At one point, you saw footage of children dancing and skipping through a graveyard, an enigmatically potent emblem for the lives of second-generation refugees trying to grow up ordinary.
Today, more than 463,000 people live there, including around 10,000 third-generation refugees.
One statistic may be most telling: The United Nations says Dadaab has 6,000 third-generation refugees, grandchildren of the original arrivals.
Even if they are third-generation refugees in Lebanon, they risk losing their right to re-entry if they stay abroad longer than six months.Egypt, home to just 70,000 Palestinians, is slightly kinder.
Estimates suggest that of the more than half a million people now living in Dadaab, more than 10,000 are third-generation refugees; they and their parents were born in the camps.
SItn up for the best of VICE, delivered to your inbox daily.
What makes you think you can do it?" This was the late '80s, and the vast majority in our community were first-generation refugees, many of them boat people who had subsisted for years in refugee camps in Southeast Asia.
Most of the families here fled from parts of northern Israel in 1948 and are now into their third generation as refugees.
By 1965 the UNRWA's definition of whom it would serve had been changed, first, to the third generation of refugees – born after 14 May 1948 – and by 1982 to all generations of descendants, totalling upwards of 5 million people.
There are children born into refugee camps in northern Kenya who are second- and third-generation Somali refugees.
