Somalia, the place that may soon cover its landscapes with hundreds of thousands of tiny tombs

MOGADISCHU, Somalia – To survive a child is to lose a piece of one’s heart. The famine looming over the Horn of Africa may soon disappear hundreds of thousands of tiny graves in that barren landscape.

Somalia is a wasteland of pure beauty, with farmers and goat herders making their living in lunar desert landscapes. The country usually has two rainy seasons a year, but these have been missing for two and a half years, wither crops and leave carcasses of goats and cattle on dry brown earth.

Families move, setting up colorful home-shops and looking for work to earn money to feed their families. some hungry children

This may be partly our fault: it is believed that worst drought in four decades It is related to climate change. The implication is that carbon emissions from rich countries are killing Somali childrenbinding us to this crisis with a thread of moral responsibility.

This is the drought here: Sabirin Omar, a 14-month-old girl, suffers from it kwashiorkor, an extreme form of protein deficiency. Her skin is mottled and scaly, her hair is yellow and falling out, and her body is swollen with fluid retention.

“He’s not eating enough,” explained his mother, Amina Moallim, 27, who she has already lost three children. She said the family had a hundred goats, but they are all dead and the family only eats when she or her husband finds odd jobs that earn them at most 2 dollars per day.

When they get the money, the family only eats one meal a day, for example rice with a little tomato paste. There is no money for protein, so Sabirin risks becoming the fourth dead child in the family.

Multiply Sabirin by hundreds of thousands and they will start to get the idea. The United Nations calculates that as the crisis approaches famine, 1.8 million Somali children children under 5 will suffer from acute malnutrition in July.

The nutritional gaps of the world

Traveling to Somalia means being bewildered the nutritional gaps of the world.

– Berco’s Popcorn of Chicago offers “super millionaire popcorn” with gold flakes at $2,500 a large can.

– A pack of Plumpy’Nut, a food rich in protein and energy for severely malnourished children like Sabirin costs 38 cents. Two or three packets a day can revitalize a child.

Lack of water, lack of peace

However, what is needed in Somalia is not just help, but also peace. An Islamic extremist group, Al-Shabab, he is fighting the government and the combination of war and drought has driven an estimated 3.8 million Somalis from their homes.

I arrived at Mogadishu airport on a United Nations plane. The area around the airport is well protected (when no mortars are falling) and international aid workers live within this fortified area, but traveling outside is difficult. An aid worker told me that he had been working in Somalia for three years and that he had only left the airport once to visit Mogadishu.

When he traveled outside the protected area, he did so in an armored vehicle escorted by a large group of armed men. If it’s that complicated for me to move only with my laptopJust imagine what it’s like to try to provide assistance in remote areas of the country.

Another war -the one in Ukraine- it also kills children here in Somalia. About 90% of wheat imports from Somalia came from Russia or Ukraine, and that war raised the price of all food and fertilizer. And perhaps more importantly, it has diverted attention and aid that would otherwise have eased the humanitarian crisis here.

– UNICEF estimates the cost of preventing severe acute malnutrition to be $55 per child per year, i.e. only 15 cents a day.

– A large American dog consumes readily $2 food a day.

I don’t mean to shame Americans who love their dogs and enjoy their luxuries (myself included!), and the truth is that the United States has been generous to Somalia, providing $1.3 billion in aid since October 2021, two-thirds of humanitarian assistance received here. Europe and the Gulf countries can and must follow the American example and do more.

But let’s be real: these are responsibilities that the rich world should accept when our animals are on a diet and Somali children are starving.

Hunger doesn’t just kill children, of course; he also takes them out of school and forces girls into child marriage at times with much older men.

Habiba Abdulahi, 40, has already lost four children and is caring for a seriously ill fifth. Now there is a solution: marry Luul, his 13-year-old daughter.

“With all the problems now, if I can find her a good husband, I’ll marry Luul,” she said.

Luul hasn’t been consulted and doesn’t know that there could be a wedding in her future. The girl’s grandmother, Hawa Ibrahim, who has lost seven grandchildren, has acknowledged that Luul is too young to marry, but she sees marriage as a way out for the family’s survival. Thus, the family would not only have one less mouth to feed, but they would also receive for Luul a dowry that could feed others.

“If a man has good money, we will marry her“, She said.

It seemed difficult to me. But I asked myself: If I had lost seven grandchildren and were seeing an eighth fight for their lives, would I see things differently?

The famine of 2011

The 2011 famine in Somalia claimed 260,000 lives and followed three seasons of drought during which no rainfall arrived. This time, five rainy seasons have failed and some fear that the situation is more serious.

But even when there is no drought, Somalia is losing children to malnutrition at a frightening rate. In 2020, according to UNICEF, some 72,000 children died in Somalia, half of them from hunger-related causes.

Let me acknowledge, however, that all figures in this article it can be wrong, as it is impossible to collect accurate data in an impoverished country in the midst of a war. UNICEF statisticians acknowledge that actual infant mortality in 2020 could have been below 35,000 or above 156,000.

Somali statistics are full of oddities. presumably, 14% of women are obese, although I have not encountered any and the stunting of children due to malnutrition is allegedly lower than the African average. I doubt it.

But while the numbers for Somalia are uncertain, famine and deaths are not. Nor is the rapid slide into further hunger.

– Bling H20 sells “handcrafted alkaline water” in a bottle with Swarovski crystals for $2,700 a bottle.

– Somalis in resettlement camps pay 4 cents to fill a 20-litre tank with water. That’s double what it cost a year ago, so water is becoming inaccessible for uses like cleaning.

hygiene

“We use the water for cooking and drinking,” explains Marko Ali, a mother huddled with her baby at Mogadishu’s Banadir hospital. “We don’t have enough water to bathe or wash our hands“.

Maybe that’s why his son, Mohamed, did it a bad case of cholera. Malnutrition usually kills children indirectly by weakening the body, so it could be the immediate cause of death cholera, measles, pneumonia or diarrhea.

“Hygiene gets worse in an economic crisis, when people can’t afford to use water,” said Dr Hafsa Mohamed, a pediatrician at Banadir hospital who, with support from UNICEF and Concern Worldwide, he is doing a heroic job to keep sick kids kids alive.

Most of the children in the hospital they have parasitesshe said, and showed pictures of a baby throw up worms and another with a diaper full of them. Parasites leave these anemic children, and the food they receive can end up in the worms instead of their own bodies.

– One albendazole deworming pill, bought in bulk from UNICEF, costs 4 cents and can eliminate parasites.

– The average American spends more than $1,300 a year in wasted food and it is launched

We can’t solve all the world’s problems, but I believe we have some obligation to families who lose children to current weather disasters, even if there is inevitably some uncertainty about how much of a particular crisis can be attributed to global warming. The climate is changing and the United States has been emitting cumulatively 12,000 times more carbon than SomaliaSo we accept some responsibility.

How do we assume our responsibility?

It would mean an even bigger international effort now to avert this impending famine in the Horn of Africa and invest in resilience measures, such as dams and drought-resistant seeds, so that famine doesn’t follow every failed rainy season. According to one study, every dollar invested in resilience reduces downstream losses and humanitarian spending by up to $3.

It is true that some aid will seem wasted. We will give Plumpy’Nut to parents of severely malnourished children and they will share it with other hungry children. Or perhaps the rains are in, the war subsides, and the famine alarms turn out to be a false alarm. It is fair to point out that aid workers have predicted ten of the last five famines.

The other risk, however, is that we will be embarrassed by the worst famine of this century and that hundreds of thousands of children will die needlessly.

“Somalia is at the epicenter of the global hunger crisis, with a scale of deaths potentially unseen in 50 years,” said Reena Ghelani, UN famine coordinator. “This generation of children will not recover.”

As I interviewed starving Somalis, I had a heartbreaking thought: A chicken or pig abused on an American factory farm is more likely to survive than a baby in Somalia.

About 5 percent of American chickens die before maturity, while 11 percent of Somali children die before age 5…and that number will skyrocket if famine hits this spring.

We say that “all lives are of equal value”, but the life of a Somali child is treated as having less value than that of a chicken destined for the table.

So can we afford to help the Somalis? On a moral level, Can we afford not to?

c.2023 The New York Times Society

Translation: Elisa Carnelli

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