NAZRAN: Satsita Khadirova watches from a corner of the cramped room as her 15-year-old daughter washes clothes in a baby bath, then huddles over a two-ring gas stove to make lunch for her younger siblings.

Like many Chechen refugees, their father died a few months ago of tuberculosis caused by damp and miserable living conditions.

The family’s home is a tiny space on the upper floor of a former warehouse and tractor repair workshop, long since abandoned to the post-Soviet scrap-heap of closed factories and collapsed agriculture. The cold brick walls are draped in blankets to provide some insulation. Wooden floors cover the uneven concrete, and gas pipes and electric wires have been installed, courtesy of Medecins sans Frontieres. Twenty-two other families live in the same bleak building.

The money for these “non-food items” comes largely from Echo, the European Union’s humanitarian arm; MSF distributes them and organizes who gets what. Perhaps nowhere else in the world does MSF go so far beyond its original medical brief as in its work in Ingushetia with refugees from the two recent wars in the neighbouring republic of Chechnya.

About 90 per cent of the 70,000 Chechen refugees no longer live in tents. To escape the winter cold they moved into kompaktniki, a vague term which covers a variety of disused garages, pig farms, chicken factories, bakeries and workshops.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.