Three months after a spate of Muslim attacks on Christians in Kano, the largest city in northern Nigeria, thousands of people are still displaced from their homes and in dire need of shelter.
"I want to go home," Emmanuel James Okon, a 26 year old Christian living in the Panshekara camp for internally displaced people told IRIN as he tried to suppress a tear from his misty eyes.
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Since Muslim rioters attacked Kano's Christian minority on 11 and 12 May, killing at least 30 people, Okon has been living with 2,000 other displaced people on an open football pitch at an abandoned police training school.
Clutching a plastic bag of clothes, a tooth brush and a loaf of bread given to him by a kind-hearted passer by, Okon was making his way to the main road in preparation for another hour long walk to the factories of Kano's industrial area in search for work.
Since his rented apartment was set ablaze by rioters, Okon has nowhere else to live. Now he wants to leave Kano and the predominantly Muslim north of Nigeria to go back to his home in Cross Rivers state in the southeast.
"Look at me! They have made me a beggar!" he exclaimed. "All I have worked for during five years as a factory worker they burnt. My only true friend, Moses, they killed like a goat before my eyes, why should I remain here?"
Nearly 30,000 people fled from their homes during the May riots in Kano. These were provoked by a Christian massacre of Muslims in Yelwa, a small town in Plateau State 350 km to the south, a few days earlier.
A large but undetermined number of displaced people in Kano still remain, like Okon, at the military and police barracks, where they sought refuge.
"I cannot tell you how many are still in those locations. As of 1 June, about 8,000 people were spread across the camps, with Bompai hosting the largest number", Moussa Abdoulaye, the Executive Secretary of the Nigerian Red Cross in Kano told IRIN on Wednesday.
The Bompai Police Barracks, in the industrial area of Kano, is one of six sites still housing the displaced people. There, men sleep on mats in a shed or in the open, while others play cards. Women meanwhile sell cooked food, such as boiled corn cobs and water in plastic sachets.
Agnes Ekoto, 33, one of the women food sellers, told IRIN how she started her business.
"Some members of a church gave me some money and I decided to start selling boiled corn and groundnut inside the camp. That is how I survived with my children and husband," she said.
The displaced people have received sporadic assistance from the government, the local Red Cross and certain religious organizations.
"Last Friday, NEMA (the National Emergency Management Agency) gave us 40 bags of rice, 20 bags of beans, 28 bags of garri, 50 blankets and 25 rubber mats", Marc Amani, the elected chairman of the Bompai camp told IRIN.
But he said the situation in the camp was appalling. Most of its residents lived in the open and had to shelter under trees andn balconies of people's houses when it rained.
"We need a place to stay. That is the most important thing for us," Ekoto, the food seller, told IRIN.
Conditions at the other camps are no better and many of their residents are starting to despair.
"We have been abandoned here, government people left us here to suffer. We don't have food and we don't have money to rent a place and we cannot go back to our former houses because they have been destroyed," 42-year-old Michael Okpara, a community leader at the Panshekara camp said.
Many would like to leave Kano altogether, but cannot afford to do so.
"They (the Kano state government) promised to give us money to leave Kano if we wanted. A month ago, we made a list and gave it to them. It is over a month now since we gave them the list and we have not heard anything from them," Amani, the chairman of Bompai camp, told IRIN on Wednesday.
"We are tired of living like this. We cannot continue to live in a place where we are killed every two years," he added, referring to previous bouts of communal rioting.
Sule Ya'u Sule, the official spokesman for the state government said the authorities were doing their best to look after the displaced people in this city of eight million.
"We as a government have not abandoned the people. Only last Friday we sent food items and other relief materials to the various camps. We have so far spent about 50 million Naira ($45,000) on this," he told IRIN.
Sule denied any knowledge of a list of displaced people wishing to leave Kano, where tight security remains in force to prevent a recurrence of religiously inspired rioting.
Armed soldiers have erected tents as temporary quarters for themselves at several strategic locations in the city, but most of them look bored. One soldier who declined to give his name told IRIN: "We were ordered to remain on the streets. When they say we should return to barracks we will gladly do so."
Police said 30 people died in the May riots, but some Christian leaders claim that many more were killed.
Bishop Foster Ekeleme, the Kano state chairman of the Christian Association of Nigeria, an umbrella body for churches in the country, said: "We have tried to ensure that our people do not suffer too much. Thousands of our members are displaced and we are still compiling the list of those killed, who are in their thousands also."