Hungry Somalis Facing a New Threat: Disease

The shrunken peanut of a boy with the haunting big eyes stared vacantly while the mother who had somehow saved him from starvation and bullets for a year gently cradled him in her lap.

Although he is eating now in this hot, overcrowded refugee village 20 miles outside of Baidoa, chronic malnutrition has left the 2-year-old child with the frail, tiny-boned body of a 6-month-old baby.

Worse, not yet recovered from Somalia’s hunger crisis, the boy is already at mortal risk amid a looming new disaster--disease.

“I am worried about my son,” said Nusluma Salaat, 27. She has lost seven of 10 family members, including her husband, to hunger and gun-carrying looters in the past year. The boy and an aged grandfather are all she has left.

Relief agency officials are as scared for all of Somalia as Salaat is for her only child.

“Medical care is extremely poor, thousands of people are very sick,” Mike McDonagh, field director for Concern Worldwide, said Thursday from his office in Mogadishu.

A frightening specter of things to come is offered by Dr. Laurie Vollen, director of the Arizona State University Medical Center and a volunteer in the international relief effort in Somalia. “Sanitation and medical services have completely dissipated so that now the leading killer is going to be infections,” she said.

Back at Cof-Gadut, the solution to starvation is part of the problem of disease: Concern Worldwide has placed a large metal water tank in the feeding center. The brown, brackish water comes from a reservoir where animals drink.

Still, the water is essential for the thousands of Somalis here to avoid dehydration and death.

“It makes them more sick, but they have to keep drinking it,” said Lynn Anne Mulrooney, Concern’s leader here.

She hopes a water engineer will arrive soon to arrange a cleaner water supply.

It is not just the water system that has relief and health officials worried about camps like this one.

Besides being full of filth and, inadvertently, lowering their occupants’ resistance to disease, many refugee centers are near the countless poorly buried bodies of the dead. Here, the wind--when there is a wind--carries an appalling stench.

At Cof-Gadut, “There’s a lot of parasites and diarrhea. The situation would be ideal for typhus or cholera, but we’ve been lucky,” Mulrooney said.

Officials also fear the onset of other diseases, including tuberculosis, malaria and dysentery.

Even as they confront a new potential catastrophe, relief agencies have not yet fully conquered hunger or armed marauders who steal food shipments for the nation’s inland reaches. But a corner has been turned in the fight against famine. In the hard-hit Baidoa area, about 300 people were dying a day last September. Now the number has declined to 15 a day.

McDonagh said that Baidoa “is the worst I’ve seen” in nine years service with relief agencies in Ethiopia, Bangladesh and Cambodia.

Slowly, thousands of Somalis in the Baidoa area are withdrawing from the brink of death.

Today, the harshest of the famine is over, and the people of this region are being taught to live again.

But they still suffer.

About five miles from Cof-Gadut is the neighboring village of Hawain, once a small enclave of thatched huts with witch-hat roofs, now a feeding center for about 8,000 people. Within spacious tan canvas tents, three rows of children, 12 to a row, eat meals designed to build up their damaged digestive systems.

The kids feast on Unamix, a combination of corn, sugar, oil and vitamins that resembles porridge.

“I feel all right now,” said Abdulah Mohmud, 14. He still is terribly gaunt, though, and he stares as though in a daze. He said his mother and father died from starvation.

Nearby, Ala Abraham is a bony 18-year-old, with bleeding sores on his hands, his skin scratched and hard. He has been here three months. “When I came, I was very thin,” he said. “Now I’m a little bit recovered.”

Although U.S. Marines and other forces have arrived, there is a lingering problem of roving gangs stealing food provided by the relief agencies. Several days ago, a gang raided Hawain, taking 60 bags of rice, beans and oil. The guard for the food was unable to defend the shipment, having hidden his semiautomatic rifle so U.S. Marines wouldn’t confiscate it.

“The technicals (gang members) knew the food had no guard,” said Zahra Mohamed Noor, who had worked in the Somali Ministry of Foreign Affairs before she became involved in the relief effort with Concern Worldwide.

Despite the arrival of the Marines and the exodus of most of the gangs, she has seen too much starvation and death for her to feel secure. She fears that the Somali gangsters, known for riding around on “Mad Max”-style vehicles, will return. “If they get the chance maybe they will come back,” she said.

But Concern Worldwide is determined to brave the security risks and prepare the local villagers and their refugees to help them grow stronger by the day.

When the farmers are able, the aid agency is supplying them with seed and farming tools to return to their homes and prepare for the next harvest.