August 14th, 2011 Dadaab, Kenya-Somali border, July 2011
The journey was long, there was nothing to eat, and for two-month old
Abdulnoor Ibrahim, it may yet prove fatal. His wasted body does not
move as he lies on his hospital bed in the Dadaab refugee camp, his
breathing so shallow it sometimes seems to have stopped. He is one of
dozens of children on the ward suffering from severe malnutrition,
teetering on brink of death because they haven’t had enough to eat.
Some cry, but most are silent, too sick to make a sound. Their limp
bodies are cradled by their parents, or in Abdulnoor’s case, his older
sister, as they wait for the doctor to make his rounds.
Abdulnoor arrived at the Dadaab refugee camp with his mother on
Sunday. They had walked for days from Somalia, forced to leave their
village because there was nothing left to eat. By the time they
arrived at the camp on Sunday, his tiny body had all but given up. He
was admitted to the hospital on the same day and left with his sister
while their mother, herself desperate for food and water, joined the
queues to register as refugees. Some of the new arrivals say they have
been waiting weeks to complete the registration process, surviving on
whatever emergency rations they can claim.
This is the reality of East Africa’s food crisis. Across the region
almost ten million people are suffering the effects of a terrible
drought caused by consecutive failed rainy seasons, and as always, it
is children who are paying the heaviest price. Doctors at the hospital
have seen an explosion in the number of children requiring urgent
treatment for malnutrition in recent weeks; three months ago one child
in ten here was considered malnourished. Today that figure is one in
three.
This dramatic increase is a direct result of the tide of humanity
flowing from Somalia into Kenya. They are people on the brink of
starvation, convinced that registering in Dadaab, the world’s largest
refugee camp, is their final hope. They have walked for weeks, risking
banditry, rape and attack by wild animals along the way, carrying
everything they own upon their backs as they arrive to build a new
life in the camp. By the time they get here, some are so weak they can
barely stand.
On the road outside Dadaab, Makaye Enow trudges through the dust with
six hungry children in tow. For five days and five nights five days
they have walked without food from the village of Sakow, in southern
Somalia. They carry whatever they can from the village, but their
packs contain no food and their water containers are empty. “We are
very hungry now,” Makaye says, her arm around her son, painfully thin
and barefoot in the dirt. “We want food. We want assistance from
anyone in power.”
But that assistance is slow in coming. Registration centres at the
camp are overwhelmed; Dadaab was built to hold some 90,000 people, but
now is home to at least 370,000, not including those who have arrived
but are yet to complete the registration process. The new arrivals
live in a makeshift camp tagged onto the outskirts of the camp proper,
a place filled with desperation and tragedy. I’m taken to the
graveyard by one of the residents. Most of the graves are child-size;
my guide tells me some of them died in the camp before they could make
it to the hospital.
In many respects, the children who are admitted to the ward are the
lucky ones. They receive the medical care they so badly need, and that
tens of thousands of children across the region are lacking. All the
same, some are too sick to recover. On a trestle table at one end of
the room, the death register provides a grim reminder of each of the
children who have lost their battle with hunger here. It shows that 20
children, most of them under the age of five, have died on the ward
over the past month. The latest, a one-year old girl called Anab Ali,
slipped away on Sunday, after a gruelling 22-day journey to get to the
camp.
These deaths are avoidable. For months now, aid agencies have been
warning that a humanitarian crisis was brewing in East Africa due to
the severity of the drought. Experts have watched with growing concern
as early warning system after early warning system predicted the
disaster the world is now watching unfold on its television screens.
But the money didn’t follow those warnings, and the required scale-up
of relief efforts could not be paid for. It’s not difficult to stop a
child becoming malnourished, but without early action, early warnings
are useless.
We may have failed to prevent this crisis, but we must not fail to
respond to it. Across the region children like Abdulnoor need urgent
help. We can no longer write this off as just another African drought.
We can no longer say that we didn’t know. The children’s names on the
death register at Dadaab are a warning of what will happen if aid
agencies cannot raise the funds they need to tackle this growing
crisis head on. The cost of failure will be thousands of children’s
lives. The stakes could not be higher.
