Famine ራብ Fight Famine in all all of its forms !!!
Monday, July 18, 2011
Sunday, July 17, 2011
U.N. flies aid to terrorist-controlled Somalia - CBS News
Nune Abdil, 2, a malnourished child from southern Somalia get treatment in Banadir hospital in Mogadishu, Saturday, July 16, 2011. (AP Photo)
(CBS/AP)
UNICEF's Horn of Africa crisis donation site
Save the Children donation site
The drought in Somalia represents one of the worst humanitarian crises in several years, and the worst-hit areas of Somalia are controlled by an al Qaeda-linked Islamic group called al-Shabab.
For weeks, there has been worry that al-Shabab would not lift its ban on foreign aid, but they finally did Saturday, allowing U.N. workers unhindered access, the BBC reports.
UNICEF spokeswoman Rozanne Chorlton told the BBC she hoped this would encourage other agencies to also deliver aid to the devastated south and central areas of the country controlled by al-Shabab.
The Islamist group lifted the ban 10 days ago as long as outside aid groups had "no hidden agenda."
"They gave assurances that our access for humanitarian purposes would be unhindered and that we would be able to reach the people who need support most," Ms Chorlton told the BBC.
U.N. struggles to cope with E. Africa droughtUNICEF's Horn of Africa crisis donation site
Save the Children donation site
Meanwhile, a U.S. State Department official pledged "significant" aid for the crisis, despite the debt ceiling impasse being debated in Washington.
The U.S. already has pledged $5 million Friday to help Somali refugees on top of a previously budgeted $63 million. Reuben E. Brigety, who is responsible for State Department assistance to refugees and conflict victims in Africa, said Washington is now studying how much more it will give.
"A great nation can do more than one thing at the same time and that is what we the United States will continue to do even in the context of the financial challenges that we are facing," said Brigety, an assistant deputy secretary.
Tens of thousands of Somali refugees are flooding camps in Ethiopia and Kenya in search of food after several seasons without rain decimated livestock and killed crops in Somalia.
Levels of malnutrition among refugees arriving at the camps are staggeringly high. The overall mortality rate at the camps in Ethiopia is seven people out of 10,000 per day, when a normal crisis rate is two per day, Brigety said.
At Kenya's Dadaab refugee camp, the largest in the world, Brigety spoke with a mother who arrived at the camp with six children, including a 7-year-old who has polio that she carried on her back. He said that even if Somalia sees rains again soon, the food crisis will go on for many more months.
"There are many seasoned relief professionals who would tell you we haven't seen a crisis this bad in a generation," he said. "We anticipate that this crisis will get worse before it gets better."
The crisis has swelled Dadaab's numbers to nearly 440,000 people, UNHCR said Friday.
And World Health Organization spokesman Tarek Jasarevic said at least 462 cases of measles, including 11 deaths, have been confirmed in recent months among Somali refugee children in Dadaab.
The aid group Save The Children said Friday that it has started feeding malnourished refugee children in pre-registration sites at camps in southern Ethiopia. Some 2,000 refugees are crossing into Ethiopia every day, swelling the camps' populations.
Because of the overwhelming numbers, refugees are waiting days or weeks to get into the camps, Save the Children said, making the feeding programs outside a necessity.
"In terms of the sheer numbers of people affected, this is one of the worst droughts the world has seen in a long time," said Duncan Harvey, the acting country director for Save the Children in Ethiopia.
Friday, July 15, 2011
The forgotten people of Africa's deadly famine
Displaced Somali children rest inside their makeshift shelter in southern Mogadishu on Thursday. The Horn of Africa is in the grip of a major food crisis, with millions of people severely affected in drought-stricken areas of Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Uganda, according to the UN.
Photograph by: Ismail Taxta, Reuters, The Daily Telegraph
It is a long walk from Fini village to Dadaab, the Kenyan refugee camp that is the focus of attempts to save millions of people in the Horn of Africa from starvation.
Daily aid flights bring Hollywood stars and hand-wringing Western politicians to tour the epicentre of a hunger crisis that many are warning could rapidly become a catastrophic famine.
However, in Fini, a place so small it does not appear on maps, there are no visitors. This cluster of three dozen stick-built shacks, bisected by a track rarely used by traffic, is growing daily as more and more people trek in from the wilderness.
They are here seeking help. But most come in vain; The Daily Telegraph was told again and again in northern Kenya that none of the millions of dollars generated by aid agencies' latest appeals had yet filtered through.
No one is bringing food, or medicines, or offers to buy the destitute herders' few remaining goats. The little food that people have is shared around ever more mouths. Children, already weak, are falling sick with potentially deadly diarrhea.
The only outside help has been water trucked in daily since December by World Vision, a British Christian charity. Those supplies end today because the money needed to cover costs has run out.
"There have been droughts before, but then people came to assist us, there was food available, even the animals were helped," said Dekow Farah, 49, an elder who arrived here a month ago with his two wives and nine children.
"Now, there is nothing. We see vehicles from the government passing by some days, but they do not stop. The situation is worse than ever. Why have we been forgotten? I cannot tell."
In countless villages like this across northern Kenya, eastern Ethiopia and southern Somalia, similar scenarios are being played out as the disaster threatens 11 million lives.
Fini is a place of the elderly and of women and children; all husbands and brothers aged between 16 and 50 have left with the few animals still alive to chase reports of rain far away that might have turned green a distant land with precious new pasture.
Among the domed huts of thatch and rags, the constant hot wind entombs in sand the carcases of goats that have perished. The only vegeta-tion lies high on trees with poisonous foliage.
Beneath a leafless thorn bush, branches are used to lift a near-lifeless cow to its feet to shift it into the meagre shade. The village shop, such as it is, stands locked, its shelves - usually stocked with sugar, maizeflour and cooking oil - are bare.
The traders who formerly visited once a fortnight to buy livestock stopped coming weeks ago because the animals were so weak they would die before reaching the slaughterhouse.
These are a people who survive by drinking the milk and selling the meat of their animals, their only source of food, wealth and income, and whose animals are now dead or worthless.
A cow that last year could be exchanged for six large sacks of rice now barely covers the cost of one. With money short and food prices soaring, stark decisions are being forced. In Habaswein, the nearest town, a long day's walk from Fini, Fatuma Ahmed sat at sunrise frying thin maize pancakes that would be the only food she and her seven children would eat all day.
She told of how "in the dark because people don't want others to know," families are agreeing to give their daughters as young as 13 in arranged marriages in order to receive a dowry from the groom's family, as is the tradition in Kenya.
While it is the most severe in living memory, the current drought is in fact the latest in a series that have come closer together and are forcing a change in an entire way of life.
People are for the first time choosing to settle permanently in villages with boreholes or towns with schools and hospitals, and turning their backs on living by their livestock.
Abdullahi Wardere, who guesses his age at 50, had chosen to leave the area his family roamed for generations and walked to Habaswein with his son and daughter-in-law and their three children. Their hope was to find food aid from the government or aid agencies.
Apart from once last month, they have received nothing.
"There is no one there where we came from, you will find all the villages are empty," he said.
"It is time now to stop moving with the animals. They cannot survive with these droughts, and in the same way we cannot survive. This must be where we stay now."
NEW CAMP TO OPEN
A new camp for Somalis fleeing the drought sweeping the Horn of Africa is to open in Kenya, despite security fears.
More than 1,400 Somalis stream into the Dadaab refugee centre every day, and its existing infrastructure cannot cope. Aid organizations led by UNHCR, the UN's refugee agency, have been pushing Kenya to allow new arrivals to use a ready-built camp that had been kept closed at Nairobi's insistence.
Kenya's government fears that agents of al-Shabaab, Somalia's al-Qaeda-linked Islamist insurgency, could slip into the country unnoticed in the chaos of the drought influx.
On Thursday, Raila Odinga, Kenya's prime minister, said he had agreed to open the Ifo II complex.
"Although we consider our own security, we cannot turn away refugees," Odinga said.
The camp, for as many as 80,000 people, must be run by the UN, he added.
Dadaab's three existing centres were designed to house 90,000 people, but are currently catering for 380,000, almost all of them Somalis. The Daily Telegraph
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Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/business/forgotten+people+Africa+deadly+famine/5105962/story.html#ixzz1SDaCv8gW
Thursday, July 14, 2011
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