“We were terrified. It didn’t stop raining and when the water reached our knees we decided to flee,” she recounted. “We spent days under the rain; children were crying of hunger everywhere. We didn’t know what to do.”
Kahnpur is a small village in south western Bangladesh, home to about 200 households of farmers, nestled between green rice paddies and ponds. Except it’s not – its people uprooted on mass, it now sits about a kilometre and a half away on the outskirts of the town of Tala.
Save the Children teams were smack in the middle of programme delivery in the hot scorching sun (to which we have grown accustomed), when the skies opened, as we say here in Kenya, and rain fell in Wajir.
I see families steering their narrow boats closer and closer to the highway, while trucks crowded with food supplies and volunteers push steadily through the water to the evacuation centres. Driving past the few dry patches along the highway, we see makeshift dwellings and tents housing evacuees who haven’t made it to the centres.
Our team filled a bag with enough rations for another week as Halima sat holding and feeding her baby – a quiet joy passing between her and her daughter. This was the moment we had travelled all the way across the country to witness, and this was the reason the food had travelled all the way across the world to be here.
On Monday we set off on the final stretch of our journey to deliver living-saving food to the most remote places in East Africa. At eight in the morning, the gravel courtyard of the Save the Children office in Habaswein was buzzing with activity.
Behind every treatment for every child made sick by the drought in east Africa, there is a story. An often-long, often-difficult journey, made possible by a lot of hard work, and by your generosity.
When we pulled into the sandy desert outpost town of Habaswein, we had been travelling for two days and covered over 800 kilometres.
We take the first batch of peanut paste off the truck so the driver can take the rest on to the next office, extending this lifeline to another group of children…
We woke up in the town of Garissa early enough to see the morning sky turn from purple to white.
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