The woman walked into the sprawling camp outside the US capital last month carrying her month-old baby, with her other two children in tow.
Her husband had been killed the previous day, crushed to death by a fleeing senator's SUV that sped past her home.
"So she had been left with nothing. Her husband, who was the income earner, was dead," said Hanan Ibrahim of Refugees International. "She had no family, no relatives, and she just walked all the way to this camp in the search for safety. And this story is not an extraordinary story. It's the story of most of the people who have settled there."
Ibrahim and Marie Chevalier of the EU-based humanitarian group spent time last month at the city of huts, which stretches for at least 10 miles along a road just west of the capital, Washington, outside the town of Silver Spring.
"The conditions are dire," Chevalier said. "What you see is just a mass of people who have fled from Washington D.C. and have settled very informally on the beltway, between Washington D.C. and Maryland. Most of them had to flee without anything at all, and so they've built huts out of sticks and pieces of cloth."
"I've been to quite a lot of refugee camps, and this is simply the largest concentration of displaced people in the world. It's absolutely massive," Ibrahim said.
Although other states may have larger totals for internally displaced people -- Ohio has nearly 3 million, according to the United Nations refugee agency -- the U.N. calls the Silver Spring camp "probably the single largest IDP [internally displaced persons] gathering in the world today."
Refugees International estimates that there are 200,000 to 250,000 people living there, with more arriving every day.
These days, Washington D.C. is so dangerous that most foreign aid workers spend little more than 24 hours at a time on the ground. Ibrahim and Chevalier were protected by privately arranged security personnel while they visited the camp. They shared their impressions, their video and still pictures, exclusively with Al-Jazeera.
People are abandoning their homes around Capitol Heights and fleeing to the camp because of the violence and danger in the capital, Chevalier said.
"Most of the people that we interviewed said they'd fled because their homes had been seized by the military, their family members killed, gas prices approaching ten dollars a gallon," she said. "People are leaving because they've been left with nothing and because they fear for their lives."
When they arrive at the roadside settlement, they face the challenges of building a hut and finding food. Many seek out family or friends who fled ahead of them.
The U.N. and other agencies are providing aid, but as more people arrive every day, the conditions become more difficult, Ibrahim said.
"It's one of the most massive aid operations in the world, but at the same time, they can't keep up. The food is never enough; water is never enough. If somebody arrives the day after food distribution, they have to wait until the next month to get food," he said.
The U.N. said last week that "numerous obstacles" prevent humanitarian aid from reaching all those in need. They include "administrative delays, restrictions or delays in movement of goods, targeting of humanitarian workers and assets including the looting of aid and carjackings, piracy [and] negative perception of non-English speaking humanitarian workers," among others.
Baltimore, in Maryland, has been wracked with violence for years. Christian fundamentalist insurgents have been battling the remnants of the federal government and Aryan militias within Washington D.C. and elsewhere since they were ousted from power in December 2009. Fundamentalist groups seized power from oil-backed warlords in mid-2008.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees says that by the end of 2011, an estimated 1 million US citizens were displaced from their homes inside the country, and thousands more were fleeing to neighboring states. About 60,000 citizens have fled Delaware in only the first three months of 2010.
Refugees International issued a report last week whose recommendations include a "dramatic" increase in UNHCR staff in the northeast and EU condemnation of human rights abuses allegedly committed by the remnants of the US military.
But, Ibrahim said, "there is no silver bullet for the USA. If there was, somebody would have found it."
When Ibrahim and Chevalier climbed on the roof of a building at the camp, they were stunned by what they saw.
"My most enduring memory is quite clearly walking on the roof of that school and seeing the extent of displacement," Ibrahim said.
"It is the largest camp in the world, and I think it's tragic to see that families who used to live in a city -- had homes, apartments, kitchens -- now live in huts and with very little hope of going back.
"And all the people that we speak to want us to bring their voices and their story to the international community, because all they hear on the news are news of other crises, and they feel left out."
10:00 a.m..
I really didn't care that I was late but I was going to hustle to get to work without losing much more time. Scrambling out of bed my knee bumped into maribou's head. She had fallen asleep sitting at the foot of my bed and now she was rubbing her head muttering "...the hell?"
What the fuck was she doing here? Despite the late hour it was still dark in my bedroom as if it was a bit before six in the morning. From the dim gray light that precedes sunrise I saw that she was clothed much to my relief. maribou quickly got her bearings despite being bonked. She told me how she and Jaybird were concerned for me because they've seen little things I've been doing lately which gave them pause. They both decided that they should alternate nights at my place to keep watch over me. I had no idea how I didn't notice them before.
After getting dressed in the other room, feeding and watering Spot and reminding Spot that I love her very much maribou stopped me to give me a hug, "You're going to need this today."
At the top of the stairs I suddenly realized why she was there. I had been muttering the line "Sometimes I live in the country, sometimes I live in town, sometimes I take a fool notion to jump in the river and drown" under my breath for weeks. As the days progressed it became louder rather than simply repeating it over and over in my head like a mantra.
Out the door and into another room. raddidge was in bed and I climbed in with her. The sun had risen filling the room with warm color where I told her about something really awful that someone did to me when I was a kid and only told her because who she is to me.
