A Family’s Painful Exodus From Devastated Somalia : A woman struggles to free her in-laws from a hellish refugee camp. Many expatriates worldwide don’t know where their loved ones are--or if they are alive. : DALE LYA PIERSON

As the TV airwaves fill with images of international troops in Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, America gains an opportunity to learn about a country whose political problems and human suffering have too long been neglected. I know from personal experience--I struggled to bring 13 in-laws out of the Liboi refugee camp in Kenya in 1991, at a time when everyone seemed to turn a deaf ear to the need for aid in this then-forgotten corner of the world.

Since then, I’ve tried to play at least a small role in letting people in the U.S. know more about the Somali situation--by hosting an informational talk for 50 fellow employees at UCLA Extension and a Sunday forum at the African American Cultural Center to sending a five-page letter to Rep. Mervyn Dymally after he invited me to testify before a congressional subcommittee on Africa (I unfortunately had to decline due to a death in the family).

My in-laws’ saga is a tale of two cities: Mogadishu and Los Angeles. My husband’s father, mother, siblings and their children left a violent city caving in on itself and arrived here in time to live through the spring civil unrest (following the Rodney King beating verdict). Sad to say, America has not proven to be an altogether safe haven to them, they came here with fear and still experience fear.

The family’s story begins in early 1991, when much of the devastation of the Somali infrastructure began, following the overthrow of the military dictator, Mohamed Siad Barre, Dec. 30, 1990. The majority of the capital’s residents fled the violence immediately. Those who had a lot of money or international connections got out of the country entirely. The others ran to the borders.

My husband’s family is from Mogadishu. For four months--during the Persian Gulf crisis--the only news we got about Somalia was from foreign newspapers, which told horror stories of dogs and rats eating unclaimed bodies.

Finally, my husband’s sister called from Nairobi. The entire family was alive and together, stranded in the Liboi refugee camp on the Kenya-Somali border. They had walked from Mogadishu to Kenya--that’s like walking from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

My husband and his brother went to the Kenyan Consulate in Los Angeles to get travel visas. They were told no Somalis were allowed visas to Kenya. It was left to me. I arrived in Nairobi in March, 1991. I didn’t have money, I didn’t have power, I didn’t have any Somali IDs for the family. Kenyan friends advised me to take one step at a time--after (embassy officer E. Michael) Southwick of the American embassy in Nairobi told me my in-laws would have to go to the bottom of an eight-year waiting list for the refugee status needed to enter the United States.

Nevertheless, I was able to secure Somali passports from the Somali Embassy--just one day before it closed permanently.

With a letter of permission for release from the Kenyan Minister of Home Affairs, I went to the Liboi camp. If there was ever a hell on Earth, Liboi is it. No water, no shelter, hotter than you could possibly imagine, with snakes, vultures and hyenas everywhere. Authorities counted 5,000 refugees in March of 1991, I understand there are now over 60,000 there.

The entire family was released from the camp and traveled with me back to Nairobi, where they remained for six months while their refugee status was processed. They were admitted to the United States on Sept. 27, 1991.

Much of my in-laws’ story takes place on the Kenyan border or in Kenya itself. It’s along this and the Ethiopian border that the overflowing refugee camps are located--and here too is where most of the arms and booty trading (an underground industry that has kept Somalia’s economy squeaking along for two years) takes place.

Though it’s been a long and painful experience for my family, we’re healthy and we’re together. Our hearts go out to the thousands of other Somali people who are suffering in those hellish camps. Expatriate families worldwide don’t know where their family members are or even if they’re dead or alive.

The United States is doing the right thing. We’re in a new era. It’s the end of the Cold War. Let’s look at the technology we have amassed and ask how we can use the military-industrial complex that we have created to do constructive work like Operation Restore Hope.

In Somalia, the entire infrastructure is destroyed. Our military has the capability of building roads, creating the beginnings of a communications system and perhaps most importantly, of digging wells. Water is crucial because the majority of Somalis are nomads who travel from one water resource to another.

This culture is so rare and so rich, with an intricate tradition of poetry. It’s an ancient society once known as the Land of Punt going back to the Biblical times of frankincense and myrrh. Some of the old poets are dead; some of the ancient traditions and knowledge are soon going to be gone.

Everything has been an adjustment for our family here in Los Angeles. It’s been hard for them because of the revolt, the earthquakes and the shock of coming to a supposedly advanced culture where they too often see a level of violence they’d hoped they had put behind them. Of course, much of their information about their new country comes from local TV news, which, to them, depicts a land full of robbers and child stealers.

They and their fellow Somalis have been through a trauma that will follow them for years and will color their adjustment to expatriate lands or to the new Somalia. As we watch the drama in Somalia unfold and see the faces of starving children, let’s try to remember that they are part of families longing to remain whole and of a culture that is struggling to survive a veritable holocaust.