
By Andrew Harding
Monday October 17, 2022

Hawa, seen here holding her daughter Ubah and with her son Abdiwali lying on the bed, says he had been growing weaker for weeks before they came to get help
After two days in a small Somali hospital, Abdiwali Abdi
seemed to be groping his way towards some sort of recovery.
The two-year-old still weighed just 4.6kg (10lb 2oz) - not
much more than a healthy newborn. But he had the energy to moan now, and his
mother, Hawa, sat beside him on the bed, in the border town of Dollow,
breastfeeding her two-month-old daughter and making hopeful plans to return to
their makeshift camp on the dusty outskirts.
"It's encouraging," said Fatuma Mohammed, a senior
nurse and administrator from Kenya, as she paced around the 17-bed
stabilisation ward, with its 17 infants all wrestling with malnutrition, and
with the various diseases that keep it company here on the dry, thorny plains
of southern Somalia, as the country grapples with its worst drought in 40
years.
"We don't have food to feed him, but our neighbours
have been helping us," said Hawa, 22, watching her son closely. He'd been
growing weaker for weeks, with a fever and diarrhoea, before they finally came
to seek help.
The district hospital in Dollow - a dusty little border town
in south-western Somalia - has been quietly assisting children like Abdiwali
for years. Funded by the UK government, and others, it has built up a network
of community workers who provide basic medical support, not just in town, but
deep into the contested countryside, where the militant Islamist group al-Shabab
controls many villages.
But today, following a fifth failed rainy season, Dollow is
being overwhelmed by a surge of new arrivals. Tens of thousands of families
like Abdiwali's - their cattle dead and their farms parched - have gathered in
crowded informal settlements, hoping to find food and safety.
"We're talking about hundreds of thousands of lives [at
stake] and people are dying now. We don't have enough resources to support
them," said Abdulkadir Mohamed, from the Norwegian Refugee Council,
watching more families arrive at one of the larger camps.
At the hospital, nearly 100 women sat in the midday heat,
nursing malnourished infants, waiting for them to be weighed and assessed.
"It's going to be really bad here. We're expecting
things to get worse - we're expecting a formal declaration [of famine] very
soon," said Pamela Wasonga, who runs the hospital's nutrition programme on
behalf of an Irish charity, Trocaire.
The United Nations is warning that 6.7 million people will
need food aid in Somalia in the coming months - about 40% of the population.
Overnight, Abdiwali's condition deteriorated. Soon after
nine the next morning, his temperature fell sharply, and two Somali doctors quickly
wrapped him in a thermal blanket made of foil. Two beds away, an 18-month-old
girl was getting the same, urgent treatment.
"We're really worried. These children cannot control
their temperatures very well. That's why we never put on the [ceiling] fans in
the stabilisation centres. If the child warms up, then the survival rate is
higher," said Ms Mohammed, as a doctor rested a thermometer under
Abdiwali's limp arm.
By now, the boy's father, Kerad Adan, 28, had arrived at the
hospital, and was pacing nervously around the bed.
Before this new drought, the family had been quite well off,
with four children, 40 cows and a thatched home near the town of Qansax Dheere,
200km (125 miles) south of Dollow.
But that region, Bay, lies at the centre of the current
drought, and, two months ago, the last of the family's cattle - the source of
all their wealth - died. Soon after that, the parents decided to pack up a few
belongings on a donkey cart and head north with the family, trekking for six
days. Al-Shabab militants tried to stop them leaving the town but settled for
confiscating Mr Adan's mobile phone, smashing it in front of him.
Suddenly the doctors clustered around Abdiwali. One of them
used two fingers to press, repeatedly, on his chest, hoping to stimulate a
heartbeat. His colleague moved closer to look into the child's unmoving eyes.
The parents stood quietly at the foot of the bed.
And then, at 10:13 on an overcast morning, it was over.
"The heartbeats have gone," whispered Ms Mohammed,
now watching Abdiwali's mother as she slumped onto the bed and began to cry.
"We've been able to rescue quite a lot of babies. But
probably things are getting worse now," said Ms Mohammed, in the manner of
someone who has seen such scenes many times.
"It's so sad and painful when you witness something
that can be prevented and can be corrected very easily," said the
hospital's head doctor, Ali Shueb.
Within minutes, Abdiwali's father was on the phone, alerting
relatives, and planning a funeral, that afternoon.
"Everyone must die, at some time," he said,
quietly, as if to himself.
An ambulance reversed up the narrow lane outside the
hospital, and Abdiwali's parents climbed onboard, the father carefully clutching
his son's body, wrapped in a heavy piece of material, in both hands.
Later, Pamela Wasonga showed visitors the hospital's
well-stocked pharmacy and small laboratory. She first came to Somalia from her
home in Kenya during its last famine, in 2011, and has been here ever since,
confident that much has changed since then, and that the steady work of the
past decade was paying off.
"I think the continuity of service that has been here
all along has probably averted a very, very much worse situation. There are
more [international] organisations now on the ground, and more local
organisations who are able to reach remote and hard to reach areas," she
said.
And yet, just as another famine looms, the hospital has -
perhaps temporarily - lost half its international funding as a result of delays
caused by political upheavals in the capital, Mogadishu.
Worse still is growing evidence that a distracted world has
been slow to recognise the scale of the catastrophe now unfolding in Somalia,
with new data showing less than half the humanitarian funding required to
respond to the drought is currently in place.
The UK, for instance, provided over £200 million ($223
million) in humanitarian assistance during Somalia's last serious drought in
2017. This year it is spending less than a quarter of that.
"We ask the world… not to lose focus on Somalia.
Somalia needs help now. If we don't get it, we are heading for a catastrophe,
for sure," said Ms Wasonga.
By the time the ambulance reached the far edge of Ladan
camp, on the eastern outskirts of town, a crowd had gathered outside the
family's tent.
Flurries of wind whipped up spirals of thick dust. Jerry
cans of water were brought in to wash the child's body. Someone had already
bought a special piece of white linen for the burial. Then two neighbours,
shovels slung over bony shoulders, set off towards a fenced-off scrap of
wasteland to dig a grave. They chose a spot between two other small,
child-sized piles of earth.
An hour later, Hawa arrived at the cemetery. By tradition,
women do not attend burials. But she and her mother had made it clear they
would not be kept away, and so they sat, with a few other women, perhaps 20
metres from the graveside.
"You tried your best." "You have other
children." The women quietly passed around words of sympathy and
encouragement, while Abdiwali's father took turns with the other men, swinging
a pickaxe into the hard, dry earth.
A short prayer followed, then the burial itself. Then
Abdiwali's parents walked back towards their new home, as the wind blew in
across the plain, and scraps of rags and litter shook on a thousand, bone-dry,
thorn bushes.