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Yet as this crisis has reached its end game, a political indifference appears to have arrived in Abidjan along with the guns and the fighters, and it's been delivered by the fundamentals of thirst, hunger and fear.

Saudi is half Mauritanian half Sierra Leonian and she lives in a suburb of the city.

'Yesterday the tap was working a little so straight off I filled one big tin in my house to get enough water for today. It's all but finished now, but I reserved a little to cook some food for my son.'

She spoke of trying a well nearby for some more with which to wash, but the prospect was too frightening.

'I'm not going outside. I'm standing by my wall, then i'm looking looking and seeing what is going on with the boys around me. They are looting the Mauritanian shops, they are stealing. Then they bring the goods just in front of my building and they are selling them.'

Given that a mixture of rice and milk is all that she and her family has to eat, I wondered if she'd be going out to get some food.

'I cannot buy the things taken from my Mauritanian people. I prefer to die. I don't have food but I can sustain myself. I learned to do this during the civil war in Sierra Leone.'

Her voice began to tremble with anger.

'I don't know what Mauritanians did to them. We are Africans but they are treating my people like animals.'

Earlier she'd mentioned her eight year-old son.

'For the moment I'm not exposing him to everything. But he understands. When he hears the gunshots he throws himself on the ground. Everyone is keeping their children inside, so there are no friends to play with.'

Her husband later told me it's as if their son was imprisoned.

The injustice of Saudi using her experience of living hungry in one conflict to help her do so again jarred.

Stagar's story had the same effect.

'I'm in a camp in Ghana,' he shouted down a distant cellphone line, his strong accent giving away that Nigeria was once home. But it hasn't been for some time.

'I was a refugee living in Ivory Coast, but they marked our house for destruction and we ran away. My wife has a knife wound from Gbagbo's boys and we cannot go back. We will remain in the desert here in Ghana.'

'Where will you go in the end?' I asked.

'I don't know,' he replied, at a loss to imagine a plan which works for him and his injured wife.

Ghana isn't the only country welcoming thousands of refugees. Turn west rather than east and Liberia too is playing host.

Boakai texted from Monrovia: 'We were once refugees ourselves. We will open our houses to our Ivorian brothers, even if it means sharing our last penny with them.'

The familiarity with hunger, violence and displacement remains shocking. And I thought back to what Saudi had said when she bid me goodbye.

'For a long time, God has left West Africa. Inshallah, inshallah, inshallah.'