Johnstown, PA encampment.After being summarily forced from the nation's capital in 1932, they landed in Johnstown on the inviation of Mayor Eddie McCloskey. The encampment quickly wore out its welcome.
A Darfur refugee cradles her child at a camp in Chad
REUTERS/David Mwangi
Africa's largest country is emerging from a 21-year civil war between the north and south. A separate conflict raging in the arid western Darfur region has caused massive displacement. Another insurgency is brewing in the east.
More than 1.75 million Darfuri children live in and around camps.
Girls risk rape when they leave camps and villages to gather firewood.
Teenage boys are recruited to fight in armed groups.
One agency says a third of children in camps are working and 15 percent have some type of physical or emotional disability due to atrocities they have experienced.
Nearly 18 percent of children in east Sudan have acute malnutrition - WFP.
"People are living in a virtual state of lockdown, unable to fully pursue independent lives, trapping families and children in a state of bare survival and little hope."
Some 1.8 million children have been affected by a three-year conflict in Darfur, according to the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF), where they risk being recruited to fight and are especially vulnerable to disease and malnutrition.
"It is a traumatised population and you can see it in the children's faces," said Hollywood actress and UNICEF goodwill ambassador Mia Farrow, who last month visited camps for some of the 2.5 million displaced by Darfur's war.
"Everyone has lost family, seen villages burn, seen relatives raped, been raped."
U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres - who selected Congo, Uganda and the Sudan/Chad border, where some 200,000 refugees from Darfur eke out an existence - pointed to the physical and psychological consequences of living in crowded, underfunded camps "which are not conducive for a healthy child development".
In southern Sudan, children also suffer the effects of low-level violence, poverty and a lack of basic services. The region is struggling to recover from a 21-year civil war with the north that killed 2 million people, as 600,000 refugees forced to flee the country trickle home.
AlertNet, a humanitarian news website run by Reuters Foundation, asked 112 aid experts and journalists to highlight the world's most dangerous places for children.
After Sudan, they chose northern Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, Somalia, India, the Palestinian territories, Afghanistan, Chechnya and Myanmar - with the top three clearly ahead.
More than 2 million children worldwide have died as a direct result of armed conflict in the past decade, and about 20 million have been forced to flee their homes, according to UNICEF. More than a million have been orphaned or separated from their families.
