Lokichoggio

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Lokichoggio from the final approach
Lokichoggio: View from the ICRC property
Cargo planes and warehouses in Lokichoggio 2006
Lokichoggio airfield

Lokichoggio or Lokichokio ( Loki for short ) is a place in Turkana County in northwestern Kenya on the border with South Sudan .

geography

Lokichoggio is located at 632 meters above sea level on the edge of the Lotikipi plain at the current northern end of the paved road A1 (planned as the Cairo-Gaborone-Cape Town Highway from Cape Town to Cairo ). It is the last controlled outpost in Kenya 30 kilometers from the border with South Sudan. The Kenyan border post for leaving the Sudan is located immediately north of the town. The temperatures in the dry savannah are high, the rainfall is very low and falls all year round, with a focus on the summer months.

Supply base for South Sudan

The civil war in South Sudan gave Lokichoggio an unexpected boost. Between 1981 and 2005, the Turkana grass hut village developed into the most important distribution center of humanitarian aid for South Sudan, including a war hospital with 600 beds. As early as the 1980s, the ICRC opened the Lopiding Field Hospital for war invalids, whom the organization brought here from the various front lines and cared for. With the launch of Operation Lifeline Sudan by the UN in 1989, also based in Lokichoggio, the community of humanitarian aid workers grew steadily. Only an improved security situation after 2000, the ceasefire agreement of 2003 and in particular the peace treaty of 2005 made permanent humanitarian structures possible in South Sudan, which made Lokichoggio less important again. Since then, the roads in South Sudan have been expanded so that transport can also be carried out by land.

On June 30, 2006, the ICRC officially handed over the war hospital to the government of Kenya. A large reception camp with mostly refugees from South Sudan is located 90 kilometers south in Kakuma .

traffic

Relief goods are brought by air via Nairobi or from the sea port of Mombasa by truck and are then reloaded into smaller planes. From Lokichoggio International Airport there are scheduled flights to Nairobi . There are flight connections to the runways in the larger towns in South Sudan. These include Juba , Rumbek and Wau . Most planes still take off with humanitarian cargo.

Lokichoggio in novels and short stories

Parts of the novel The Eternal Gardener by John le Carré and the film of the same name play in Lokichoggio .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Thilo Thielke: War in the land of the Mahdi. Darfur and the disintegration of Sudan. Essen 2006, pp. 89–93. Journalistic report
  2. ↑ Sudan / Kenya: Lopiding hospital in letter. ICRC, June 28, 2006
  3. ↑ Kenya / Sudan: Various conflict zones have benefited from lopiding ... ICRC, June 28, 2006
  4. ^ International Association of Civilian Aviation Chaplains.

Web links

Coordinates: 4 ° 12 '  N , 34 ° 21'  E