Famine sweeps Niger

[Soxy]

Linkage

 

Hundreds of Children Starving in Niger

 

By NAFI DIOUF, Associated Press Writer Sun Jul 24,12:34 PM ET

 

MARADI, Niger - Nasseiba Ali is the face of hunger in Niger. The 20-month-old girl weighs just 12 pounds, and her eyes are clouded at night, one of the symptoms of her chronic malnourishment, along with sparse, wiry hair, brittle and malformed nails, and a deceptively prominent belly.

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Nasseiba may survive because her grandmother was able to get her to a feeding center. But aid groups despair that so many other children — among the most vulnerable in times of crisis — are dying because the world was slow to respond.

 

"I thought we would not make it safely," said Haoua Adamou, Nasseiba's grandmother, speaking in Hausa through an interpreter. Adamou had walked several hours from her village with the baby on her back to the emergency feeding center at Maradi, some 400 miles east of the capital, Niamey. She sat Saturday fanning flies from Nasseiba's face.

 

The aid agency Oxfam warned last week that about 3.6 million people, about a third of them children, face starvation in this West African nation devastated by locusts and drought. The U.N.'s humanitarian agency estimates some 800,000 children under five are suffering from hunger, including 150,000 faced with severe malnutrition.

 

The warnings have been coming for months. The

United Nations first appealed for assistance in November and got almost no response. Another appeal for $16 million in March got about $1 million. The latest appeal on May 25 for $30 million has received about $10 million.

 

Donations jumped dramatically in the last week because, U.N. humanitarian chief Jan Egeland said Friday, of increased media attention and TV images of starving children. Egeland estimated thousands of children are dying in Niger.

 

Nasseiba dozed, at first fitfully, in the intensive care tent of the emergency center erected by

Doctors Without Borders in Maradi, where 55 other chronically malnourished children were receiving care. Her mother, who is three months pregnant, and her father stayed behind to work their farm, hoping to coax something from the dry soil come the October harvest.

 

Nasseiba tried several times to pull out the tiny feeding tube securely taped to her forehead and running down into her nose. She found sleep after several meager mouthfuls of enriched formula and what looked like a long, cold stare, sign of her troubled vision that leaves her blind at night.

 

Just a few steps from the critically sick, another ward sheltered children who have almost recovered.

 

Two-year-old Tsclaha has survived the critical 48 hours since her admission, when she weighed just 13.2 pounds. It will take her days to reach her target weight of 16 pounds before being declared fully cured.

 

Tsclaha, barely able to stand on wobbly legs, happily munched a ready to eat, highly nutritious peanut butter mixture. Tsclaha wore a red bracelet, signaling doctors had decided to admit her. Nearby, 40 women carrying children waited anxiously for them to be weighed and for doctors to decide which ones would get red bracelets, which ones the orange or yellow bracelets that meant that, though considered malnourished, they were well enough to be sent home with supplies of flour and cooking oil.

 

Outside the MSF center, new tents are being set up to ease up the burden on the already stretched facility, where nurses work round the clock to diagnose the 300 hungry children who come daily from surrounding villages.

 

A 16-ton shipment of oil, sugar, and nutritional paste arrived in Maradi from France on Thursday and several more shipments were scheduled, the U.N. World Food Program said.

 

But the need is great and growing in this desert nation of 11.3 million regularly ranked among the world's least developed. When the first appeal was made, only $1 dollar per day and per person would have helped solve the food crisis, the U.N. has said. Now that the situation has worsened and people are weaker, $80 will be needed per person.

 

"It's the worst I've seen so far," said Hassan Balla, a primary school teacher in Tarna, a village just outside Maradi.

 

"What is happening is really ugly," he said. "I've seen people eat leaves ... live like animals."

 

Balla, however, is optimistic.

"The world is generous," he said. `Our friends heard our cries. Do you think they will let us suffer when they are living comfortably?"

 

Bold part is the saddest thing I've heard in a very long time.

[EvilMonkey]

But aid groups despair that so many other children — among the most vulnerable in times of crisis — are dying because the world was slow to respond.

 

How about they are dying because you LIVE IN A f***ING DESERT!!! all props to Sam Kinnison.

Seriously, you live in a desert, you have no food, yet you keep having children. If they won't help themselves, why should I? Yes, it sounds cold, and it is, but it still is a valid question.

Geography - note:

 

Niger is landlocked and one of the hottest countries in the world Its northern four-fifths is desert, southern one-fifth is savanna, suitable for livestock and limited agriculture. Sounds like an ideal place to raise a family. Here is a little tidbit about all the starving childen: The birthrate is 6.75 children per woman. I would have a hard time feeding 7 kids.

http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ng.html

[Milkman delivers]

How about they are dying because you LIVE IN A f***ING DESERT!!! all props to Sam Kinnison.

Seriously, you live in a desert, you have no food, yet you keep having children.  If they won't help themselves, why should I?  Yes, it sounds cold, and it is, but it still is a valid question.

Geography - note:

 

Niger is landlocked and one of the hottest countries in the world Its northern four-fifths is desert, southern one-fifth is savanna, suitable for livestock and limited agriculture. Sounds like an ideal place to raise a family. Here is a little tidbit about all the starving childen: The birthrate is  6.75 children per woman.  I would have a hard time feeding 7 kids.

http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ng.html

 

I don't know much about Niger, but I'm gonna guess it's an undeveloped country. People in undeveloped countries tend to have a lot of children because they're basically free labor.

[Soxy]

I don't know much about Niger, but I'm gonna guess it's an undeveloped country.  People in undeveloped countries tend to have a lot of children because they're basically free labor.

And I can't imagine it's that easy to get birth control over there either. . .

[Milkman delivers]

And I can't imagine it's that easy to get birth control over there either. . .

 

And who knows how many other children there were that didn't "survive."