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Still severely malnourished from a searing
drought that struck east Africa last year, she is among
thousands of the children in this impoverished, lawless nation
now bearing the brunt of devastating floods that have hit the
region.
Too young to understand the cycle of natural disasters that have
ravaged her country, Habiba's ribs protrude and the scale
records her weight at 6,3kg, half the normal weight for a
toddler her age. If she was any smaller, she would be too
fragile to hang in the sling and would be put in a red bucket to
be weighed, but her mother, Salada, 30, is thankful the youngest
of her four children
is at least alive.
"If I did not come here, my child would die," she said, her head
wrapped in a black scarf, as a nurse examined her daughter at a
clinic run by the France-based aid agency Action Contre La Faim
(ACF - Action Against Hunger).
Unusually heavy seasonal rains that began across east Africa in
October have compounded the misery of people in Kenya, Ethiopia
and Somalia who were just recovering from the drought that
scorched the
earth and left it unable to absorb water.
But it is here in Somalia, without a functioning central
government since 1991 and now on the brink of all-out war
between a weak transitional administration and powerful
Islamists, that
conditions are perhaps most dire.
Already, the worst floods in 50 years, man-eating crocodiles
they have unleashed and waterborne disease have killed about 120
people here with hundreds of thousands homeless and potentially
up
to a million affected if the downpours continue as expected.
For families like the Somos, the effect has been catastrophic as
the drought killed off most of their livestock and they now
watch raging waters simply engulf fields too dry to grow staple
crops of maize and sorghum.
"There are no crops in the area, there is hunger, there is
disease," Salada Somo said. "There was the long drought, now the
water has washed everything away."
UN World Food Programme spokesperson Penny Ferguson, here on an
aid distribution mission, echoed the sentiment.
"The effects of a devastating drought are not wiped out by a
rainy season," she said. "Once your cattle and your goats are
dead, even when it rains they don't come back."
"It is going to take several growing seasons for people to get
back on their feet and have enough to eat," Ferguson said.
While adults have lost property, animals and in some cases their
lives, it is the children of Somalia, which is swimming in a sea
of grim health statistics already, that are suffering the most.
Even before the drought and floods, life expectancy at birth is
46, 25 percent of children die before they reach five and in
many areas, malnutrition rates hover at 20 percent or above,
according to UN figures.
Since this feeding station opened in March, ACF has treated more
than 600 and there are now 24 inpatients, most of them children
under the age of five but fewer than 10 admissions have died.
"When they come here their metabolism is upside down, they are
very irritable, very weak, of course," said Vanessa Cagnion, the
nurse in charge of the general nutrition program here. "The
first
week is always a bit sensitive."
The children are given a special, fortified milk for the first
week before they are really even able to start gaining weight,
she said. Treatment can take up to 45 days.
Breast feeding her malnourished four-month-old daughter Rukia,
30-year-old Hediga Mohamed said her child had been at the clinic
for two weeks and nearly doubled her pre-admission weight of
about
1,5kg.
Rukia's twin sister was not so lucky, dying on a green mat
covered by a mosquito net several weeks ago, and Hediga has
wrapped a necklace of wooden charms around her scrawny neck.
"It is so she won't smell the other sick children, it's to
protect her," she said. "It's working. She's getting better." -
Sapa-AFP |
11:00 GMT
