The women sit in the sun waiting for their turn and their faces tell a story of endurance and fortitude. They are reduced to living from hand to mouth. In this battle, the only goal is to survive.
Recently, I had the opportunity to work with the Somalia education team and learned about an amazing teacher, she is one that deserves a spotlight on World Teacher’s Day.
We saw this disaster coming as early as last year. There’s a warning system in place, fed by satellite imagery, rainfall measurements and crop growth figures. Food prices have been rising for years. Save the Children was already trucking in emergency water supplies in February. But the fate of many of the children now malnourished was already sealed. We have a broken humanitarian system based on responding, not preventing.
It’s a collective failure. Aid agencies go to huge lengths to prepare the communities they work with to adapt to droughts and other shocks, but there’s a limit to what they can do to raise money from governments and the UN in the early stages of a crisis. It’s very hard to talk up a situation before it becomes a full-blown emergency.
As I walked through the busy and narrow alleys of the camp, I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of children – they were everywhere. Many of them had thin arms and swollen bellies, typically symptoms of malnutrition and stomach diseases. Some of them would not stop crying.
The amount of need was palpable at the camp and I was glad that we were there to take action.
In the wake of devastating humanitarian crises, like last year’s earthquake in Haiti, it’s all too easy to get caught up in emotion and feel an overwhelming urge to support orphanages, build new ones or send children overseas for adoption. These can seem like logical solutions in the face of children’s suffering. But this misguided kindness can actually cause harm to children and families who are already suffering.
We at Save the Children, take accountability seriously.
While doctors provide consultations and medicines to Pakistani families in hospitals, families themselves are expected to supply the meals, since hospitals are chronically underfunded. Many families have no food and children are going hungry.
The floods arrived here in late July. There were reports that nearly 300,000 people had had to leave their homes over night and entire villages were stranded on the highways and in government schools. But none of the reports came close to the reality on ground.
We found a small girl wrapped in dusty cloth. At 3 years and 6 months, Haoua weighed only 6 kilograms. The child was completely dehydrated.
Suddenly the room I was working in went orange. It was as if someone had put an orange filter over the window glass. Then it went very dark but it was the middle of the afternoon. All three of us in the room looked at each other in bewilderment and immediately rushed outside to see what on earth was going on.
