It’s jarring to enter a medical facility in Somalia. I visited a hospital that had depleted its supplies and was forced to run without medications. In one room I entered I was faced with 15 severely malnourished children. There were eight such rooms at this particular hospital. The medical staff was completely overwhelmed. There were four to five doctors to oversee the most severe cases along with the countless others who arrived daily in search of help. Nurses were in even shorter supply.

Mothers are often forced to become both nurse and doctor for their children. They cling to their frail bodies and try to nourish them as best they can. When a person is starving, they can’t eat or drink, they require special food. In the face of such severe malnutrition, medical expertise is really required, and yet these women who have had no training and often can’t even read are struggling to keep their loved ones alive. The doctors provided serum and the mothers do their best to lovingly administer what they’ve been given. But there is no technology to support them, no IVs and no monitors to measure vital signs.
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I first visited Mogadishu in the 1990s. In the past 20 years it has become almost unrecognizable. It used to be such a beautiful city, and it’s now marked by overwhelming destruction. An estimated 181 camps have been cobbled together by people fleeing drought. They arrive each day.

It feels like another world. You walk the streets and see women with four to five children living in a house made of no more than sheets, salvaged wood and occasionally a plastic tarp to protect them from the rain. It really is like stepping into another world.

The camps are made up mostly of women and children. The women are fending for themselves. They struggle to provide for their children often in shelters no larger than six square feet. Inside their “homes” you’ll find cooking utensils and a place to sleep. Everyone is crammed together. There is nowhere to bathe. There are often no bathrooms. Aid agencies are providing water and bathroom facilities, healthcare, and food. The magnitude of need is daunting.
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Hunger is an unforgivable disease because it is the easiest one to cure. It is devastating to wake up in the morning and look east, west, south and north and see that there is nothing green that you can chew. During a drought everything goes yellow and dry. I would walk the roads and search the ground to see if someone had spat out a bit of chewed-up sugar cane. I am not ashamed to say that I would re-chew what I would find. Hunger is dehumanizing. It gets to a level where you do not know how you will survive and you will do anything for a simple kernel of corn.

The thing about drought is that it does not just affect farmers and their crops; it affects everyone. If you think about it, during harvest time farmers hire local farmhands to help with their crops. But when there are no crops to harvest, not only does the farmer lose his or her income, so do the laborers the farmer would have hired. There is a ripple effect that affects the whole community. Few have food and even fewer have money to buy food.

Peter Kimeu’s opinion piece about growing up hungry was published in the September 11 edition of the New York Times.

By Patrick Carney

I traveled 7,500 miles to get here. Door to door, it took just over 24 hours. I am on a different continent and hemisphere, and I am below the equator. I couldn’t be much farther from home.

Yet, I feel like I am nowhere near the people suffering and dying from a historic drought and famine throughout parts of East Africa, and I am in Nairobi, only about 300 miles from the camps. That’s about the distance between my hometown, Philadelphia, and Boston. It’s a day trip in a car.

How can I be so close to the suffering, and feel so far away?

I get to sit in an office, go to a restaurant for lunch, drink bottled water, and take a taxi back to my modest hotel at the end of the day. Meanwhile, just a few hours northeast of here, people are sleeping in refugee camps fighting for their lives.
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By Patrick Carney

The week started like any other.

I came into the office around 8 a.m., checked my e-mail, and got ready for the week ahead.

Thirty minutes later, one of my supervisors came in, and my week changed immediately.

“How do you feel about going to East Africa?” he asked.
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Dear Friend,

As you know, East Africa is in the grip of a horrible drought. We have all seen images of the hungry and malnourished arriving in refugee camps, many after walking for weeks or months, surviving not only the bleak landscape but also bandits and even wild animals. The perseverance of these people, of mothers sacrificing to save their children, is a tribute to the human spirit.

This is personal for me. I worked in this region in similar crises going back to the 1970s. Just before becoming CRS’ president in 1993, I was in Kenya as we helped Somalis who suffered through a drought made worse by political conditions. And now here we are again.
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As the food crisis across the Horn of Africa is intensifying, Catholic Relief Services will help thousands of Somali refugees in northeast Kenya by providing critical services in the soon-to-be opened Kambioos extension to the Dadaab refugee camp.

CRS is making a five-year commitment to work with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to provide 25,000 people with water and sanitation infrastructure in Kambioos, while also aiding the surrounding communities affected by the influx of refugees.

“The vast majority of refugees are suffering from malnutrition, poor sanitation facilities, and live in crowded conditions with a lack of appropriate shelter,” said PM Jose, CRS’ Kenya country representative. “Getting life-saving assistance to the new arrivals is critical, but as we help refugees, we must not forget the impact that these arrivals will have on the host communities surrounding the camps.”
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Excerpted from Busted Halo:

Fleeing war and famine, fighting off attacks from bandits and lions, thousands of refugees are flooding out of Somalia on foot each week. Busted Halo contributor Laura Sheahen, a communications officer with the humanitarian aid group Catholic Relief Services, looks back on her first days in some of the refugee camps that are receiving them. Let us remember our sisters and brothers in East Africa in our prayers.

Day one

Small plane to airstrip in Dadaab, a tiny, broken-down town in northeast Kenya. Blinding clouds of dust billow from the car in front of us as we make our way to our local partner’s compound. Dust instantly coats everything we carry. The same dust has swallowed up any hope of growing crops or raising livestock across the border in Somalia, where the drought and famine are worst.

Drive to the UN registration center, where hundreds of Somali refugees are bused in daily from several surrounding camps. At the center, they wait for hours to be processed in a big tent filled with screaming children and fingerprint scanners. The United Nations is trying, but can’t keep up with the influx.

We talk to Momina, a 22-year-old woman whose two children wear sack-like shirts and cling to her nervously. After their two dozen goats and cows died, they walked 20 days to get here.
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“Almost every refugee I spoke to had a horror story about the long walk from Somalia to Kenya. Armed bandits are a huge problem, and the vast majority of refugees I spoke to had been robbed at gunpoint. There has been an appalling number of rapes as well.

“Some of the refugees were robbed not just of the little food and clothing they carried, but the actual clothes they were wearing; they are walking naked. People fleeing the famine and war in Somalia are also fighting off lions and hyenas in the night.”

Excerpted from an AssociatedContent interview with CRS regional information officers Sara Fajardo and Laura Sheahen. Read the full interview here.