Somalis Eat Animal Skins and Boiled Leaves as Life Ebbs Away

As U.S. officials visited Somalia on Wednesday to prepare for a massive relief airlift, people in the starving Horn of Africa nation were eating animal skins in a desperate effort to survive.

One family in Gofgadoot, 150 miles northwest of the Somalian capital, Mogadishu, sat around a boiling pot where animal skin and leaves were stewing. On the ground behind them lay a toddler who had died Tuesday morning.

The French medical relief group, Doctors Without Borders, reported Wednesday that Somalis in the region had resorted to eating animal skins for lack of food. Eighty percent of children under 5 are severely malnourished, and up to 20 people in each of the five towns it visited were dying daily, the Paris-based group reported.

Civil war and drought have combined to deadly effect in the country, and an estimated one-fifth of its roughly 8 million people face imminent starvation. About 4.5 million more are suffering from malnutrition.

In what promises to be the most massive delivery of relief to Somalia, the United States plans to ferry in 145,000 tons of sorghum, cooking oil and other food over the next two months.

Baidoa is to receive the first delivery of U.S. aid to Somalia. On Wednesday, four U.S. officials visited the desert town, several miles from Gofgadoot, to lay the groundwork for the airlift that is to begin next week.

The first flight won’t take off from neighboring Kenya until U.S. experts arrange for humanitarian agencies to unload, store and distribute the food on the ground.

On Tuesday, Marine Brig. Gen. Frank Libbuti, who will command the military airlift from the Kenyan port city of Mombasa, said U.S. soldiers will be responsible only for getting the food into Somalia, not for getting it to the needy.