After more than 15 years of traveling to some of the most wretched places on the planet, I thought I had seen it all – but nothing comes close to Dadaab.

I am writing this letter from the world’s largest refugee camp, Dadaab, which is on the Kenyan – Somalia border just South of Mogadishu.

This must be the world’s hottest refugee camp also. It is close to 100 degrees today and I am sweating as if I am in a steam room.

We are on the equator and the sun is blinding, the earth is a parched desert with little to no vegetation and just a few ugly, small scrub trees. Our caravan of range rovers stirs up huge clouds of dust as we race from the airstrip to the camp.  You can see the ribs on all the camels we pass by.  Enormous vulture-like “garbage birds” give us the evil eye from atop the trees. We all have pits in our stomachs as we drive across the barren landscape, a naked boy stares at us emotionless on the side of the road, as if we descend into a new level of Dante’s infamous inferno, bracing ourselves for what we are about to see.