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9th August, 2005, Irish Examiner
We cannot afford to wait for an onslaught of harrowing
images of dying people to realise a humanitarian crisis is looming
in Niger. Liam Horan reports from Niger.
THE mother, no more than 25 years of age, places her eleven-month-old
son on the clinic table. Like a merchant unfolding her goods, she
slowly peels away his clothing to reveal the full extent of the
child's frailty: he is little more than loose-hanging skin and tiny
bones.
He cries weakly, the effort clearly straining his feeble body.
His face is creased like that of an old man.
To the untrained eye, he could surely survive no more than a week.
Even in these grim times for the people of Niger, other distraught
mothers stand back to allow this chronic case to be examined by
the GOAL medical staff.
Even famine has a hierarchy of suffering.
The mother eyes bereft of hope mumbles something and the translator
suddenly reveals that the boy is a twin.
The twin sister is passed through the crowd to the front of the
queue and is also placed onto the table for examination. She looks
marginally healthier than her brother. She might live for a fortnight.
As this sad story unfolds in Abala, a remote village four hours
north of the capital Niamey, over 800,000 children all over Niger
are in much the same boat. Some have more meat on their bones, but
the spiral of hope is going downwards.
Anne Maguire, GOAL's Country Director in Niger, said: "It
is impossible to know just yet the exact state of the 800,000 children,
but all the indications are that many of them are in a very bad
way."
The Niger disaster was one that was waiting to happen. When a plague
of locusts and a bad drought struck the country last year, devastating
the crops, the prospect of a famine in 2005 loomed large.
Food would run out for many families. There was no question of
that. Niger sub-Saharan, baking hot, mercilessly poor it never has
much food to spare, and this year it has lost what little it had.
"The World Food Programme estimate that 3.6m people are now
facing dire food shortage in Niger," adds Ms Maguire. "GOAL,
and other Non-Governmental Organisations, are working around the
clock to stabilise the health and nutrition status of those 3.6
million people. We are rolling out feeding and medical programmes
to target the worst affected first of all."
Their task is enormous. Niger is very hot and very poor. Famine
is biting deep in isolated pockets all over the country. In many
cases, road networks are bad and telecommunications virtually non-existent.
In other famines, starving families leave their homes and make
for the big towns in the hope of finding food. This displacement
has not happened in Niger they don't believe it to be worth their
while.
Sandra Beattie, one of the GOAL nurses in the field, said: "This
means we have to travel to numerous villages to carry out assessments
of the children. It makes the job of finding affected people, and
treating them, all the harder."
GOAL are now concentrating their efforts on Abala, and in the region
surrounding the country's second biggest city, Zinder.
"We are planning to feed over 200,000 people in the Zinder
area in the coming weeks. The aim is to give them enough food to
get them through to harvest time in autumn," says GOAL'S Ray
Jordan.
"If we can bridge this gap until autumn, millions of lives
can be saved. But it will be no easy task because of the vastness
of the country. It is a race against time."
There is also a conundrum at the heart of the Niger problem. The
world tends to take notice only of television images of gaunt jaws,
swollen bellies, forlorn faces, dry breasts, cupped hands, never-ending
queues, and eyes drained of tears. Yet GOAL and others working in
Niger are working to prevent matters coming to that point.
"The message we would like to send out is that a humanitarian
disaster of this nature can be prevented here. There have been deaths
already, and there will be more, but if we can get enough food and
medicine out now, it will not be another Ethiopia 1984," explains
Ms Maguire.
"Down the line, the international community needs to act to
stop the nightmare of Niger from recurring again and again.
An international emergency response team must be set up to move
into countries like Niger before problems get out of control and
the international community must provide the financial backing to
stop the situation deteriorating before the faces of starving children
hit the TV screens back in Ireland again."
It may come too late for the dying twins of Abala if it comes at
all.
Their battle is more immediate, a country's battle in microcosm. |
