Arbay Mahad Qasim has already lost two children to a vicious drought, and now the Somali villager fears she could lose a third while her malnourished toddler Ifrah awaits treatment at a Mogadishu hospital.
Barely in his teens, Qasim is among dozens of weary parents crowding the Banadir Maternity & Children Hospital, which has become the root of the hunger crisis sweeping Somalia as a record drought grips the Horn of Africa.
Whole villages were forced to uproot their lives and flee their homes after bad rains destroyed crops and killed livestock.
When rain failed for the fourth consecutive month last month, UN aid agencies and meteorologists warned that famine was imminent in Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia.
But for many Somalis, like Qasim, who has survived on government handouts in recent months, disaster has already struck.
Two of their children died of starvation in the last 18 months.
When two-year-old Ifrah’s tiny body swelled and showed symptoms of severe malnutrition, Qasim wasted no time and spent a day traveling from her village in the southwest to Mogadishu in a desperate attempt to save the life of her youngest child.
– ‘Worst Conditions’ –
The Banadir facility is full of parents who fear the worst for their children.
Some walk for days to find help, carrying their sick, skeletal infants on their backs.
Many told AFP they had never seen a crisis of such horrifying proportions, echoing warnings from climate scientists who say the unprecedented drought is the worst in four decades.
“The harvest failed. We lost the cattle. The river has dried up,” said Khadija Mohamed Hassan, whose 14-month-old son Bilal is among those admitted to the Banadir facility.
“I am 45 years old and I have never experienced such a devastating drought in my life. We live in the worst conditions of our time,” she told AFP.
Health workers are already overwhelmed, and doctor Hafsa Mohamed Hassan told AFP that the number of patients arriving at Banadir’s stabilization center due to malnutrition has tripled since the start of the drought, leading to a lack of beds on some days.
“The cases we receive include children with other health complications, such as acute measles, and others who are in comas from severe malnutrition,” she said.
The situation is at a turning point, said Bishar Osman Hussein of the nonprofit organization Concern Worldwide, which has supported the Banadir center since 2017.
“Between January and June this year, the number of children admitted to the Stabilization Center of Banadir Hospital with severe malnutrition and other complications increased from 120 to 230 per month,” he told AFP.
Meteorologists have warned that the October-November monsoon could also fail, sending the region into more turbulence.
– ‘I can barely wait for it’ –
Conflict-torn Somalia is particularly ill-equipped to deal with the crisis as a attritional Islamist insurgency restricts humanitarian access to parts of the country.
Thousands of kilometers away, the war in Ukraine is also devastating the lives of Somalis, with soaring food prices and scarce aid supplies.
Around 7.1 million Somalis – almost half the population – are fighting hunger, with more than 200,000 on the verge of starvation, the UN said this week.
Meanwhile, calls for help went largely unnoticed, with aid organizations raising less than 20 percent of the funds needed to prevent a repeat of the 2011 famine that killed 260,000 people – half of them children under the age of six.
“We cannot wait for a famine to be declared,” El-Khidir Daloum, the country director of the World Food Program in Somalia, said in a statement Monday, warning of a race against time.
With humanitarian aid insufficient, Somalia’s newly elected President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud has called on Somalis to help their fellow citizens.
“Anyone who has a plate of food on their table today must think of the child somewhere crying from hunger and help them in any way they can,” he said during a recent visit to a camp housing drought-displaced people.
Back at the Banadir hospital, Khadija Mohamed Hassan anxiously watches over little Bilal, whose bony body is a jumble of tubes and bandages.
“We’ve been here 13 days and he’s looking better now,” she said.
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