I'm spending a few days in the refugee camps of Dadaab, Kenya, which now have the distinction of being the world's largest refugee settlement, home to some 200,000 271,000 people, most of them having fled from Somalia. On my last trip to Dadaab, in 2006, I'd met some bright young Kenyan aid workers, many of whom walked around the main guesthouse wearing giveaway aid-agency t-shirts bearing unintentionally hilarious messages. True to form, this week I ate lunch with a tall, broad-shouldered Kenyan man whose shirt read on the back, in big letters, "Breastfeeding is the best option."

One day I sat in on some interviews with long-time refugees -- most had arrived in the early 1990s, fleeing the start of Somalia's civil war -- who were hoping to be resettled in the West. (The U.S., for example, takes in about 70,000 refugees every year under the official Refugee Resettlement Program.) With the situation in Somalia continuing to deteriorate, these people have been waiting for such an opportunity for years, and they took it extremely seriously.

One woman arrived on time for her interview despite being nine months pregnant and what doctors might call "about to explode." She sat through about 15 minutes of her interview before the American caseworker realized that the woman was sweating profusely and taking short, panting breaths. "It's OK," the Somali woman said through the interpreter. "I just felt this pain two minutes ago and it went away."

It took a few more moments of questioning before the caseworker determined that, in addition to the contractions coming two minutes apart, the woman's water had broken earlier that morning.

That was the end of the interview. The caseworker called for a car to take the woman to the refugee hospital. It took several minutes to arrive, and in the meantime we watched as the woman lay with her two other children in the shade of a small tree, looking to be in pain. I couldn't believe she'd made it through the bus ride to the interview, let alone the interview itself. But she believed that if she tried to reschedule her interview, her long awaited chance to escape the refugee camps might be lost.

In the end, the caseworkers convinced her that delivering her baby on time was more critical, and that the interview could be postponed. In a few days, after the child is born, the woman will come back to resume her interview -- and her newborn baby will be added to the case file.