Cloaked in rags and dust, Somalis flee looming famine
BAIDOA, Somalia: Mariam Ibrahim, her seven children and two neighbouring families were the last to leave their village in southwestern Somalia.
They loaded their combined belongings – blankets, cooking pots, sleeping mats, jerry cans, clothes – onto a hired donkey cart and walked beside it for 20 kilometres to Baidoa, the closest city.
“There is nobody left now,” said the 28-year- old. She joined thousands of others who are arriving in Baidoa each day, staggering from the parched countryside into the garrison city, cloaked in rags and dust. Clusters of stick and cloth domes are appearing across the outskirts of Somalia’s regional capital.
Somali and Ethiopian soldiers – part of an African Union force – secure the town against the alQaeda-aligned Shabaab militants whose control begins just 15 kilometres away. Successive seasons of poor rains and failed harvests have left farming families like Ibrahim’s destitute and on the brink of famine.
The United Nations is warning of an unprecedented global crisis with famine already gripping parts of South Sudan and looming over Nigeria, Yemen and Somalia, threatening the lives of 20 million people.
For Somalis, the memory of the 2011 famine which left a quarter of a million people dead is still fresh. But Ibrahim said what is happening now feels worse.
First the food ran out, then the wells emptied. And the little water that remains is brackish or diseased. So when her village of Aliyow Mumin suffered an outbreak of cholera in late January, Ibrahim decided to leave.
Muslima Kusow was born into famine 25 years ago and survived 2011, but it was this year’s drought which forced her to abandon her home for the first time. She left the farming village of Roobey in early March, trekking four days northwards with her six children to Baidoa.
Asked why, Kusow feathers four slender fingers down her throat to mime swallowing, then holds out an empty hand: “Thirst. Hunger.” Her youngest child, two-year- old Asiba, is skinny and pale, lacking the strength to hold her head upright.
At the Deeg- Roor Medical Organisation – the name means ‘ first rains’ – Abdirahim Mohamed says new outpatients are registering for the Unicefbacked feeding programme at an exponential rate.
In February, 75 children were admitted to the clinic, more than double the number in January and a figure he predicts will double again in March. — AFP