Hungry Somalis weigh a daughter’s freedom against her siblings’ lives
DOLLOW, SOMALIA (Reuters) - As the village wells dried up and her livestock died in the scorched scrubland of southern Somalia, Abdir Hussein had one last chance to save her family from starvation: the beauty of her 14-year-old daughter, Zeinab.
Last year, an older man offered $1,000 for her dowry, enough to take her extended family to Dollow, a Somali town on the Ethiopian border where international aid agencies are handing out food and water to families fleeing a devastating drought. Zeinab refused. “I would rather die. It is better that I run into the bush and be eaten by lions,” said the slender dark-eyed girl in a high, soft voice.
“Then we will stay and starve to death and the animals will eat all of our bones,” her mother shot back.
The exchange, related to Reuters by the teenager and her mother, is typical of the choices facing Somali families after two years of poor rains. Crops withered and the white bones of livestock are scattered across the Horn of Africa nation.
The disaster is part of an arc of hunger and violence threatening 20 million people as it stretches across Africa into the Middle East.
It extends from the red soil of Nigeria in the west, where Boko Haram’s sixyear jihadist insurgency has forced 2 million people to flee their homes, to Yemen’s white deserts in the east, where warring factions block aid while children starve.
Between them lie Somalia’s parched sands
and the swamps of oil-rich South Sudan, where starving families fleeing three years of civil war survive on water-lily roots.
Parts of South Sudan are already suffering famine, the first in six years.
In Somalia, the United Nations says more than half the 12 million population need aid. A similar drought in 2011, exacerbated by years of civil war, sparked the world’s last famine, which killed 260,000 people. Now the country teeters on the brink again.
At the moment, the death toll is still in the hundreds but the numbers will spike if the March-May rains fail. The forecast is not good.
As US President Donald Trump threatens to slash aid budgets, the United Nations says the drought and conflicts in the four countries are fuelling humanity’s greatest collective disaster since World War Two.
“We stand at a critical point in history,” Undersecretary-General for humanitarian affairs Stephen O’Brien told the Security Council in March. “We are facing the largest humanitarian crisis since the creation of the United Nations.”
The United Nations needs $4.4 billion by July, he said. So far it has received $590 million.
The choice
Missing from the statistics are the heart-wrenching choices families make every day to survive.
Sheltering under the bare branches of a thorn tree as she waited for a cup of flour, one mother who just arrived in Dollow said she had been feeding her younger children while the older ones went hungry.
Another had left her sick five-year-old son by the side of the road with distant kinsmen as she led children that could still walk towards help. A third woman bid goodbye to her crippled husband and walked through the desert for a week, carrying their toddler, to the place where there was food.
Hussein traded Zeinab’s freedom for the lives of her sisters.
“I felt so bad,” she told Reuters in the ragged dome (Reuters/Z ohra Bensemra)
of sticks, rags and plastic that shelters her and 14 other relatives. “I ended the dreams of my baby. But without the money from the dowry, we would all have died.”
Zeinab, whose henna’d hands are also covered with her own inky teenage doodles, wears a tight-fitting headscarf and a long, drab skirt. Underneath are a pair of trousers with a spray of coloured rhinestones at the bottom, and an iron will.
She wants to be an English teacher. She wants to finish school. She does not want to be married.
“I want something different to this,” she said, as her