Khamisa Tafaela is frantic about 10-month-old son Nabil Abdulkarim, crying miserably in her lap. She has already lost one child to the same vomiting and diarrhea in the same Darfur camp.
Painstakingly, she squeezes gooey paste into his reluctant mouth from the energy-meal sachets provided after a doctor’s visit but Nabil writhes and twists his head away, uninterested, his tiny thin legs dangling off her lap.
“Last night he got worse. He cried all night. I had one child with the same problems and the child died three years ago,” said Khamisa, bouncing a wailing Nabil up and down.
PHOTO: AFP
She doesn’t know why he fell ill, but Ardamata, a sprawling expanse of huts providing little reprieve from the burning sun or torrential seasonal rains, is a difficult place to live for some 27,000 Darfurians made homeless by war.
In the four to five years that she, her bricklayer husband and five children have lived in the camp in West Darfur, life has been grim.
She now has to contend with a second month of halved food rations from the international community, although special nutritional programs for the under fives such as Nabil, who are considered most at risk, have not been affected.
Camp elders, all men, are beginning to blame what they consider the all-powerful UN for letting them go hungry five years into the war.
The World Food Programme says food cuts are a forced necessity. They have plenty of food in the warehouses but massively deteriorated security, banditry, hijackings and kidnappings makes it simply too dangerous to deliver.
The UN agency expects to feed 1.2 million people in Darfur, but since last month’s rations of cereals, pulses and sugar have been cut by 50 percent, and the daily kilo calorie allowance per person slashed by 40 percent from 2,156 to 1,242.
Officials consider June to October “hunger season” — when food stores are running low and next year’s harvest has yet to be gathered.
Last August, the acute malnutrition rate in Darfur among under fives was 16.1 percent, above the emergency threshold of 15 percent.
“Before, the food lasted 25 days. Now only 10 days. We do get some food from the market, but sometimes we go without, we reduce our meals and sometimes we sleep without food. We have no option,” one woman said.
“At one point you even cry. You see a problem and you can’t help these people,” said one African expatriate worker in a camp in southern Darfur.
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