By Cyrus Kinyungu Hawa Hassan, 19, cuddles her two-year-old malnourished child as she attempts to shield him from being photographed by journalists visiting Somalia. A refugee camp in Wajid where internally displaced Somalia citizens live in squalid conditions in the shanties constructed with torn sacks and pieces of clothes.
Some fortified milk is passed on to her in an orange plastic cup at a feeding centre for malnourished children in Wajid.
Besides her, in an expansive room, are other equally emaciated women with their children waiting for the same ration, measured in syringes.
The milk, though nutritious, will not be enough for little Isaac Ibrahim, who can be mistaken for a five-month-old baby because of his stunted growth. But it will sustain him until he gets his next meal.
Smiling shyly after receiving her ration, the teenage mother from Ghelyo village in Wajid District of the war-torn Somalia says that it is only by luck that they have survived the devastating drought that has hit the country.
Her luck came calling when officials of Action Contre la Faim (ACF), an international NGO operating in Somalia, found her and her children starving at their home 35 kilometres from Wajid.
Many more like her were left in her neighbourhood without food and water and may have died of hunger.
Hassan cannot recall the number of days she had slept without a meal, but she was only sure that her child would have died anytime.
Speaking haltingly, Hassan recalls that she left her other child with her aunt, and without anything to eat.
“I left her with her aunt when we were brought here. They did not have anything to eat,” she says staring pensively in the distance.
The memories of her first-born child, whose whereabouts she doesn’t know, dampens the mood of the previously jovial mother and all she can say, through an interpreter, is, “I am happy with the help we got”.
Lying next to Hassan is 45-year-old Fatuma Abdullahi, who is with her three children at the ACF feeding centre. She was brought with her two children 20 days ago, but delivered the third one while at the centre. The two youngest children are almost the same size and one can mistake them for twins.
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Hawa Hassan, 19, holds her emaciated two-year-old child, Isaac Ibrahim, as she waits for fortified milk at the Action Centre La Faim feeding centre for malnourished children in Wajid, Somalia. |
“My child was sick and some people came to visit her and that is when they brought us here,” she says, also through an interpreter.
“I used to look after our camels, but they all died,’ she adds.
ACF head of base in Somalia, Admain Lassuilciarias, says the hunger situation in the country was still bad, but was likely to improve due to the rains.
Such images of desperation flood the Somalia countryside as the inhabitants try to cope with one of the most severe drought situation in 15 years, which has affected close to 2.1 million people.
Due to inter and intra-clan hostilities in the country, rescuing such people from the effects of drought involves the use of several hundreds of dollars for security purposes besides the money required to feed them.
Not even the heavy rains that have pounded the country in the last two weeks can bring hope to the citizens.
A few kilometres from the ACF feeding centre, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Somalia citizens live as refugees in their own country in shanties covered with torn sacks and clothing.
These are the people whose lives have been disintegrated by the war and have been displaced from their homes due to insecurity.
As the United Nations Special humanitarian envoy for the Horn of Africa, Kjell Magne Bondevik, arrives in the camp in a convoy of vehicles guarded by heavily armed soldiers and militias, women start lighting fire in their ramshackle, perhaps in the hope that he has brought them food.
But he has only gone there to assess the situation and look for ways of assisting them. “This is the worst living conditions I have ever seen,” said Bondevik at the end of the tour.
As the convoy drives South of Wajid to Kurta village, women with plastic jerricans are seen fetching muddy water from the flooded roads.
The women know that when the waters dry up, they will be forced to walk for dozens of kilometres in search of the scarce commodity.
Drought is not the only humanitarian calamity affecting the country, as there have been reports of outbreak of measles and polio.
Mr James King’ori, Unicef’s Emergency Nutrition Coordinator in the five most affected regions in the country, says this grave situation is replicated in almost all parts of the country.
King’ori says a nutrition assessment done in the five regions of Bay, Bakool, Gedo, Middle and Lower Juba in Somalia indicated that there was a global acute malnutrition of 15 per cent and above.
Malnutrition levels of this nature, he says, call for a declaration of an emergency.
In some areas, says King’ori, the situation is much worse with Gedo region recording a malnutrition level of 23.8 per cent in March this year. He adds that the children mortality rate is equally high. “Recovery is expected to take about three to four months even with the coming of the long rains,” says King’ori, adding that the rains may not last for long.
The drought situation in the war-torn country sharing a common border with Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti is complicated further by the outbreak of measles and Polio.
The outbreak of these diseases is a risk to the neighbouring countries considering that Somalia citizens are always on the move trying to escape from their country.
Somalia is the only country in the world with a geographically expanding outbreak of polio and it poses a threat to the goal of eradicating the disease in the Horn of Africa.
A UN reports says a total of 199 wild polio virus cases have so far been confirmed since July 2005. Since the start of 2006, the report says, 14 cases have been identified.
The disease had been eradicated in 2002, but it re-emerged in 2005.
Dr Ayana Yeneabat of WHO Somalia says by mid 2005 more than 200 cases of polio were identified, most of them in Mogadishu, Banadir and Lower Shabelle regions.
Unicef Somalia Representative Christian Balsev Olesen on Tuesday warned that polio had been detected in Ethiopia and could rapidly spread into Kenya.
He said WHO needs US$11 million to enable it maintain and implement sensitive quality active surveillance to detect any ongoing virus circulation.
“With all these problems in the country, the presence of UN agencies and international NGOs has helped to significantly reduce the suffering of the people.
Source: Standard, May 10, 2006
