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Private First Class
Join Date: Nov 2011
Posts: 22
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Some Aid Trickles Into Somalia, Surrounded by Death and Disease
As the East Africa correspondent for The New York Times, my assignment has been to chronicle the current famine in Somalia, one of the worst humanitarian disasters of the last two decades, hitting one of the most forlorn and troubled countries in modern times. My job is to seek out the suffering and write about it and to analyze the causes and especially the response, which has been woefully inadequate by all accounts, though not totally hopeless. In Benadir, there is a room full of old blue cots, one after another, <a href="http://www.winterbootugg.com"><strong>ugg australia</strong></a> where the sickest children lie. On each bed, a little life is passing away. Some children cry, but most are quiet. The skin on their feet and hands is peeling off. All their bones show, like skeletons covered in parchment. I was standing just a few feet away from Kufow Ali Abdi, a destitute nomad, as he looked down on his dying daughter, and when the time came, there was no mystery, no fuss. I watched Mr. Kufow carefully unhook the I.V. that was attached to her shriveled body and then wrap her up in blue cloth. Her name was Kadija and she was 3 years old and probably not more than 20 pounds. Mr. Kufow walked out of the room, lightly carrying Kadija’s body in his arms. At least five children died that day in Benadir. At a camp not far away, where people are housed in twig huts and stare listlessly at the road, hoping for an aid truck to arrive, I was told that 10 had died. Across Somalia, it’s hundreds a day. Much of Africa, Somalia in particular, has had a tough time since independence in the 1960s, becoming synonymous with staggering levels of misery and leading many people to simply shrug and mutter “here we go again” when they hear of a new drought or a new war. But this current crisis in Somalia is on a different order of magnitude than the typical calamity, if there is such a thing. Tens of thousands of people have already died, and as many as 750,000 could soon starve to death, the United Nations says, the equivalent of the entire populations of Miami and Pittsburgh. One reason the situation has gotten this grim is that most of the big Western aid agencies and charities, the ones with the technical expertise and so-called surge capacity to rapidly distribute aid, have been blocked from working in the famine zones. At a time when Somalia is suffering from the worst drought in 60 years, a ruthless militant group called the Shabab, which is essentially a Qaeda franchise, is on such an anti-Western tirade that it has banned Western music, Western dress, soccer, bras and even Western food aid. The Shabab are a heavily armed complication that differentiates this crisis from previous famines in Somalia, Ethiopia or Sudan and from other recent natural disasters like the tsunami in Indonesia or Haiti’s earthquake, where aid groups were able to rush in and start saving lives within a matter of hours. That said, it is not as if American or European <a href="http://www.winterbootugg.com"><strong>winter boot</strong></a> aid agencies are simply giving up on Somalia. It’s the opposite. They’re stepping up operations and scrambling to find ways to get around the Shabab restrictions, turning to new technologies like sending electronic money by cellphone so people in famine zones can buy food themselves from local markets. Western charities are also teaming up with the new players on the aid scene, like Turkish groups and other Muslim organizations that are allowed into Shabab areas. It all calls for more hustle and definitely more imagination: in Somalia there are a million impediments to the aid business — the Shabab, the broken-down state, dilapidated ports and airports, American government sanctions, a legacy of corruption and the sheer dangers of working in full-fledged anarchy haunted by militias, warlords, glassy-eyed gunmen and even 21st-century pirates. But charity groups say they are beginning to turn this famine around. They just need more resources and more time.
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