Posted on 07/24/2005 7:43:51 PM PDT by Graybeard58
MARADI, Niger (AP) -- 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. Nasseiba may survive because her grandmother was able to get her to a feeding center. But aid groups despair that so many other children are dying because the world was slow to respond.
"I thought we would not make it safely," Nasseiba's grandmother, Haoua Adamou, said in Hausa through an interpreter after walking several hours 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 5 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 generated 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 of increased media attention and TV images of starving children, U.N. humanitarian chief Jan Egeland said Friday. Egeland estimated that thousands of children are dying in Niger.
Nasseiba dozed 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 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 weighed just 13 pounds and will need days to reach her target weight of 16 pounds before being declared 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 for them to be weighed and for doctors to decide which ones would get red bracelets and which ones would get orange or yellow bracelets signifying that they, while malnourished, were well enough to be sent home with supplies of flour and cooking oil.
Outside the center, new tents are being set up to ease 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 per day, 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," said Hassan Balla, a primary school teacher in Tarna, a village just outside Maradi. "What is happening is really ugly. 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?"
ping
There aren't enough dumb rock concerts apparently. (It's my fault for not liking U2 songs...)
All that oil for food money? Now would be a real good time to get it back.
Send Joe Wilson. Maybe he can drink sweet mint tea with them. Plus, what's one more fly?
Or, because the African governments are stealing most of the aid?
What do you want, an armed invasion? And by who?
Better yet, if we send Joe Wilson the entire poverty problem will just disappear like the yellowcake did.
Yes, he can boff his wife in Paris and then report back that the poverty most assuredly didn't happen, because the names and dates are wrong.
This says more about the U.N than it does about the world's generousity.
My thirteen month old weighs TWICE as much as they do. Those thieving you-know-whats in charge down there need to be starved themselves. Just punishment for stealing aid money that is supposed to go to helping little ones like the one in the picture you posted.
B@st@rds!!
I think there is a private organization that is helping these children but I can't remember what it is. Almost anything would be more trustworthy than the U.N.
I read an article yesterday about the Red Cross having just arrived there. There seems to be some hope with that arrival.
Well, it's sad and all that...Why can't the UN send all this food and money from some of it's Socialist paradises in Africa? What's Libya up to with cash? Did it ask the advanced Muslim nation of Egypt for $$$?
Plenty of blame to go around. One certainty though is that child in the picture is not to blame.
A thousand years from now the aid agencies will be saying the same thing about the same people!
Sorry, but my spare cash is being spent on the bomb-shelter in my back yard.
That idiot snob would probably say, "Let them eat yellowcake."
Sixteen pounds is cured for a two year old? My children hit sixteen pounds between three and five months. God help these poor babies.
Mrs VS
Bush needs to send $2 trillion in aid immediately! Obviously, the $15 billion wasn't enough. So what if the left screams that "it's not enough?" and people hang Bush in effigy? Then damnit, send $3 trillion!
And as soon as the new UN conference center is built, and all the delegates are flown in to discuss the situation, followed of course by several days of banquets and catered luncheons during which they will 'network', and calls for powerpoint presentations have been made so they can figure out exactly how to distribute the supplies, they'll all go home and expect the USA to roll up its sleeves and do all the work while they issue diatribe after diatribe about how the USA never does enough.
Has Boner (hewson) put in his 2¢-worth yet? Or gone photo-opping?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.