave and they treat us as such," he added.
Minority Rights Group International, a charity for minorities, says the collapse of law and order in Somalia hit the Somali Bantu hardest.
LOCALS ENVY THE CAMP
Outside the U.N. relief food warehouse that supplies the camp, two policemen wielding whips and German G3 rifles were engaged in running battles with persistent Kenyan Turkana women.
"Where do these people expect me to get food for my family and who is all that food meant for?" asked irate Turkana woman wearing tradition colourful bead necklaces.
Kenya's Turkana region, where Kakuma refugee camp is located, is one of the poorest in Kenya and still emerging from the effects of last year's drought.
The millions of dollars the U.N. has pumped in to the Kakuma camp have made it the envy of many locals.
The U.N. has supported development projects in Turkana villages and allowed locals to seek medical treatment in the camp's clinics and their children to go Kakuma schools. But these measures can only go so far.
Kakuma camp is also home to a refugee from Namibia in southern Africa. Many know the jocular 60-year-old as the 'Namibian' and see him as a sort of celebrity.
"I had to leave Namibia in 1989 because of the disastrous war by the white settlers," he said in an emphatic English accent, walking away with a swagger.
But Namibia's independence war ended in 1988 and the southern African nation has long moved on.
Leaving Kakuma camp, one bypasses hundreds of graves, in all shapes and sizes, outside the camp. A U.N official said the graveyard, covering more than three football pitches, was full and efforts to look for another were underway.
Many of those taking shelter from Africa's trouble spots like Ethiopia, Eritrea and Uganda seemed resigned to the fact that they would live and die at Kakuma.
