Vice president's wife arrives at famine zone with 29 cars and two airplanes!
DADAAB, Kenya - August 8, 2011 - Wearing a linen trouser suit, neon-green Nike trainers, and a CNN lapel-mic, Jill Biden sat in the shade of an acacia tree and listened solemnly to Fatuma Adem's story.
Watching the wife of the U.S. vice president touring the world's biggest refugee camp for famine-hit Somalis was a scrum of television cameramen, international reporters and Washington staffers thumbing their BlackBerrys.
A circle of secret service agents, their oversized shirts flattened by the hot wind on to the outlines of bulletproof vests and pistols beneath, fanned out, watching the perimeter.
Parked off to the side, waiting to whisk the visitors back to the airport, was a convoy of 29 polished vehicles, including armored U.S. embassy Land Cruisers driven eight hours up from Nairobi the previous day.
This is what it looks like when the biggest VIP circus so far comes for a two-and-a-half-hour visit to Dadaab.
The Kenyan town today hosts 440,000 Somali refugees in sprawling camps that are now the accessible epicenter of the international famine relief effort.
"All this is a necessary evil," said one senior aid worker, watching CNN's Anderson Cooper interview Mrs. Biden against a backdrop of newly-arrived refugees from Somalia, squatting while waiting for food and water.
